“What’s really important about bioarchaeology is that it is the window into the past for most people who existed — because while historical records do exist, they don’t exist for everyone. And when they do exist, they’re written by a select few. This is really our glimpse at people in the past who have no voice otherwise.”
This is Purdue Interview, 2023
Professor Michele Buzon is a bioarchaeologist whose research focus is the Nile Valley of present-day Sudan (ancient Nubia and Egypt). She is primarily interested in the study of culture-contact and how mortuary and skeletal data can provide insights into interactions between different populations in the past. Since 2000, Prof. Buzon has been co-directing an international, interdisciplinary research team at the site of Tombos and most of her work on health and identity has focused on the New Kingdom and Napatan periods.
Why is Professor Buzon a TrowelBlazer?!
- The Tombos Archaeological Project has been actively engaged in community outreach and collaboration– here are some examples of local posters developed by the project– and in pursuing explicitly decolonial and anti-racist research questions.
- These local and national initiatives are highlighted on the Tombos Blog and in Buzon’s 2022 Sapiens article, Reinterpreting Life and Death in Ancient Nubia.
- She has also presented public-facing webinars of her research for the Islamic Medical Association of North America and other interested organizations.
- Prof. Buzon is committed to “changing institutional infrastructure” and “rededicating archaeological practice to collective learning and capacity building1” through her work with the American Sudanese Archaeological Research Center (AmSARC).
Publications
Professor Buzon has highlighted the following 5 publications as most representative of the diversity of her research interests:
2022 Buzon MR, Marshall J. “Countering the racist scholarship of morphological research in Nubia: Centering the ‘people’ in the past and present.” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 35:2-18.
2022 Buzon MR. “Archaeological site along the Nile opens a window on the Nubian civilization that flourished in ancient Sudan,” The Conversation [April 12, 2022].
2019 Schrader SA, Buzon MR, Corcoran L, Simonetti A. “Intraregional 87Sr/86Sr Variation in Nubia: New Insights from the Third Cataract.” Journal of Archaeological Science Reports 24:373-379.
2016 Buzon MR, Smith ST, Simonetti A. “Entanglement and the Formation of Ancient Nubian Napatan State.” American Anthropologist 118:284-300.
2013 Buzon MR, Simonetti A. “Strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) variability in the Nile Valley: Identifying residential mobility during ancient Egyptian and Nubian sociopolitical changes in the New Kingdom and Napatan periods.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 151:1-9.
Photo Credits:
- Profile photo (Purdue University) & Prof. Buzon’s Facebook page
- Transforming Archaeology : Activist Practices and Prospects, edited by Sonya Atalay, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/smith/detail.action?docID=1689435. ↩︎