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.
Dr. Danielle Kurin is a former assistant professor and tenuredassociate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara who has trained graduate and undergraduate students in various elemental, compositional, and histological preparation of samples, as well as analysis of human tissues using multiple techniques such as pXRF, isotopy, and 3D morphometrics. Dr. Kurin has used these methods in her own research work in the Andes of Peru, to understand ecological adaptation, the movement of populations, and health and disease in the period from about 1000 to 1400 AD. She has also used these techniques on contemporary human remains to help identify the home regions of victims of violence during such conflicts as between the Army and the Shining Path.
A nondestructive method used for elemental analysis of samples, XRF spectrometry is based on the principle of absorption of energy of atoms when the surface of a substance is bombarded with x-rays. It is useful in analyzing a wide variety of samples including rocks, bones, ceramic paints, and soil samples. XRF spectrometry works by causing ejection of electrons from the inner shell of an atom, which results in the subsequent replacement of the ejected electron by a more energetic electron from any outer shell. This results in dispersion of x-ray photons whose value is equal to the difference in energy levels between the resting electron and the ejected electron. Detecting and measuring the energies of the photons can be used to determine the elemental components of samples.
There are two primary types of XRF spectrometers, the wavelength-dispersive (WD) spectrometer and the energy dispersive (ED) spectrometer. All ED XRF spectrometers use semi-conductor type detectors that collect emitted spectrum from a sample, and decode the received spectrum into a number of count per photon energy histogram. WD XRF spectrometers, on the other hand, make use of a crystal to disperse the emitted photons depending on the wavelength of each photon, and the dispersed photons are received by a detector that measures x-rays of that particular wavelength.
In past years, XRF spectrometers have been of limited use to archaeologists due to the limited size of the sample they could analyze, because the material has to be mounted on the instrument. Samples like large rocks may be impossible to analyze unless broken, which is not practical if sample preservation is desired. However, the invention of portable XRF (pXRF) solved this problem – it allows the convenient and quick analysis of samples.
Danielle Kurin 