Maya Time Allocation and Children’s Work Project
I have maintained an ongoing field project in a remote Maya subsistence agricultural village in the Yucatan, Mexico for the past fifteen years. This has been an ideal community to research a variety of life history, demographic and health questions in a premarket, predemomgraphic transition population.

The village is now rapidly transitioning as it becomes more integrated into the regional Mexican economy, which has far reaching affects on labor, children’s lives, fertility and mortality. While still subsistence agriculturalists, in the last several years electricity was brought to the village, a rudimentary health clinic and school were built and fertilizers were introduced into farming practices. Recently collected reproductive histories reveal that population growth is rapidly rising through an increase in fertility. In the last several years, the first signs of social stratification have emerged. We are currently collecting data to monitor changes in land use, agricultural practices, time allocation and demography.

Demographic Processes in Pumé Transitional Subsistence Economies
Along with my collaborator Russell Greaves who has worked with the Pumé since 1992, we began a new demographic project in 2005. The river Pumé (horticulturalists) and the savanna Pumé (foragers) are two groups of genetically related, but economically distinct native South Americans who live on the llanos of southwest Venezuela. The river Pumé live in permanent villages along the major rivers that drain the llanos and have a mixed subsistence base of fish, manioc horticulture, animal husbandry, wild foods and occasional wage labor. In contrast, the Pumé who live in the savannas between these major rivers are mobile foragers, subsisting on hunting, fishing, wild root and mango collection, and seasonal bitter manioc cultivation. The current project combines reproductive history and anthropometric data to look at differences in growth and development trajectories, nutritional status, child mortality and age at first birth. Pumé girls who grow up in a food-limited and epidemiologically challenging environment, reach maturity and have their first child at a precocious age, and are an interesting comparison to the Maya who are well fed, have low mortality and reach maturity relatively late.



Integrating Dynamics of Human Resource Use and their Effects on Rainforests in Madagascar
For the past several years I have been involved with a long-term interdisciplinary project centered at Ranomafana National Park. A research team of anthropologists, primatologists and conservation biologists are collecting data to evaluate the interaction between population growth, farming and land-use practices and their effects on biodiversity and deforestation.

The anthropological component of the project involves study among the Tanala – swidden and paddy- rice farmers who live in Madagascar’s central highlands.