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My research interests all reflect a concern with the manifestation of social realities in the patterning of material things, I have done prehistoric, historic, and ethnoarchaeology; my field research has taken place in North America, in and around New York City and on the Zuni Reservation in New Mexico. I have also worked with museum collections and feel that such collections represent an increasingly significant resource for scholars. I have studied, and continue to be interested in, a number of socio-cultural issues: changes in gender role and status, the construction and recognition of coherent sub-units within urban entities, and the way in which food is used to express social and symbolic concepts.

It is difficult to understand the past, and particularly difficult when one wants to know about social life. Additions to traditional archaeological data, such as the use of documentary information, and the observation of the interaction between people and things in living societies (including how artifacts enter the archaeological record), have improved our ability to achieve this understanding, allowing us to interpret more of the details of social and cultural life in the past.