Amy Anderson

Amy Anderson is a researcher affiliated with the Lise Meitner Group 'BirthRites' at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. She holds a postdoctoral position on the ERC-funded project 'Multilingual worlds – neglected histories' at the University of Warsaw, focusing on the emergence and loss of multilingualism through cultural evolution frameworks. Her academic background spans Archaeology and Integrative Anthropological Sciences with expertise in bioarchaeology, generative modeling, and skeletal health analysis.

Her research integrates epidemiological and clinical data to address how skeletal evidence reflects past population health, particularly through generative models that simulate causal relationships between health, environment, and mortality. Current work explores drivers of multilingualism using evolutionary approaches, bridging anthropology with computational methods. She has contributed to methodological advancements in skeletal analysis, including validation of CT imaging against traditional osteological techniques and developing tools like the boneMachine R package for 3D data analysis.

Key research themes include childhood stress indicators (cribra orbitalia, porotic hyperostosis), climate change impacts on prehistoric populations, and health disparities in tropical subsistence communities. Her work frequently addresses the 'osteological paradox' by reconciling skeletal evidence with lived health experiences through interdisciplinary frameworks.

Anderson collaborates with multidisciplinary teams across institutions, combining fieldwork, lab-based analysis, and computational modeling. Her projects emphasize methodological rigor and cross-population comparisons, spanning prehistoric case studies in Peru to contemporary forager-farmer communities in the Amazon and tropical regions.