My Research Interests
As a bioarchaeologist, I am interested in the human past, present and always its future. Particularly, I study how various human groups lived, what they ate, how they died and - most importantly - I try to use the data to determine why they did these things, what they meant to people at that time and how we can learn from such data. Bioarchaeologists, like me, have many interests - some study children, others only adults. Some study health while others focus on violence, diet, or labor. I am interested in taking a broad view of all of this data to try and answer questions in two major areas:
A. Identity, Power & Meaning
In this area of my research, I am interested in using skeletal data, in conjunction with other data from ethnoarchaeology, archaeology, zooarchaeology & other disciplines, to try and reconstruct mortuary behavior. That is, how were people buried and how did this burial relate to the systems of meaning that past people constructed to explain their worlds. Currently, I am using data from prehistoric Mexico to reconstruct the sequence of behavior that ancient mesoamerican people went through before being sacrificed to their gods. Particularly, I am interested in how this ritual behavior structures and responds to health, social hierarchy, mortality, and mortuary behavior. Admittedly, this is my more cultural work and often demonstrates the utility of bioarchaeology to combine multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct complex social behavior laden with meaning.
B. Patterns of Subadult Mortality/Morbidity in Prehistory
Here, I am not so interested in behavior as I am health, frailty and life expectancy of past peoples. In this area of my work, I am currently combining paleopathological data, cutting-edge paleodemography and constantly-evolving methods of age and sex estimation from forensic anthropology to model patterns of mortality and morbidity in children for mesoamerica. Particularly, I am understanding why the sacrifice of ill-infants was so common by identifying the causes of infantile scurvy in the ancient New World.
As my Advisor, Dr. Debra Martin notes, patterns of violence and disease are never random. I would argue that patterns of death - especially in our most sensitive subgroup: children - are also never random either.