Daniel Pedro knew when he was a sophomore at Santa Fe Indian School that he wanted to be an anthropologist. He also knew that as a Zuni, he would not be able to touch human remains – a common task for physical anthropologists.
Photo: Daniel Pedro
Pedro began looking for a solution through the New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge. The challenge aims to teach teams of middle and high school students how to use powerful computers to analyze, model and solve real world problems.
Pedro hit on the idea to study the faces of living puebloans in search of consistent similarities and then project that data onto the past to identify and repatriate skeletal remains without disrespecting native customs.
An early advisor, UNM Curator of Human Osteology Heather Edgar, told Pedro that the people of the pueblos were too mixed to make the sort of determinations he was seeking. Nevertheless, she was impressed by his inventive approach to problem solving and encouraged him with advice on how to go about his project.
“We need a native perspective in anthropology, and especially a perspective that comes from working with living communities,” Edgar said.
Working in a computer program called StarLogo allowed Pedro to rotate two objects side by side and compare the objects in different profiles. His goal was to create a method for anthropologists to determine which tribe or pueblo a skull might belong to with minimal handling. The resulting entry in the Supercomputing Challenge, called “Scan of the Past,” received the Judges’ Choice Award for Integrating Computation into Anthropology.
At UNM-Gallup, Pedro studies anthropology with Professor Teresa Wilkins. Last year, he got a taste of the museum work he hopes to make a career by working at A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in Zuni, where he learned how to care for exhibits and worked with the photo collection.
Pedro wants to continue to explore ways to use technology to repatriate human remains and relics to the tribes they belong to. “It’s best to listen to Native American oral traditions about what happened at these sites. If we can integrate these traditions with what we can learn from modern technology, we can create another level of thinking,” he said.
Story by Linda Thornton