Danielle Kurin earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology & Hispanic studies from Bryn Mawr College in 2005, after which she advanced her studies at Vanderbilt University to earn a master’s degree and PhD in the same field. During her postgraduate studies, Danielle Kurin participated in fieldwork in several archaeological sites in Peru. She has numerous academic publications, including those covering her work on cranial surgery in ancient Peru.
Despite the advances in medical technologies and clinical practice, cranial surgery continues to be a complicated procedure. Yet nearly 2,000 years ago, early Peruvian neurosurgeons were already performing trepanation, a surgical procedure which involves removing small portions of a patient’s skull to treat injuries.
Several archaeological findings suggest that the premodern neurosurgeons had tremendous success rates with their operations. So much that the survival rate was around 80 percent during the Incan era. This is nearly twice the survival rates of modern American neurosurgeons (50 percent) during the American Civil War some 400 years later.
Unlike modern cranial surgical procedures that are performed in conjunction with antibiotics and anesthesia, ancient Peruvian surgeons managed the patient’s pain using maize beer along with wild plants, such as coca and wild tobacco. They used natural antiseptics like balsam and saponin to control the spread of infection.
While teaching archaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2013 to 2022, Danielle Kurin, PhD, focused her research efforts on the ancient peoples of the central Andes. Among Danielle Kurin’s abiding interests is ancient civilizations spanning what is today Peru and Bolivia.
As explored in a 2015 Smithsonian article, one of the most enduring legacies of the Inca Empire was its network of highways, which spanned a pair of main arteries and numerous side routes. The impetus of this system, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was the Incan leader Huayna Capac. While he ruled from the high altitude capital of Cusco, he preferred the balmier climes near the equator, and ordered the building of Quito as a second capital.
With more than a thousand rugged miles to traverse, Huayna Capac marshaled the efforts of able-bodied men from communities along the route. He was actually expanding and improving a narrow roadway, the Quapaq Nan, that had served communities for centuries. The completed highway, with guest houses along the way, was described as being flat and straight, to a point where 16th-century Spanish traveler Agustin de Zarate noted that “a cart could be rolled along it.” With this highway finished, Huayna Capac promptly ordered that a similar route be built along the coast.
These projects represented the apex of Inca culture, and at the time of Huayna Capac’s passing in 1527 he was still trying to incorporate northern regions within an expanding empire. Unfortunately, a civil war followed, with conquistadors in 1532 introducing a panoply of diseases that reduced the indigenous Andean population by half. Despite the many upheavals, though, the paving stones continue to mark this centuries-old road system that visitors can traverse to this day.
A former assistant professor and tenured associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Danielle Kurin, PhD, possesses extensive experience in the study of the indigenous people of Latin America. Dr. Danielle Kurin is a member of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), an organization that advances the field of archaeology.
The SAA supports research in Latin America through the H. and T. King Grant for Precolumbian Archaeology, which may help researchers unearth answers to questions in Latin American culture and history. The King Grant is for field research, laboratory work, collection study, and the compilation and analysis of data sets.
Those interested in applying for the grant must have a degree in archaeology or a related field. Further, senior scholars or early-career archaeologists/scholars who have earned a degree in the past five years may have an advantage in receiving the grant. Learn more about the King Grant and applications for the grant at http://www.saa.org.
Danielle Kurin holds a PhD in anthropology and served as an assistant professor and then tenured associate professor of bioarchaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Anthropology. Aside from teaching anthropology, Dr. Danielle Kurin also engages in field and laboratory analysis of bones from ancient human remains using a variety of techniques.
Ancient DNA, also referred to as aDNA, helps researchers answer important questions regarding the origin, distribution, and evolutionary changes of pathogens and their diseases. Aside from identifying the presence of pathogens in remains, aDNA study of excavated bones and teeth can help determine the sex of an individual and identify close genetic relatives.
While this may be appealing for the purpose of historical studies, contamination of human and pathogen DNA in materials has hindered the widespread adoption of aDNA analysis. Contamination of material can occur in the field, museum, or laboratory, since modern DNA may be accidentally introduced during the process of handling or cleaning. Contamination reduces the amount of aDNA available for analysis in materials, minimizing usable information.
To reduce the chance of errors from contamination during analysis and also maximize usable aDNA, researchers have developed procedures to correct for sample contamination. One such standard practice is the extraction of aDNA under thorough clean-room conditions. This entails the use of filtered air systems, as well as UV and bleach treatment of surfaces. In addition, special adapters are employed to tag molecules present during the time of extraction to help identify and separate additional molecules that may be added accidentally during sequencing steps.
