About Danielle Kurin

Danielle Kurin served as an assistant professor of bioarchaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Working in the Department of Anthropology, she taught courses in the areas of human evolution, osteology, forensics, and bioarchaeology. Also a much published and often cited researcher, Danielle Kurin maintains an additional post as a visiting research professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Peru.

Danielle Kurin’s work in Peru has centered on undertaking field research in the Andes in the Apurimac and Ayacucho regions. She has excavated at major sites of Wari civilization and at Sondor--a Chanka and Inka site.. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships . Dr. Kurin concentrates on the period from about 800 A.D. to 1400 A.D. and is interested in transitional societies, following the collapse of Wari civilization and before the rise of the Inka empire. These are often small, localized polities that are ethnically organized. Kurin's work uses human remains--bones, skulls, and mummies that she and her teams have excavated to understand how people lived, what they ate, what diseases they had, how they migrated through the region, how they fought, survived, carried out medical practices, and died. Among her major findings have been the role of cranial modification in defining ethnic groups. People of the region would bind the heads of their infants to achieve elongated or rounded shaped skulls so they could be recognized as members of one group or the other. Dr. Kurin has also discovered many skulls that show evidence of ancient brain surgery. Skulls would have been drilled open to relieve intercranial pressure caused by fighting and injury. She found about 50% of victims survived the surgery. Kurin also found skulls showing that ancient brain surgeons of the Andes experimented with different materials and techniques for their surgery.

Danielle Kurin holds a PhD in bioarchaeology from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote her dissertation on ethnogenesis and ethnocide in Andahuaylas during the post-imperial period. Before turning her focus to the field of bioarchaeology, she completed an MA in anthropology from Vanderbilt and a BA in anthropology and Hispanic studies from Bryn Mawr College. She started doing field work and archaeology in the Andes as a teenager. She is fluent in Spanish and conversant in Quechua, the indigenous language.