Briggs Buchanan is an archaeologist primarily working on the Paleoindian period in the Americas. His research focuses on investigating population history, cultural interactions, and adaptation during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in the Americas. He also has research interest in understanding the processes responsible for the evolution of cultural diversity and how cultural evolution operates in small-scale societies. Buchanan's approach is to define testable implications from archaeological hypotheses and then generate data to test those using quantitative analysis. He is conducting fieldwork projects at Paleoindian locales in Texas and Oklahoma, and pursuing a project in northeastern British Columbia.