Danielle Kurin, PhD, is a bioarchaeology professor and forensic anthropologist formerly with the University of California, Santa Barbara. With extensive field experience in the Andes region, Danielle Kurin is author of the book The Bioarchaeology of Societal Collapse and Regeneration in Ancient Peru (Springer, 2016).
In the work, Dr. Kurin explores the sudden, catastrophic demise of the Wari Empire a millennia ago, after the Wari had controlled a region the size of contemporary Peru for 500 years. With reasons for this collapse still not fully understood, this decline paved the way for the Inca to come to power around 1400 AD and form a new empire encompassing the “spine of South America.”
Dr. Kurin’s research of hundreds of skeletons reveals links between the last remaining populations of imperial Wari and the Chanka society that emerged in its wake. Unlike the Wari, the Chanka did not create elaborate cities or develop major commercial networks and written systems. In addition, they left behind relatively few goods and tools as evidence of their society.
As Dr. Kurin describes it, “prehistoric state fragmentation” of the Wari led to unprecedented genocidal attacks, displacement, and mass migrations. With community health impacted, individual life spans were reduced and access to clean water and nutritious food became less equally distributed.
At the same time, the Chanka began to display remarkable societal resilience mechanisms. These included trepanation medical procedures, new clan-like social formations, and religious practices centered on the worship of mummified ancestor-chief bodies. The archeological record reveals this upheaval and regeneration process in a novel way.
An anthropologist and researcher, Danielle Kurin, PhD has led and participated in numerous projects in the Andes as a bioarchaeologist. In this role, Danielle Kurin oversees excavations and analyses of human remains found at various sites in Peru and Bolivia. Among those remains are mummies.
A mummy is the body of a human or animal that has been preserved after death – either by chance or through an ancient artificial preservation practice called mummification. In some regions, where the conditions are very dry, some bodies may mummify naturally and be interred along with ritual items often assuring a safe trip to an afterworld, and survival in it.. In other societies, mummies may require a lengthy preparation process involving washing the dead body, removing internal organs, filling spaces within the body with stuffing, and drying the body by covering it with a salty substances.
Many ancient civilizations, including some in ancient Europe, Australia, and Africa, practiced mummification. However, the most widely-known examples of mummification as a religious practice to honor the dead are probably the mummies of ancient Egypt.
In 1894, an Egyptian mummy called “the Gilded lady,” made from the remains of a woman who was estimated to have lived between 30 BCE and 395 BCE, was taken to the Chicago Field Museum. Until recently, the mummy was left untouched. Recently, non-invasive CT scans were conducted to view the bones and skin layer by layer without harming the remains, through which important information including gender and age (40-year-old female), and hair type (curly hair) were revealed.
Printed 3D images from the scan were also used to recreate her skull, which was used to forensically reconstruct a statue portraying what the woman may have looked like. In addition, evidence from the study suggested that the woman might have died of tuberculosis, which was a prevalent disease during that period.
Dr. Danielle Kurin, former Assistant Professor and then tenured Associate Professor of Bioarchaeology at the University of California in Santa Barbara, focuses her research on ancient Latin American civilizations. One of Dr. Danielle Kurin’s projects involved analyzing human skeletons from the Chanka civilization in the Sondor region through the Andahuaylas Bioarchaeology Project.
According to scholars, the Chanka were warriors who lived in the Andean region from the 11th to the 15th century. From archaeological digs, researchers have pieced together some parts of this civilization’s narrative. Evidence of hilltop fortresses used to wall out enemies indicates that the society engaged in warfare frequently.
Researchers hope to gain more insight into what might have happened to this society through the study of human skeletons from the period. Referred to as osteological analysis, this process can assist in making discoveries related to migration patterns, the types of violence the people endured, and types of diseases they contracted. Dental examination can shed light on dietary habits and overall health.
Investigators are looking into multiple theories that explain the disappearance of this culture after conquest by the Incas. Some records indicate the society left or all its members were killed; others state that the Chankas were resettled or simply assimilated into the dominant culture.
Dr. Danielle Kurin’s research in bio-archaeological anthropology concentrates on the study of ancient South America, mainly in the Andes, and for the period from about 600 AD to the present. Kurin, a former assistant professor and tenured associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara directed the Phillip Walker Bio-archaeology Lab there, taught in the department, and conducts fieldwork not only in Peru and Bolivia, but also in California.
Kurin has unearthed more than 60,000 human remains in her career and studied thousands of more remains in museums and repositories in the United States and in other nations. In order to analyze large numbers of bones, skeletons and other remains, Kurin uses a variety of quantitative means and sophisticated statistical analyses.
