Anthropology professor Celeste Marie Gagnon, anthropology alumna Jennifer Ida and chemistry professor Nick Richardson recently teamed up with colleagues to study Chicha de maiz, a traditional corn beer brewed in the Andes. They wanted to explore how chicha affects the bones and teeth of the people who drink it. To study the effects, they sampled chicha they brewed in the Wagner chemistry lab.
They also traveled to Peru to sample traditionally made chicha. Samples were analyzed for their content of heavy oxygen in at the University of Alabama, stable isotope laboratory. The findings of their study have been recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Sciences Reports and have been highlighted in Forbes