Anthropology

Dr. J. Marla Toyne is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology from The University of Western Ontario, Canada (2002), and a Ph.D. from Tulane University (2008), New Orleans, Louisiana. She has conducted archaeological, bioarchaeological, and forensic anthropological fieldwork spanning Canada, Belize, Ecuador, Louisiana, and Peru.
Specializing in pre-Columbian bioarchaeology, Toyne has excavated and studied human remains from diverse archaeological sites on the northern coast and eastern highlands of Peru, South America.
Toyne’s research interests span human osteology, health and disease, mortuary archaeology, landscape archaeology, and the archaeology of violence and conflict. Her principle multidisciplinary investigations of human sacrifice, which tie together studies of violent trauma, skeletal heath, genetic relatedness, and biogeochemistry, has developed since 2001 around the massive late pre-Hispanic monumental coastal site of Túcume; including numerous publications on this research.
More recently she has been in the Chachapoyas region participating as osteologist at the monumental center of Kuelap exploring mortuary variation and bioarchaeological indicators of health and population structure. This led her to explore other sites in the region and discovered the challenges of conducting archaeological investigations in this mountainous region where tombs were constructed in seemingly inaccessible places. She will be discussing here tonight this recent work from the mortuary complex of La Petaca.
Toyne’s work has also been prominently featured in the National Geographic Channel’s Explorer series and the Mummy Road Show, the BBC’s Lost Worlds, and The Discovery Channel’s Bone Detectives series.