Typically, Kurin and/or members of her team will measure human remains to as to be able to accurately describe and analyze them. Those measures will differ depending upon the type of remains, and bioarchaeologists have over time developed standard measures to aid data analysis and comparison. Kurin will correlate various independent and dependent variables to discern ancient social practices. For example, in her book The bioarchaeology of societal collapse and reorganization in ancient Peru.she examined the relationship between gender and skeletal injuries. She was able to use various correlation analyses to determine the patterns of injuries among men and women–the former were injured in bodily conflicts and occupational accidents while the later suffered likely spousal abuse and household related injuries.
Kurin has used all sorts of statistical analyses in her work, from relatively straight-forward descriptive statistics to very sophisticated regression analyses in order to make sense of thousands of human remains.
UCSB bioarchaeologist Danielle Kurin studies trepanation — a practice of drilling holes in the cranium that dates back thousands of years
Andrea Estrada
UCSB Current, 2013
Santa Barbara, CA
Some 900 years ago, a Peruvian healer used a hand drill to make dozens of small holes in a patient’s skull. Photo by Danielle Kurin
Cranial surgery is tricky business, even under 21st-century conditions (think aseptic environment, specialized surgical instruments and copious amounts of pain medication both during and afterward). However, evidence shows that healers in Peru practiced trepanation — a surgical procedure that involves removing a section of the cranial vault using a hand drill or a scraping tool — more than 1,000 years ago to treat a variety of ailments, from head injuries to heartsickness. And they did so without the benefit of the aforementioned medical advances. Excavating burial caves in the south-central Andean province of Andahuaylas in Peru, UC Santa Barbara bioarchaeologist Danielle Kurin and her research team unearthed the remains of 32
individuals that date back to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. AD 1000-1250). Among them, 45 separate trepanation procedures were in evidence. Kurin’s findings appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. “When you get a knock on the head that causes your brain to swell dangerously, or you have some kind of neurological, spiritual or psychosomatic illness, drilling a hole in the head becomes a reasonable thing to do,” said Kurin, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCSB and a specialist in forensic anthropology. According to Kurin, trepanations first appeared in the south-central Andean highlands during the Early Intermediate Period (ca. AD 200-600), although the technique was not universally practiced. Still, it was considered a viable medical procedure until the Spanish put the kibosh on the practice in the early 16th century. But Kurin wanted to know how trepanation came to exist in the first place. And she looked to a failed empire to find some answers. “For about 400 years, from 600 to 1000 AD, the area where I work — the Andahuaylas — was living as a prosperous province within an enigmatic empire known as the Wari,” she said. “For reasons still unknown, the empire suddenly collapsed.” And the collapse of civilization, she noted, brings a lot of problems. “But it is precisely during times of collapse that we see people’s resilience and moxie coming to the fore,” Kurin continued. “In the same way that new types of bullet wounds from the Civil War resulted in the development of better glass eyes, the same way IED’s are propelling research in prosthetics in the military today, so, too, did these people in Peru employ trepanation to cope with new challenges like violence, disease and depravation 1,000 years ago.” Kurin’s research shows various cutting practices and techniques being employed by practitioners around the same time. Some used scraping, others used cutting and still others made use of a hand drill. “It looks like they were trying different techniques, the same way we might try new medical procedures today,” she said. “They’re experimenting with different ways of cutting into the skull.” Sometimes they were successful and the patient recovered, and sometimes things didn’t go so well. “We can tell a trepanation is healed because we see these finger-like projections of bone that are growing,” Kurin explained. “We have several cases where someone suffered a head fracture and were treated with the surgery; in many cases, both the original wound and the trepanation healed.” It could take several years for the bone to regrow, and in a subset of those, a trepanation hole in the patient’s head might remain for the rest of his life, thereby conferring upon him a new “survivor” identity. When a patient didn’t survive, his skull (almost never hers, as the practice of trepanation on women and children was forbidden in this region) might have been donated to science, so to speak, and used for education purposes. “The idea with this surgery is to go all the way through the bone, but not touch the brain,” said Kurin. “That takes incredible skill and practice.
