Graduate Student Advisees

Maya Krause | maya.b.krause@vadnerbilt.edu | she/her/hers

Maya is smiling into the camera. Her blonde hair is in two braids and she is wearing a pink tank top. There is a rockface behind her.

Maya entered the Ph.D. program at Vanderbilt in the fall of 2017. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. During her undergraduate career, Maya attended the Huari-Ancash Bioarchaeological Field School in Huari, Peru, which motivated her to pursue research in the Andean highlands. In her graduate research, Maya is continuing her work in the Cusco region of Peru to further understand how state imperial structures alter and shape the lived experiences of subjects. Using bioarchaeological methods, Maya explores how imperial policies related to forced resettlement, conscripted labor, and oppression affected subjects’ overall health and nutrition, as well as their risk of occupational injuries and exposure to violence. Maya’s research interests explore multiple sources of information, which include skeletal infection and chronic stress, diet, bone/tooth isotopic chemistry, and evidence of violent conflict. In her research, Maya aims to bring individuals’ bodies to the forefront of our understandings of how imperialism profoundly shapes peoples’ lives. National Geographic Early Career Grant, 2019; Fulbright IEE for research in Peru, 2021.

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Kristina Lee | leekristinae@gmail.com

Kristina is wearing a black tanktop, glasses, a blue mask, and white gloves. She has curly black hair. She is holding a drill in one hand and a jaw bone in the other. She is looking down at them.She is sitting in a white chair and a white table.

Kristina entered the graduate program at Vanderbilt in the fall of 2016. After she completed her M.A. in Spring 2018, she joined the faculty at a charter school in the Metro Nashville Public School system for one year. After her bioarchaeological work on the corporal process of identity construction in the colonial era of Peru, she is now pursuing a Ph.D in Sociology t Northwestern University, focusing on race, ethnicity, and identity formation in Latin America. She completed her B.A. in Anthropology at Brown University, where she focused on Bioarchaeology and Latin American Studies. As an undergraduate, she attended the Huari-Ancash Bioarchaeological Field School in Peru and worked as a bioarchaeologist on the Proyecto Archaeológico Zaña Colonial. Her undergraduate research focused on pathology among indigenous populations living on reducciones during the Andean Colonial Period. In her graduate research, she studied Colonial Period Afroperuvians and the impacts of enslavement on the human skeleton.

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Terren Proctor | terrenproctor@gmail.com

Terren has long curly brown hair. She has a black dress with whit epolka dots on it. She is smiling into the distance.

Ph.D. received 2021.

Terren K. Proctor is a bioarchaeologist who focuses on the embodiment of structural violence, specifically in relation to the mining economy in Colonial Peru. She received her B.A&Sc. in Anthropology and Biology from McGill University in 2014. In 2015, she joined the Proyecto de Investigación Histórico Arqueológico-Santa Bárbara as head bioarchaeologist. This project is an ongoing research program involving both American and Peruvian scholars that looks at questions of indigenous labour at Colonial Huancavelica in the central Peruvian Andes. Her research interests include skeletal changes related to labor, heavy metals, and stress; stable isotope analysis; and interpersonal violence. Her research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Wenner Gren Foundation.

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Keitlyn Alcantara | keitlyn.alcantara@gmail.com

Keitlyn is sitting outside in front of a red brick wall. She has shoulder length brown hair. She is wearing a red top with white dots and white lace sleeves.

PhD received 2020. Dr. Alcantara is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indiana-Bloomington.

Keitlyn entered the graduate program in Anthropology in the Fall of 2013 and completed her Ph.D. in Anthropological Bioarchaeology.  Her previous studies include a B.A. in Archaeology from the University of Washington and an M.A. in Social Science (focus in Bioarchaeology) from the University of Chicago. Following the completion of her M.A. in 2011, she spent two years working with forensic anthropologist Dr. Douglas H. Ubelaker at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. Her fieldwork includes survey in Corsica, France, and excavation in Blue Creek, Belize and Oaxaca, Mexico. Her current dissertation research, which is supported by a Fulbright and Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant touches on themes related to the body as a site of identity creation, particularly through food practices. Focusing on a skeletal population from Tlaxcallan, a state that resisted the expanding Aztec Empire in Late Postclassic Central Mexico (AD 1325-1519), her research explores how varied interactions with imperial powers are reflected in the physical body by documenting patterns of community health, exposure to violence, diet and foodways. In 2017-2018, Keitlyn was a Public Scholar through the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, working with middle school-aged Latinx immigrant communities in Nashville, fostering discussions about food as a site of memory, tradition, and identity. Keitlyn has a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Washington and an M.A. in Social Science (with a focus in Bioarchaeology) from the University of Chicago. She is also trained in Forensic Anthropology through the George Washington University Certificate in Forensic Science, and a research assistantship in the Department of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Indiana-Bloomington.

