Skip to main content

Department of
Anthropology

professor showing a skull to a group of students

Immersion Course – ANTH 2371

ANTH 2371: Reading the Bones: Bioarchaeology and Forensic Studies in the Peruvian Andes

Archaeological bodies tell stories, and in this course, you will learn how to read the human skeleton to develop empirically-based narratives about societies from ancient Peru. After spending some time in the Vanderbilt Osteology Lab learning skeletal identification and basic analysis, we will travel to Peru to examine 1,300 year-old skeletons and mummies in Professor Tung’s Bioarchaeology Lab in Arequipa, located in the southern highlands of Peru. Through analysis of archaeological human skeletons, we will create life history profiles of peoples’ lives.

Questions we’ll explore:

  • Who suffered?
  • Who thrived?
  • How old was the person when they died?
  • Did they suffer at the hands of a violent attacker, showing cranial fractures or broken nasal bones as a result?
  • Is the person male or a female, and how do men’s and women’s injury patterns differ?
  • What might that reveal about gender roles and social norms regarding how men and women should be treated in society?
  • Do individuals exhibit lesions indicative of infectious disease, such as tuberculosis, and what might that indicate regarding the process of urbanization and the socio-political conditions that shape disease outbreaks?
  • Why are some people’s bodies riddled with osteoarthritic lesions, while others exhibit no skeletal markers of hard physical labor?
  • What might that reveal regarding social hierarchies and social norms about which class of people engage in certain kinds of (physically risky) activities?

You will learn how to deploy scientific evidence in an anthropological framework to address these kinds of questions.

Instructor: Tiffiny A. Tung, Gertrude Conaway Professor of Anthropology

Location: Arequipa, Peru

Dates: TBD

Approximate cost: $7,720