My Mission
Expanding the use and utility of open source GIS and Geospatial technology in Archaeology and Anthropology.Biography
I am a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Computational Archaeology Laboratory at San Diego State University. I am a computational archaeologist specializing in GIS, geospatial modeling, simulation, and the study of long-term human-environment interactions. My research focuses particularly on the development of early farming and pastoral societies and the ways that human land-use decisions interact with landscape processes over long timescales. Much of this work combines archaeological and geoarchaeological data with GIS, spatial modeling, geomorphometry, and computer simulation from a complex adaptive systems perspective.
Open-source GIS has been central to my research and teaching throughout my career. I have been involved with the GRASS GIS development community for many years, contributing to the development and application of GRASS for archaeological and landscape research. My GIS research and publications span archaeological landscape analysis, terrain and hydrological modeling, movement and accessibility, visibility, spatial simulation, survey and predictive modeling, and the integration of GIS with agent-based and other computational approaches. I have also written on the methodological and theoretical role of GIS in archaeology and on the importance of moving beyond treating GIS simply as a technical tool.
At San Diego State University, I teach Archaeological GIS and Geospatial Technologies and direct a laboratory centered on open-source geospatial and 3D computing. GRASS GIS and QGIS form the core of my GIS teaching, alongside other open-source tools for spatial analysis, remote sensing, 3D data, and scientific computing. I have also developed an extensive collection of freely available YouTube tutorials on GRASS GIS, QGIS, and archaeological GIS, ranging from introductory GIS concepts to advanced terrain analysis, hydrology, visibility, movement modeling, spatial statistics, and archaeological landscape analysis. A major goal of this work is to make sophisticated geospatial methods accessible to students and researchers without requiring proprietary software.
More broadly, I am interested in developing reproducible and theoretically informed approaches to spatial research and in strengthening the connections among open-source software development, research, and GIS education. My work with GRASS GIS and QGIS reflects a longstanding commitment to open scientific software as both a research infrastructure and a means of expanding access to advanced geospatial methods.
