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.
Danielle Kurin 