Since I first visited Mesa Verde on a family vacation, I've been interested in past societies. When I took my first anthropology class my freshman year of college, I was fascinated. Every facet of biological anthropology intrigued me, from our primate relatives to modern human variation. After undergrad, I began graduate school at Southern Illinois University. At SIU I was able to focus on bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. For my dissertation project I am exploring health at the Pre-Incan site of Panquilma outside of modern day Lima in Peru. To look at health, I will be examining the skeletal remains that have been excavated in past field seasons, as well as the remains I will help excavate this summer. Many of these remains are commingled, which makes them more difficult to examine than individual burials. In addition to exploring overall health of the population, I will be exploring different methodologies for analyzing commingled remains.