aleon

I was always fascinated by fossils as a child and would have to be forced to come inside at dusk. These passions never transpired into anything until relatively recently. I began my undergraduate career majoring in Deaf Education but quickly realized that it was not the field I was meant to be in. I was convinced by a friend to take a Cultural Anthropology course and I immediately fell in love. That summer I signed up for an archaeological field school in the United States' oldest city, Saint Augustine, Florida. While in undergrad, I participated in field schools in Costa Rica and Peru. Of course I fell in love with the preservation in the dry desert of Peru. I began to teach myself about Osteology and Mortuary Archaeology upon unearthing my first set of human remains and ever since I have been continuing this journey. I am now currently attending the Southern Illinois University of Carbondale to obtain my Master's degree under the advisement of Dr. Izumi Shimada. I am focusing on understanding the everyday lives of the Ychsma civilization of the Peruvian Central Coast through mortuary archaeological analysis.

April 2015