You have been directing field schools for many years. What do you find most rewarding or challenging about teaching field techniques?

It is a thrill to see students engage in the process of discovery—albeit in a highly controlled scientific context—and see them gain confidence in their ability to uncover evidence and piece together what is important about it. I really enjoy guiding the process by which students progress from novices in methods such as survey, mapping, excavation, and recording and in artifact recognition (in other words, their familiarity with the local material culture) to competent practitioners in just a few very intensive weeks. They are always amazed themselves with how much they are able to grasp and identify and accomplish. I am especially pleased when they go on to graduate or professional careers in archaeology.

Your writings reveal a longtime interest in issues of hierarchy, inequality, and labor in prehistory. What do you find compelling about these topics?

It has long been thought that the only way human social groups developed deep–rooted social inequalities and supported echelons of hereditary leaders was through the emergence of agricultural economies. If instead, as recent discoveries have shown, such institutionalized hierarchical structures are found among coastal fishing–hunting–gathering societies in the complete absence of farming and herding, then we must fundamentally rethink certain old assumptions about sociopolitical evolution. The process by which high status and power become passed along through heredity rather than by merit or performance—and the change is accepted by members of society—is one of the most important transitions in the human cultural past. I am interested in contributing to the dialogue about such crucial social changes from the perspective of how people’s labor came to be controlled by leaders other than their own older kin. Some of the things I am working on include how people in ethnographically–known big man and chiefdom societies around the world have defined kin, have gained some measure of permanent control over the labor of non–kin, and have parlayed labor manipulation into firm economic or political power. The fact that some hunter–gatherer groups as well as some early farming groups accomplished these things is very interesting to me. The Chumash, many of the Northwest Coast groups, and the Calusa in Florida are among these very complex non–farming societies that we need to recognize in this light. My upcoming field research projects will likely focus on issues related to complexity in the pre–contact to Historic transitions in the Northwest or other parts of the American West.