Melissa is a paleoethnobotanist focusing on understanding peoples’ adaptive capability in marginal, often restrictive environments. She employs an integrated mix of macrobotanical and stable isotope methods to explore the variability of agropastoral practices across time and geographic space. Her work includes investigating how agriculture is managed in pastoral landscapes across Eurasia by exploring the social mechanisms that organize plant cultivation and investment from the Bronze to Iron Ages in mountainous Inner Asia and Viking Age Iceland. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the NSF funded (#2347017) project: Agricultural Adaption in a Geographic Context, directed by Xinyi Liu. The project uses plant stable isotope and organic residue analyses to investigate the cultivation strategies employed by farmers for newly introduced crops in Eurasia, informing our understanding of long-distance farming dispersals in the past.