As the Co-Director of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) project, my fieldwork is focused in the central Maya lowlands of western Belize, Central America. As part of the BVAR research, I direct research at the site of Baking Pot. The site was first investigated by A.H. Anderson (1931) when it was discovered that limestone from Str. B1 in Group B at the site was being used as construction fill for the Western Highway (now named the George Price Highway). Subsequent archaeological excavations and survey were conducted by Gordon Willey in the 1950s (Willey et al. 1965) as well as by William and Mary Bullard (Bullard and Bullard 1965). After that time the site was not actively investigated until the 1990s, when the BVAR project began investigations in the settlement (e.g. Conlon and Awe 1992; Conlon and Powis 1993…Conlon and Ehret 2000) and site core (Conlon 1996; Aimers 1997; Audet 2006; Helmke 2007; Hoggarth et al. 2015, 2016) of the site.

My research interests focus on the effects of climate on the collapse and regeneration of complex societies. My central research questions focus on understanding how shifts in climate affected sociopolitical organization, agricultural production, and demography in the Maya Lowlands. My research applies an interdisciplinary approach that integrates history, demography, archaeology, paleoecology, and climate research to understand the impacts of abrupt climatic change from the Classic to Colonial Periods in the Maya Lowlands.

A new NSF funded project, Examining the Disintegration of Maya Polities and Demographic Decline in the Central Maya Lowlands (in collaboration with Douglas Kennett, and Brendan Culleton and Jaime Awe) focuses on developing a high-precision radiocarbon chronology for the Belize Valley, based at the sites of Baking Pot and Cahal Pech. Ultimately, this project aims to identify chronological correlations (or lack thereof) between episodes of severe drought from the ninth to eleventh centuries with precisely dated archaeological evidence for political and demographic collapse.