Anthropology

Alyssa is a bioarchaeologist who primarily works in the Andes of South America. She completed her undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt University in Anthropology, with a focus on the biocultural foundations of health, genetics, forensics, and ethics. There, her thesis utilized stable isotope analysis, a method of archaeological chemistry, to reconstruct individual diets at La Real, a site on the outskirts of the Wari Empire (600-1100 CE). She studied dietary changes and consistencies in C4 plant (namely, maize or corn) and protein consumption before and after the Wari fully incorporated this region, and focused on differences between groups that one can root out in the (bio)archaeological record, such as one's sex, age, locality, and cultural affiliation. Alyssa completed an M.A. here at Brown as part of the PhD program. In this project, she compiled the largest database to-date of dietary isotopes for the Andes, consisting of individuals who lived between 7000 BCE and the Colonial Period. 

Alyssa is currently co-directing the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica NEBLINA (Narrativas de los Estudios Biológicos sobre La Identidad y Naturaleza de los Ancestros). She is excavating at two sites in the Chachapoya cultural region of Perú (modern-day Amazonas, La Libertad, and San Martín) with the support of a Fulbright Open Research/Study Fellowship. For her dissertation, Alyssa is primarily interested in elucidating the legacy of imperialism in the bodies of Wari and Inka imperial migrants, locals, and their descendants. 

Alyssa has also excavated in (bio)archaeological and forensic contexts here in the continental United States at both prehistoric and historic sites; in Chiapas, México at the Late Classic Maya city of Sak Tz'i'; in Late Intermediate Period and Late Horizon mortuary contexts in Ayacucho and Amazonas, Perú; and in France with the U.S. Department of Defense. Recently, she and colleagues published the first bioarchaeological application of Transition Analysis 3, an emerging age estimation technology, which we used to study the mortuary community of two commingled Bronze Age tombs from Arabia. 

You can find Alyssa at Bioarchaeology@Brown and the Integrated Laboratory for Archaeological Sciences. She is a graduate fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and is affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for Global Antiquity.