New graduate students

Megan Savoy

Megan in an excavated unit at the Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Field School at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2019.

Megan Savoy earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and Chinese language at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the spring of 2019. There she focused on bioarchaeology. For her thesis, she investigated the juvenile health of a medieval Italian population (Noli, Italy) using stature as a proxy. She reconstructed and analyzed the juvenile skeletal remains, which were part of the collection that was donated by the Archaeology Superintendent of Liguria for UMass Amherst students to study.

While at UMass Amherst, Megan completed the sixweek Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology Field School. There she learned how to locate and excavate an unmarked, pseudo-archaeological burial. While on the project, she was selected to be the team’s lab coordinator and was asked to lead her team through the organization and cataloguing of artifacts as well as the interpretation and analysis for the final lab report.

At the University of Michigan, Megan is excited to expand her knowledge of archaeology by exploring her research interests, which include diet, mobility, and isotopic analysis. She is confident that her background in bioarchaeology will be key in providing a unique perspective as she explores questions related to diet and mobility in the past.

This summer, Megan joined fellow grad Hannah Hoover in South Carolina as Hannah collected data for her dissertation. As a team, they shoveled test pits during the week and then cleaned, organized, and catalogued the artifacts. Megan learned how to set up and use a total station, among many other skills.

Please welcome our new student, Megan Savoy!

Jhon Percy Cruz Quiñones

Jhon at an open-air site from the middle Holocene (8,000–5,000 BP) in the Ancash region, north-central Peru. He is shown sreening material from a camp located in high-altitude grassland. Photo credit: Eduardo Sante, 2021.

Jhon Percy Cruz Quiñones is a Peruvian archaeologist who earned his bachelor’s degree in archaeology from the University of Santiago Antúnez de Mayolo in 2013.

His research interests focus on the transition of huntergatherers to sedentism in the Andes. He is interested in the ecological, climatic, and cultural mechanisms for sustaining permanent occupation in marginal environments. Since 2014 Jhon has been researching hunter and gatherer settlement systems located in high-altitude environments that date to 12,000 to 5,000 years BP. His field projects have consisted of regional survey, excavation, lithic studies, and raw material procurement analyses. With these projects, he hopes to better understand the use of different ecological foraging patches and interaction networks that allowed for early aggregation.

Over the years, Jhon’s archaeological fieldwork has brought him into contact with local communities and urban populations alike. Frequently, these local stakeholders informed him that they felt they lacked opportunities to participate in and access their own history. At that moment, Jhon asked himself: When did anthropology lose its commitment to making the past meaningful for people? In this sense, UMMAA and the University of Michigan stood out to him as institutions where he could recognize the diversity and participation of communities and translate archaeological findings into identities and narratives of social cohesion.

Please welcome our new student, Jhon Percy Cruz Quiñones!