As an archaeologist, he is focused on human-environment relationships and the consequences of French and Spanish colonization in the Gulf South. He has conducted excavations in the United States and Mexico and is currently PI for the Carson Mounds Archaeological Project (CMAP), a long-term study on the development of hierarchical and agricultural monument-building societies in the Lower Mississippi Valley, and Resilience in the Ancient Gulf South (RAGS), an interdisciplinary investigation into delta formation, hunter-gather settlement dynamics, and monumentality in formerly aggrading, currently subsiding, environments.