Background 

Steve is originally from Ohio but has lived in the south since the 1970s.  He obtained a B.A. in history from the Virginia Military Institute in 1973 and a M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky in 1983.  He has worked in the private sector as contract archaeologist, in the public sector as a historical archaeologist with the state of Louisiana, and has been with the SCIAA since 1986.  At SCIAA he was Deputy State Archaeologist from 1986 to 1990 and returned to SCIAA in 1992 as Division head of the Cultural Resource Division now the Applied Research Division.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2010 at the University of South Carolina.  In 2011 he was named Associate Director of SCIAA and Director in 2014.

Research 

Steve’s research interests have included studies and books on historic period settlement at military installations like Fort Polk, Fort Leonard Wood, and Camp Atterbury, Indiana.  He has also researched the lives of African American soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Huachuca, and Fort Bragg, and a nationwide study of African American military history for the U.S. Army Corps.  In his last thirty years he has focused on battlefields and conflict sites in the Southeast, especially those of the Civil War and American Revolution.  He has published extensively on the life of Francis Marion.  His latest books include a co-edited volume on asymmetric warfare, entitled “Partisans, Guerillas, and Irregulars:  The Historical Archaeology of Asymmetric Warfare” (University of Alabama Press, 2019), and “Francis Marion and the Snow’s Island Community:  Myth, History, and Archaeology” (United Writers Press, 2021). 

Teaching 

Steve teaches Conflict Archaeology and the Anthropology of Warfare in the USC Department of Anthropology.