ASM Bioarchaeology Lab

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• We train university students through classroom instruction, research, laboratory training, and field work.
• We provide professional services to public and private institutions across the state to facilitate compliance with state and federal laws regarding the recovery, documentation, treatment, and repatriation of human remains.
• We provide training workshops on distinguishing human remains from animal bone for organizations that work in archaeological or forensic contexts.
• We manage the preservation of human remains recovered from archaeological sites within the state and work closely with descendant communities to facilitate the return of ancestral remains under state and federal repatriation laws.

• We conduct research to reconstruct the lived experience of past populations.

   

Research

• La Playa Archaeological Project.

  This is a long-term bi-national collaboration with the primary goal of investigating the archaeological site of La Playa, located in northern Sonora. La Playa is one of the earliest, largest settled villages in the Borderlands region of the Sonoran Desert primarily associated with the Early Agricultural (EA) period (2100 B.C.-A.D. 50), covering the transition from foraging to farming. Co-directed by Elisa Villalpando and John Carpenter at Centro INAH Sonora.

• Paleodietary Variability in the Americas.

  The primary goal of this project is to better define how dietary adaptations to local environments play critical roles in the adoption and transition to reliance on domesticated plants and animals through our oral complex. We examine tooth wear across a wide variety of environmental, cultural, and temporal circumstances throughout the Americas to illuminate how these variables contribute to paleodietary variability.

• Biology of Early Foragers on the Andean Altiplano.

  This project examines human biology and the physical adaptations of the earliest full-time inhabitants of the Lake Titicaca Basin in Peru. This is a collaboration driven by Dr. Randy Haas and the Forager Complexity Lab at UC Davis (https://fcl.ucdavis.edu/).

Contact
James T. Watson, Ph.D.
Curator of Bioarchaeology
Arizona State Museum / University of Arizona
P.O. Box 210026
Tucson, AZ 85721-0026
520-621-4794
watsonjt@arizona.edu
See Dr. Watson's Profile

See also Repatriation