As silly as it seems, I feel that I was always meant to be a bioarchaeologist. Some of my earliest memories are of watching television shows and movies about archaeology with my father. (Yes, this includes the Indiana Jones franchise.) When I got to college—long after my father had passed away—I chose to study anthropology. After taking a course on the human skeleton, the rest was history. Or rather: the rest was bioarchaeology.
Despite realizing my vision, I came to see myself—a Black person in anthropology—as an outlier, an anomaly in a field based on racism. I was trained in osteology with the remains of Indigenous Americans. When I advanced in my studies and began to work with skeletal collections, I was shocked by bodies stolen from all over the world. I shifted my focus: from the questions I could answer using these bodies to the questions these collections—the bodies...
University of California Press