Jessica I. Cerezo-Román, Ph.D.

Dr. Cerezo-Román specializes in the study of highly fragmented and cremated human remains, mortuary practices, bioarchaeology, and forensic anthropology. She uses cutting-edge methodological and theoretical archaeological approaches to study the human body and mortuary customs from ancient populations of the Greater American Southwest, Mexico, Northern Europe, and North Africa. Her theoretical approaches focus on emerging complex societies, identity intersections, personhood, embodiment, memory and funerary rituals. She was a College Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University from 2014 to 2016. She also held a position as a Forensic Anthropology Postdoctoral Fellow in the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, Tucson, Arizona, where she worked with human remains of undocumented migrants, homicides, suicides and accidental deaths. She received her PhD in Anthropology (Archaeology subfield) from the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She has several articles and book chapters on ancient funerary customs in both the New and Old Words. She co-edited the book Cremation and the Archaeology of Death (expected Spring 2017) to be published by Oxford University Press. She also recently worked with Gallo Roman cremations and Medieval inhumations while a research scientist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels, Belgium. She worked for six years in the Bioarchaeology Laboratory at the Arizona State Museum (ASM). At the ASM she consulted on numerous repatriation projects and NAGPRA inventories, and was subcontracted by different CRM companies to excavate and analyze burial practices on numerus sites throughout the state of Arizona.