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I also have continued interests in developing and testing methods used to analyze human remains.
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I am particularly looking at how burial practices, health and industrial pollution intersect with notions of sacrifice, offerings, health fragility and emerging personhood. In this project, I am the bioarchaeology PI and will be directing excavations and analyses of burials from a sacrificial tophet precinct that in magnitude finds parallel only at ancient Carthage. In addition, I am working at the Neo-Punic urban archaeological site of Zita, Tunisia, Northern Africa. For example, I currently am director of the bioarchaeological component of the El Palmar Archaeological Project, Campeche, Mexico, where I am analyzing Classic Period Mayan unburned human remains and mortuary materials to better understand the construction, display and legitimation of power manifest in the funerary practices and remains of subordinate elites (lakams). I have worked with more than 2,600 inhumation and complex cremation burials from Prehispanic populations in Arizona, Northern Mexico, and Mesoamerica, Gallo-Roman and Medieval period burials in Belgium, Middle Gobi Bronze Age burials from Mongolia, Neolithic cremations from China, and Neo-Punic and Early Roman cremations from North Africa. One of my technical strengths is my expertise with human remains, particularly highly burned and fragmented human remains, for reconstructing posthumous treatments of bodies to answer broader anthropological questions. In this project, I theorize the body as both person and object to understand the special role of the corpse and the construction of memory in ancient societies. 600 to 1450/1500 with the Hohokam and Trincheras archaeological groups.
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One such project explores changes in funerary rituals in the Sonoran Desert (Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico), from A.D. My academic and professional trajectory has allowed me to study the human body and mortuary customs from fascinating ancient, historic and modern contexts, using cutting edge methodological and theoretical archaeological approaches.