Spanish colonial accounts of the former Inka Empire chart a vast political landscape of diverse ethnic polities that were differentiated by language, dress, and custom. The ethno-territorial maps derived from these accounts have significantly shaped how archaeologists describe and classify stylistic variation in cultural practices. Specifically, archaeologists have come to view cranial modification, the intentional reshaping of the head during infancy, as a quintessentially ethnic emblem that marked one “kind of people” as distinct from another. This approach unwittingly adopts a view from the outside and above—outside because it makes an exotic practice legible through the Western concept of ethnicity; above because it reinscribes categories of difference historically politicized by the state. Shifting the focus from ethnic symbol to embodied subject, my research attempts an archaeological reconstruction of cranial modification as it was experienced by those who practiced it. Through a richly contextualized case study integrating historical documentation, archaeological evidence, and biocultural data from human skeletal remains, I show how head shaping practices intersected gender, kinship, and status identities and contributed to emerging social inequalities in the era before Inka imperial expansion (1000 – 1450 CE). Such diversity in lived experience is masked by ethno-territorial models that present the ethnic group as a homogenous unit. In their place, indigenous Andean understandings of personhood provide a better account of how social difference operated on the ground and became naturalized in the body.

Matthew Velasco is an anthropological bioarchaeologist who studies ancient populations of the Peruvian Andes through the analysis of their skeletal remains. His research explores the emergence of novel ethnic identities and cultural traditions during the era preceding and encompassing Inka imperial expansion in the 15th century. To explore how these dynamic social transformations impacted the lived experience of the body and its treatment at death, he analyzes and interprets indicators of social identity, biological relatedness, diet, and health status written on the human skeleton.

His teaching spans the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, covering topics such as mortuary practice, human skeletal anatomy, forensic anthropology, and human evolution. He is currently developing undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on bioarchaeology, the archaeology of death and dying, and the embodiment of inequality.