Research Interests

Understanding past processes of urbanization and regional networks is critical for the continued growth of resilient communities today in urban and rural contexts alike.

This is particularly crucial in developing urban areas in tropical environments characterized by monsoon systems, like Southeast Asia.

My current research project builds on new evidence suggesting that Angkor was the central node in a complex urban network spreading across mainland Southeast Asia. In recent years, imagery from two lidar missions organized by the Cambodia Archaeological Lidar Initiative (CALI), the Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium (KALC), and the Greater Angkor Project (GAP) were used to map seven previously concealed and undocumented dense urban landscapes surrounded by much lower density peripheries. The revelation of these urban areas suggests that a complex web of agricultural and occupation spaces linking more densely inhabited urban nuclei may have been a ubiquitous, defining feature of Khmer landscapes. This new discovery gives rise to the following questions: How did Angkor interact with these provincial settlement complexes? Further, how did the settlement system impact regional resilience?

This work has two goals: 1) identify basic chronologies of provincial urban centers and 2) understand how provincial urban centers draw agricultural surplus from their surrounding landscapes and interact with Angkor as part of an integrated regional system.  

These data will be integrated into a comprehensive spatio-temporal database, and a series of analyses will be used to model the development of engineered landscapes over time and space and identify spatio-temporal patterns in demography, power structures, and resources.