“As bioarchaeologists, we can tell that they’re experimenting on recently dead bodies because we can measure the location and depths of the holes they’re drilling,” she continued. “In one example, each hole is drilled a little deeper than the last. So you can imagine a guy in his prehistoric Peruvian medical school practicing with his hand drill to know how many times he needs to turn it to nimbly and accurately penetrate the thickness of a skull.” Some might consider drilling a hole in someone’s head a form of torture, but Kurin doesn’t perceive it as such. “We can see where the trepanations are. We can see that they’re shaving the hair. We see the black smudge of an herbal remedy they put over the wound,” she noted. “To me, those are signs that the intention was to save the life of the sick or injured individual.” The remains Kurin excavated from the caves in Andahuaylas comprise perhaps the largest well- contextualized collection in the world. Most of the trepanned crania already studied reside in museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Natural History or the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. “Most were collected by archaeologists a century ago and so we don’t have good contextual information,” she said. But thanks to Kurin’s careful archaeological excavation of intact tombs and methodical analysis of the human skeletons and mummies buried therein, she knows exactly where, when and how the remains she found were buried, as well as who and what was buried with them. She used radiocarbon dating and insect casings to determine how long the bodies were left out before they skeletonized or were mummified, and multi-isotopic testing to reconstruct what they ate and where they were born. “That gives us a lot more information,” she said. “These ancient people can’t speak to us directly, but they do give us information that allows us to reconstruct some aspect of their lives and their deaths and even what happened after they died,” she continued. “Importantly, we shouldn’t look at a state of collapse as the beginning of a ‘dark age,’ but rather view it as an era that breeds resilience and foments stunning innovation within the population.”
UCSB anthropologist Danielle Kurin examines the effects of the abrupt and catastrophic demise of the Wari Empire 1,000 years ago By Andrea Estrada, 2016 UCSB Current, Santa Barbara, CA
In her new book, “The Bioarchaeology of Societal Collapse and Regeneration in Ancient Peru” (Springer, 2016), anthropologist Danielle Kurin explores how individuals, small groups and, indeed, entire populations are directly affected by the dynamic and chaotic decline of a society that once seemed timeless.
An expert in Latin American culture and history, Kurin, an assistant professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, investigates the abrupt and catastrophic demise 1,000 years ago of the Wari Empire. Residing in the central Andes, the Wari reigned 500 years over a territory the size of modern-day Peru.
According to Kurin, the reasons for the empire’s decline remain murky. But after the fall, a grueling post-collapse “Dark Age” enveloped the region for roughly four centuries. “Finally, around 1400 A.D., the well-known Inca society came to power and established a new empire that
would soon encompass the entire spine of South America,” she said. “It was an immense territory that, if centered in the Old World, would stretch uninterrupted from London to Tehran.
“Of course, history — in the form of Spanish colonial chronicles — famously related the dramatic defeat of the disease-weakened and civil war-ravaged Inca,” Kurin continued, “which ushered in yet another new, European imperial age on the New World continent.”
Yet more intriguing than the successive waves of imperial conquest, she noted, is the often overlooked interstitial era that was bookended by the fall and rise of the two major prehistoric Peruvian empires. The nature of society during the “dark” period has long been a mystery — until now.
As part of her research, Kurin, a bioarchaeologist and forensic anthropologist, studied hundreds of skeletons belonging to both the last remnants of the imperial Wari population, and to the formidable but enigmatic people called the Chanka, whose society coalesced in the ashes of the ruined Wari state. “Yet unlike their imperial counterparts, the Chanka had built no grand capital and no large, elaborate cities governed by gods and kings,” she explained. “They produced no written records or formal commercial
networks, and left relatively little in the way way of tools, goods and networks.”
Today, knowledge of the Chanka, who eked out a marginal existence on the precipitous slopes of south central Peru between 1000 and 1400 A.D., is principally written in old, dried and yellowed bone, derived from the carefully entombed human remains and associated funerary artifacts of its population.
“Through meticulous study of the mummified tissues and skeletons of the dead — and even of the microscopic molecules embedded therein — we were able to deftly reconstruct how social disasters such as imperial collapse physically altered living human bodies in the prehistoric past,” Kurin said. “We also show how resilient survivors of collapse reorganized their society anew.”
In her book, Kurin pays particular attention to describing how the Wari Empire directly shaped key social, economic and political circumstances, which ultimately and significantly altered how later people lived — and died. “Similar to the contemporary cases we hear about on the news, prehistoric state fragmentation spurred an increase in violence writ large among the Chanka, but also provoked never-before-seen genocidal attacks,” she explained. “Collapse also prompted mass migrations, kidnappings and displacement. It negatively impacted community health and reduced individual life spans and severely inhibited equal access to nutritious food and clean water.”
Yet, crucially, Kurin continued, the Wari’s decline was not all bad news for the beleaguered Chanka. As their society came into being, the Chanka, who were neither subjects of an empire nor citizens of a state, creatively generated totally novel ethnic groupings and clan-like identities. “They also developed highly successful medical procedures such as trepanation — cranial surgery — in order to cope with staggering rates of violent head wounds,” she said.
The Chanka also transformed fundamental beliefs and practices concerning the dead, Kurin continued, with a renewed focus on worshiping the intentionally mummified bodies of dead ancestor-chiefs, rather than the ineffable and supernatural Wari sky deities, who had long ago been the focus of reverence by imperial subjects and lords alike.
Danielle Kurin 