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Beth Koontz Scaffidi | bethkscaffidi@gmail.com

Beth is sitting in a deep sandy hole looking down at a skeleton she is excavating. She is wearing a white tshirt, khaki shorts, and gray shoes. Her blonde hair is in a ponytail. There are two brushes next to her- one is thin with a red handle and the other is wide with a gray handle.

Bioarchaeology; Skeletal trauma; Violence; Warfare; Ethics in bioarchaeology; Cultural patrimony; Latin America.

Ph.D received in December 2017. NSF Post-Doctoral Fellow at Arizona State University, where she served as the PI of her own NSF project (2018-2020). Dr. Scaffidi is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Merced.

Beth graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with degrees in Anthropology and Dramatic Art and then earned a J.D. at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.  She served the State of North Carolina for two years as an Assistant District Attorney. She hopes to contribute to scholarship concerning the nature of Wari expansionism in the Majes Valley and Valley of the Volcanoes, Peru, by furthering our understanding of regional health and lifeways prior to Wari influence.  More broadly, she is interested in the role of militarism in state formation and collapse, structural violence, paleopathology, skeletal trauma, state-sanctioned violence, and the cultural construction of laws and morality.  During graduate studies she has contributed to archaeological excavations and bioarchaeological research in the Tierras Blancas Valley, the Middle Moche Valley, Chavin, and Ayacucho, Peru.  Prior to graduate studies, she contributed to excavations in Italy, ethnographic fieldwork and research in Egypt, and ethnographic field work in the Burch Field Research Seminar (UNC-Chapel Hill) in Manteo, NC.  She has volunteered for the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology, the North Carolina program for Forensic Science, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, the New England Innocence Project, and completed course work in Art and Antiquities Law with the University of San Diego School of Law in Florence, Italy.

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Matt Velasco | mcv47@cornell.edu

Matt is standing in the grass around several circular structures made of stone. He is facing left. He is wearing a blue and white plaid shirt, jeans, glasses, a white baseball cap with a green bill, glasses, a black back pack on his shoulders, and another black back over the shoulder closest to the camera.

Bioarchaeology; Taphonomy; Mortuary practice; Health and diet; Late Intermediate Period; Inka; south-central Andes.

Ph.D. received in 2016. He is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.

Matt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in 2008 with a BA in Anthropological Sciences. His Senior Honors Thesis, entitled “Understanding Post-Chavín Mortuary Behavior: A Taphonomic Analysis of Human Remains from Chavín de Huántar, Peru,” addresses the re-use of the site’s monumental space for secondary burial following Chavín’s decline. His research interests primarily lie in community health and violence, and the relationship between social structure and mortuary practice during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400) of Andean prehistory. As a member of Proyecto Machu Llaqta (directed by Elizabeth Arkush, University of Pittsburgh) Matt is presently investigating tomb variation and construction in the Colla region of the North Titicaca Basin and is also conducting bioarchaeological research in the Colca valley of southern, highalnd Peru. In addition to fieldwork and laboratory research at multiple sites in the north/south-central Andes, he has participated in archaeological excavation at the Paleolithic site of Chez-Pinaud (Jonzac) in southwest France. His broader anthropological interests include body modification, human evolution, the peopling of the New World, and the social construction of space/landscape.

Recipient of the 3-yr NSF-Graduate Research Fellowship.  

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Danielle Kurin | dkurin@ucsb.edu

Dr. Kurin received her Ph.D. in 2012. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Carrie Anne Berryman | carrie.a.berryman@vanderbilt.edu

Carrie Anne is sitting down next to a skeleton that is partially excavated from the dirt. She is looking down and to the right. There is another person wearing a white shirt next to the skeleton. Carrie Anne is wearing a pink tshirt, khaki pants, and brown shoes. Her blonde hair is shoulder length.

Bioarchaeology; Paleopathology; Dietary reconstruction; Nutrition; Dental health; Development of political complexity; Tiwanaku; Andes.

Ph.D. received in May 2010. Carrie Anne is now an independent business owner in the world of finance and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, so Carrie Anne, Tiffiny, and their families often hang out together in the awesome city of Nashville.

Carrie Anne graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 1999 with a BA in anthropology and completed an MA in anthropology at the University of Arkansas in 2001. She has conducted bioarchaeological research in Greece, Jordan, Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia, and the U.S. and served as osteologist for the Cancuen Archaeological Project in Guatemala for three years. Now ABD, Carrie Anne’s dissertation research is focused on the rise of Tiwanaku political authority in the Southern Titicaca Basin of Bolivia during the Late Formative and Middle Horizon periods. Through combining stable isotopic indicators of diet, standard dental analyses, and analysis of phytoliths from human dental calculus, her research is elucidating changing patterns of trade and dietary resource distribution that accompanied the rise of the archaic state.