Looking back on 20 years of discovery at ASU’s Center for Bioarchaeological Research
For the four faculty members of the Center for Bioarchacheological Research, their work is about more than just physical and biological data. They are searching for answers to long asked questions, making connections between the past and present, and most importantly — giving a voice to the past. Clockwise from top left: Regents Professor Jane Buikstra, Director Christopher Stojanowski, Professor Kelly Knudson and Professor Brenda Baker.
When Christopher Stojanowski works in his lab, he isn’t just handling ancient remains. To him, every tooth or fragment of bone offers a voice from the past and a reminder that scientific data can illuminate profoundly human stories.
As the newly appointed director of Arizona State University's Center for Bioarchaeological Research, housed within the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Stojanowski now leads the center in bringing the stories of past peoples to light and training a new generation of scholars to carry that work forward.
For two decades, researchers in the center have been combining biology and history to uncover the insights into the lives of people who may have left no written records by studying their bones, teeth, skin, isotopes and DNA.
“We’re using biological data, but often to address historical or social science questions, not just pure biological ones,” Stojanowski said.
A vision that shaped a field
The story of the center begins with Regents Professor Jane Buikstra, whose arrival at ASU in 2005 brought both a legacy and a bold vision.
Widely recognized as the founder of modern bioarchaeology, Buikstra saw ASU as fertile ground to expand the field’s scope by uniting biology, archaeology and the humanities.
Upon arriving, Buikstra founded the research center and helped recruit Stojanowski and Kelly Knudson, both professors of bioarchaeology, to join Brenda Baker, who was already on faculty.
Together, they made ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change one of the few institutions in the world with four full-time bioarchaeologists — a distinction that remains today.
“I always turn to our role in advancing knowledge of people in the past, individually and collectively,” Buikstra said. “We’ve done this by training generations of ASU students to appreciate people in their historical and archaeological contexts and advancing bioarchaeological research through collaborations that draw scholars from across the globe.”
Buikstra’s approach — centering scientific discovery alongside respect for people of the past — has been the center's foundation from the beginning.
Her current Phaleron Bioarchaeological Project in Athens continues that legacy. Excavating the remains of non-elite Athenians, her team, which includes ASU students, is revealing the lives and identities of those who helped build the foundations of democracy but were left out of its written history.
“These are the people upon whose backs Western democracy was literally built,” Buikstra said. “Other perspectives can only enrich our understanding of this volatile, significant period.”
Buikstra's drive to include diverse perspectives also guided the “21st Century Bioarchaeology: Taking stock and moving forward” workshop hosted at ASU just before the pandemic, where 43 international scholars gathered to assess the field’s progress. The resulting publication in the Yearbook of Biological Anthropology has become a touchstone for researchers worldwide.
A culture of collaboration
Under Buikstra’s leadership, collaboration became the center's defining trait. Faculty with distinct specialties have long worked together in labs, co-authored papers and co-mentored students, fostering discoveries that no single approach could achieve.
“Bioarchaeology is inherently transdisciplinary, and faculty in (the center) really value collaboration,” said Kelly Knudson, professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. “That leads to excellent collaborative research both within the center and with folks at other institutions.”
Knudson’s OMID tuberculosis project exemplifies this. She, Buikstra and Regents Professor Anne Stone combine archaeological and genetic data from across South America to study how migration shaped the evolution of tuberculosis.
“Bringing together researchers from different backgrounds and datasets is much more rewarding, and more fun, than staying within narrow disciplinary boundaries,” Knudson said.
She also directs ASU’s Archaeological Chemistry Laboratory, where students learn to extract information from isotopes preserved in bone and tooth enamel to reveal where people lived, what they ate and how they moved through changing environments.
“It’s been so fulfilling to work with students in the (lab),” she said. “One of the first undergraduates who worked there is now an associate professor.”
Since its founding, the lab has trained more than 140 students.
Connecting the past and the present
For Professor Brenda Baker, her work not only uncovers migration and health patterns but also builds personal connections.
“You feel like you get to know these people on some level,” she said. “We have a charge to tell their stories: what happened to them, what they survived, what they went through.”
Her excavations from Egypt, Cyprus and Sudan have yielded insights that resonate far beyond ancient history.
Such as “Migrations and Disruptions,” a book she co-edited with ASU anthropologist Takeyuki “Gaku” Tsuda, which brought together archaeology, anthropology and international development to explore how humans have responded to upheaval across time — both ancient and modern.
“The reasons people move — climate change, conflict, survival — those are the same reasons people move today,” she said.
That connection between past and present also underlies Baker’s research on Treponemal disease, a family of infections that includes syphilis. Studying ancient pathogens, she says, can shed light on modern outbreaks.
“It’s very relevant today,” Baker said. “We’re having a huge resurgence in syphilis around the world, including in the U.S. Understanding how the disease developed and evolved can help us track and manage it today.”
Moving between the sciences
At Gobero in Niger, Stojanowski excavated endangered cemeteries from the Sahara’s “Green Sahara Period.”
“The sequence of burials records the entire span of history from when people first moved back because the climate was better,” he said. “Five thousand years later, people abandoned that part of the world because the climate had slowly been deteriorating.”
That project, he said, shows how local stories complicate the broad strokes of human history.
“What you’re seeing is a history that’s extremely complicated and localized and may not be the same history in another place,” he said.
His later collaborations with Knudson take a deeper look at the individual. Their co-edited “Bioarchaeology of Identity” texts explore how people’s sense of belonging, ethnicity and community can be read not just in artifacts, but in their bodies.
“Bioarchaeology really sits in the middle of hard science, social science and the humanities,” he said. “You can move the joystick in any of those three directions depending on what you’re interested in and what framework you’re bringing to your data.”
Looking forward
As the center marks its 20th anniversary, its faculty remain united by a shared goal: to tell human stories that connect across centuries and continents.
Buikstra believes that global perspective transforms both research and researchers.
“Conducting research abroad encourages one to become a scholar more respectful of humankind’s diversity, both today and in the past,” she said. “Living in a different culture encourages this respect, along with international collaborations.”
For Stojanowski, guiding the center into its next chapter means giving a voice to the stories of the past while ushering in a new future for the field.
“Our commitment to ethical research means we’re not seeking to expand the number of bioarchaeological samples, but to maximize what we can learn from existing collections,” he said. “Decades of accumulated data offer immense potential, and collaboration will be key to realizing that potential in new and responsible ways.”
More Science and technology
ASU’s LEAPS lab marks a decade of energy impact
Nathan Johnson doesn't mince words when it comes to Earth's energy requirements.“The world needs every electron it can get to match the accelerated pace of economic development and electrification,”…
Smarter tools for peering into the microscopic world
The microscopic organisms that fill our bodies, soils, oceans and atmosphere play essential roles in human health and the planet’s ecosystems. Yet even with modern DNA sequencing, figuring out what…
Securing America's critical minerals supply
You may never have heard of gadolinium, praseodymium or dysprosium, but you use them every day in your smartphone’s display. They are a few of the 60 elements and minerals known as “critical minerals…