Dalyn is originally from Pavillion, Wyoming, and recieved her undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) from the University of Wyoming in 2016. She was an NSF REU intern at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural Sciences while as an undergraduate in 2016, conducting species identification and the effects of human fishing practices on sturgeion in the Pacific Northwest, ultimately publishing on this work. She recieved an NSF GRFP in 2017 to attend Harvard University, passing her general exams and obtaining her Masters degree in 2019 and passing her dissertation prosepectus in 2020. She has finished her dissertation fieldwork and is currently writing her dissertation with plans to defend in the spring of 2023.

Trained as a zooarchaeologist, Dalyn has moved into ethnoarchaeological methods and, utilizing her undergraduate training in conservation biology and ecology, has incorporated ethological methods into her work as well. Her research interests center on understanding human-nonhuman animal interactions and relationships over time and evaluating the impact of human cultural practices on local and regional ecology and evolution. Using a combination of approaches, Dalyn questions dichotomous (wild vs domesticated, natural vs artificial) constructions in the dominant cultural worldview and parses apart the implications of breaking these down. Specifically, for her PhD project, she questions assumptions found in binary thinking on everything from archaeological disussions on animal domestication to  the conservation implications of categorizing animals as wild or domestic in policy. Bison, for example, are by all measures wild animals but, on the whole, treated like domesticated populations. 

She conducted her dissertation research on elk and elk management in the Rocky Mountain West, specifically western Wyoming. Her methods were and are largely ethnoarchaeological, combining the archaeological record with an analysis of current animal management practices. She uses this case study to investigate previously proposed hypotheses on human-animal relationships in animal domestication, to better understand a spotty regional archaeological record, and to explore the implications of incorporating dynamics of human-animal relationships over time into conservation work. By observing and participating in elk-human interactions and relationships across different geographical and cultural senarios, she interrogates assumptions in archaeological domestication models and conservation approaches. 

Supervisor: Richard H. Meadow