Clifford is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and Geography. He has broad research interests, but he is especially focused on how the first peoples of North America adapted to environmental change and used natural resources during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. His work examines cold-weather adaptations during the Younger Dryas, the role of water in settlement and mobility on the Great Plains, and artifact distributions at site and regional scales. His research incorporates morphometric and use-wear analysis, Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS), spatial statistics, and computational approaches in R. Beyond North America, he has also conducted research on medieval archaeological sites in the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus region.