Student years
As an undergraduate at Columbia University I took an introductory archaeology course that involved several weekends of field work at a shell midden on Long Island. The only clear memory I have is of adding brandy to the coffee to try and stay warm (I think we were digging in the fall - in any case, the mornings were freezing cold). Despite the discomforts, archaeology seemed an attractive idea and one day I went to see Ralph Solecki and asked about doing more fieldwork. I can't imagine why, but he almost instantly invited me to come to Turkey with him that summer if I could get there on my own, and then sent me off to learn everything I could about stone tools from Tony Marks, Bruce Schroeder and Jim Skinner who were working in the adjoining lab. That summer (1963) we went to the Konya region where we surveyed around Lake Beyshehir, visited James Mellaart at Çatal Höyük, and found Suberde which Jacques Bordaz excavated the following season.
Mellaart had invited me back for the 1964 season but that was the year he ran afoul of the Turkish government and I couldn't stay in the country. Luckily Solecki was working at Yabroud in Syria and agreed to have me join him there. Fortunately Mauritz Van Loon was passing through Ankara at just that moment on his way to the first season at Mureybit, and offered me a ride.
I stayed on at Columbia for graduate school, but I was getting restless and Tony Marks introduced me to Fred Wendorf at SMU who offered me a job with Ed Jelks doing survey and excavation in Texas. In 1965-66 I spent most of a year working with Jelks, R.K. (King) Harris and J. Ned Woodall along the Texas-Oklahoma border. Then in 1966-67, Wendorf took me to Egypt, along with Jim Phillips and Romauld Schild, to investigate the late Pleistocene sequence in the desert west of Isna and Edfu, and I stayed on in Dallas afterwards to analyze the material that he generously let me use for my dissertation at Columbia which I finally managed to finish in 1971. It was through my association with Wendorf that I met Achiel Gautier and Fekri Hassan with whom I began my first major research project in Algeria in 1972.
Post-student years
With the exception of two years as a visiting professor at the University of Toronto (1976-78), I taught from 1969 to 2001 at the University of Alberta, where I was Chair of the Department of Anthropology for three consecutive terms (1989-1999). I retired on 30 June 2001, but remain one-third time until 30 June 2004. During those years, I had major field research projects in Algeria, Portugal and Italy (go to Research for details).
From 1982-1988 I was editor and publisher of Nyame Akuma: a newsletter of African Archaeology, the official publication of the Society of African Archaeologists (http://www.safa.rice.edu)
Outside the University, I chaired or organized several conferences and served on a number of national and international professional organisations and editorial boards (Sahara, African Archaeogical Review, PALANTH). I've adjudicated grant applications for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation and served twice on committees of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (http://www.sshrc.ca) - once on the PhD Fellowship Committee and a three-year term on the Anthropology and Archaeology Grants Committee. I've been on the Advisory Board of the Centre d'études interdisciplinaires sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions (CÉLAT - http://www.fl.ulaval.ca/celat/) at Université Laval and a member of the College of Reviewers for the Canada Research Chairs competition and the Canadian representative for the XV Congress of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (http://www.uispp.ipt.pt) to be held in Lisbon, September 2006.