Mark is an Associate Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Exeter. He earned his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University on the Underwater Maya project in Belize, studying resource exploitation and wood selection behaviour. Over a decade of field work in Belize has taken him from the inundated salt works of the coast, to the ceremonial centres on the interior and the intricate cave systems of the mountains. Recent research on the archaic and paleoindian periods has recovered the oldest skeletal material in the region.

In Brazil, Mark’s research focuses on the adaptations and transformations of people and the environment, and the identification of social and ritual structures in the southern Brazilian highlands, employing interdisciplinary methods from archaeology, anthropology, ecology, soil science, and geography. Further research in Amazonia expands the examples of human environment interaction in the tropical and sub-tropical Americas.