I was the anthropologist-geographer at Chaminade University of Honolulu in the Behavioral Sciences Program until my partial retirement in 2022.  My background is in the archaeology of Oceania (specifically New Caledonia and Hawai’i, M.A. UH Manoa) and cultural geography (specifically Hawai’i, PhD UH Manoa).  My specific topical areas are the historical-cultural geographic landscape in Hawai’i, Japan and China, and archaeological-geographic preservation in contemporary China (specifically Shaanxi Province).  I taught in the undergraduate program at CUH with emphasis on Hawaiian-Pacific Islands and East Asian studies. 

Retirement has allowed me to spend more time on my research interests, specifically the movement of historic data into public-accessible formats such as pdf documents and GIS files (specifically Google Earth).  My current project “1” focuses on converting the Mahele Land Court Award Testimony (during the Monarchy from 1846-52 in Hawai’i) into searchable pdf documents (the results to date can be downloaded from this site); then “2” moving those detailed descriptions into Google Earth.  An example is the Waititi-Palolo Google Earth material, which can be downloaded from this site.  The goal of this project is to assist individuals and groups to perceive the land and relationships as it they were seen in the 1850s throughout Hawai’i Nei.

Since my retirement move to Carson City NV, a result of the realities of the cost-of-living on an academic retirement in Hawaii-Nei, I have become interested in the complex perceptual landscapes of the Comstock Lode area around Virginia City and larger aspects of historic preservation in northern Nevada.  As a result I have started looking at the patterns of wagon tracks-ore roads that network the region, and in many cases are the only visible evidence left of past use (in at least one case of an entire community); this has become the Ore Roads project with the Google Earth files again available for download from the site.

I still work on the enormous project of converting the archaeological sites recorded in the Ditu Wenwu Shaanxi [the Archaeological Atlas of Shaanxi Province PRC](from 1989) into Google Earth to aid the provincial authorities in historic preservation work in Shaanxi province. 

I also continue casual work on social empathic robot design and the symbolism and built environment of the Second Life digital world platform.

If you’re so inclined, I’ve included a link to a folder with my dissertation on ‘Contested Images of Place in a Multicultural Context’ if you are interested in my interpretation of evolving symbolic landscapes in East Maui from the 1990s.