Anthropology professor Celeste Gagnon took Rose Tobiassen '12 and Violeta Capric '12 to Peru's Moche River Valley this summer to conduct bioarchaeological research — the study of human remains to understand peoples of the past. They spent five weeks combing through boxes of bones at the Museo de Huacas Moche. Through visual observation, they analyzed the sex, age, and many health factors of the deceased, allowing them to create a picture of everyday life in Huacas de Moche, a major city in 300–700 A.D. “It was such a learning experience to take a box of skull fragments and piece them together like a puzzle,” says Tobiassen. “The [bioarchaeology] class we took [at Wagner] was great, but I learned way more from this.”
