Christina Torres-Rouff

Christina Torres-Rouff is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Heritage Studies at the University of California, Merced, where she has taught since 2012. Her research focuses on contextualized bioarchaeology, integrating archaeological human remains with mortuary contexts to explore prehistoric social interactions.

Her work addresses three key themes: the production of social identity, the emergence of inequality, and human aspects of exchange and mobility. She conducts fieldwork and museum-based research in northern Chile and surrounding regions, analyzing skeletal remains for health, violence, and cultural modifications (e.g., head binding) to understand how lived identities intersect with environmental patterns, grave goods, and affiliations.

Torres-Rouff employs collaborative, multidisciplinary approaches to reconstruct individual and community responses to social and biological environments in the past, emphasizing societal change through material evidence.