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CT Scan Reveals Valuable Information Inside Intact Mummies

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CT Scan Reveals Valuable Information Inside Intact Mummies

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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.

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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.

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CT Scan Reveals Valuable Information Inside Intact Mummies

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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...

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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).

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UCSB bioarchaeologist Danielle Kurin studies trepanation - a practice of drilling holes in the cranium that dates back thousands of years

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."

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UCSB bioarchaeologist Danielle Kurin studies trepanation - a practice of drilling holes in the cranium that dates back thousands of years Andrea Estrada UCSB Current 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.

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Data Analysis – Making Sense of Numbers in Computational Anthropology

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Data Analysis – Making Sense of Numbers in Computational Anthropology

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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 served as assistant professor -and later tenured associate professor - at the University of California, Santa Barbara; she directed the Phillip Walker Bio-archaeology Lab, taught in the department, and conducts fieldwork not only in Peru and Bolivia, but also in California.

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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, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara directs the Phillip Walker Bio-archaeology Lab there, teaches 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.

Tags Posted on anthropology

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Data Analysis - Making Sense of Numbers in Computational Anthropology

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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, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara directs the Phillip Walker Bio-archaeology Lab there, teaches in the department, and conducts fieldwork...

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The Importance of Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology

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The Importance of Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology

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Dr. Danielle Kurin’s extensive research and experience in anthropological studies have resulted in the publication of academic journal articles, chapters in scholarly volumes and a book, The bioarchaeology of societal collapse and reorganization in ancient Peru.

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Dr. Danielle Kurin's extensive research and experience in anthropological studies have resulted in the publication of academic journal articles, chapters in scholarly volumes and a book, The bioarchaeology of societal collapse and reorganization in ancient Peru. as well as university appointments, fellowships and research grants. Dr. Kurin is an assistant professor of bio-archaeology at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she is highly regarded as an excellent teacher and mentor, with her courses achieving outstanding student ratings.,

Kurin has long been an exponent of integrating social/cultural anthropology, biological anthropology and archaeology into her work. Her work is empirically-based on skeletal and other human remains with attendant morphological, DNA and isotope analyses and carbon-14 dating - but is informed by historical research and artifactual evidence as well. In her book and various publications, Kurin summons evidence of different types to build a picture of historical and pre-historical populations and their activities - from food getting and household living to migration, warfare and health care practices.

Kurin follows the evidence in a manner more like a forensic scientist and cultural detective or investigator. She forms hypotheses about how a population or community might have behaved and then tests those hypotheses against data she and her many collaborators collect. While her work is informed by various theoretical perspectives - giving her clues for what to look for with regard to ecological and environmental change, migration, conflict, and their correlates, she does not start out with a pre-determined theory of social change. She is no strict cultural evolutionist, cultural materialist, ecological determinist, sociobiologist, structuralist or functionalist. Thus her accounts of life in the pre-historic Andes are regarded as credible and factually driven.

Kurin's findings have concentrated on areas where the bodily remains of ancient peoples show evidence of various social practices - and the beliefs that underlay them. For example, her work on ancient trepanation, or brain surgery, illustrates how warfare, which caused an uptick in skull wounds and injuries, actually prompted people of the period 1000-1400 AD to develop new, innovative forms of treatment, In another example, Kurin has demonstrated how the cranial modification of babies was employed by parents to express communal identity - something akin to the markings of ethnic groups.

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The Importance of Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology

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Dr. Danielle Kurin's extensive research and experience in anthropological studies have resulted in the publication of academic journal articles, chapters in scholarly volumes and a book, The bioarchaeology of societal collapse and reorganization in ancient Peru. as well as university appointments, fellowships and research grants.

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Many anthropologists work in very narrow specialties and may be quite reluctant to step beyond their academic comfort zone to apply their knowledge. But many anthropologists do see their role as one of also using their knowledge to serve their communities. Danielle Kurin, a former assistant professor - and later tenured associate professor- of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara was a highly rated professor and accomplished researcher with stellar publications. But she has also served various communities with which she is associated..

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Many anthropologists work in very narrow specialties and may be quite reluctant to step beyond their academic comfort zone to apply their knowledge. But many anthropologists do see their role as one of also using their knowledge to serve their communities. Danielle Kurin, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara is highly rated professor and accomplished researcher with stellar publications. But she has also served various communities with which she is associated..

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Many anthropologists work in very narrow specialties and may be quite reluctant to step beyond their academic comfort zone to apply their knowledge. But many anthropologists do see their role as one of also using their knowledge to serve their communities.

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A Bioarchaeological Assessment of Cranial Modification and Health in Ancient Highland Peru

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A Bioarchaeological Assessment of Cranial Modification and Health in Ancient Highland Peru

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A Bioarchaeological Assessment of Cranial Modification and Health in Ancient Highland Peru

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"A Bioarchaeological Assessment of Cranial Modification and Health in Ancient Highland Peru" is published by Danielle Kurin.

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Data Analysis – Making Sense of Numbers in Computational Anthropology

# data[].attributes.subject
Data Analysis – Making Sense of Numbers in Computational Anthropology

# data[].attributes.body
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 later tenuredf 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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara directs the Phillip Walker Bio-archaeology Lab there, teaches 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.

Tags Posted on anthropology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Data Analysis - Making Sense of Numbers in Computational Anthropology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara directs the Phillip Walker Bio-archaeology Lab there, teaches in the department, and conducts fieldwork...

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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

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UCSB anthropologist Danielle Kurin examines the effects of the abrupt and catastrophic demise of the Wari Empire 1,000 years ago
By Andrea Estrada
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.

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UCSB anthropologist Danielle Kurin examines the effects of the abrupt and catastrophic demise of the Wari Empire 1,000 years agoBy Andrea EstradaUCSB 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...