The Four Corners region of the American Southwest preserves one of the world’s richest repositories of Upper Jurassic fossil material, offering exceptional insight into ancient ecosystems predating human presence in the Americas by hundreds of millions of years. The landscape itself provides a formative encounter with deep time and the material evidence of life’s long history.

As a programme participant with the American Museum of Natural History in the summer of 2003, I contributed to palaeontological excavation across the area, gaining foundational experience in excavation techniques, fossil extraction and preparation, specimen cleaning and documentation, and the preliminary interpretation of faunal assemblages. While my later work has focused on human history and cultural inheritance, this early engagement with stratigraphic excavation and material analysis provided an enduring grounding in field methods that have informed my archaeological practice ever since.