I have been working on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia with Emil Podrug (Šibenik City Museum) since 2008. By excavating sites, working on existing collections, and using innovative technologies, we are helping to define the nature and timing of early farming societies in the eastern Adriatic region.

Check out our work on the earliest cheese in the Mediterranean, and stay tuned for more discoveries on nature of farming practices and their implications for long-term sustainability.

Recent excavation and coring by our collaborative team has demonstrated the existance of a paleolake next to the Neolithic site of Krivače. This lake dates back 11,000 years and dried up around 4000 years ago. Pollen and other markers from lake cores provide an environmental record that gives us the unique opportunity to study the effects of early farming on the environment. Funded by the National Geographic Society, this research is changing our understanding of how early farmers adapted to environmental change by shifting animal management strategies and technologies.

I have been working with colleagues at the University of Valencia in Spain since 1998. Most recently I co-directed with Oreto García Puchol and J. Juan Cabanilles a re-evaluation of Cueva de la Cocina, a Mesolithic-Neolithic transition period site in eastern Spain. The site was extensively excavated in the 1940s and 1970s, but much of the material was never analyzed. This is an amazing site with thousands of stone tools, art in the form of engraved stone slabs (plaquettes), food debris, and human remains. Important for models of the transition to agriculture in the western Mediterranean, this site is proving itself to be an incredible document of the region's last hunter-gatherers prior to the arrival of farming.

Oreto García Puchol and I directed excavations at the site of Cova de la Pastora in 2007-2008, another National Geographic Society funded expedition. This site is a mass burial site with the remains of over 70 individuals interred with numerous grave goods. Excavated in the 1940s, it was long thought to be evidence of the emergence of social inequality during the Late Neolithic. Our research has shown, however, that the cave was in use over a much longer period of time and that there was no indication of a special status of individuals.