Person:
Perez, Ventura

Profile Picture
Email Address
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Last Name
Perez
First Name
Ventura
Discipline
Anthropology
Expertise
Introduction
Bio-archaeology: My primary area of interest is interpersonal and institutional forms of violence. My work focuses on cultural representations of violence using an interdisciplinary inquiry that includes social science and behavioral and biological research (specifically skeletal trauma), along with the analysis of artifacts and ethnohistoric research. I view the use of violence as a cultural performance and argue that in order to understand its use we must strive to recognize the culturally specific circumstances under which it is produced and maintained. My other interests include skeletal biology, taphonomy, forensic anthropology, paleopathology, and the etiology of diseases affecting the human skeleton. My research is currently in Zacatecas, Mexico at the site of La Quemada (AD 900) and in the greater Southwest.
Name
7
7
Reset filters

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    From the Editor: Special Poster Presentation Issue
    (2012-05-01) Perez, Ventura R.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    From the Editor: An Introduction to Landscapes of Violence
    (2010-10-01) Perez, Ventura R.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    The Taphonomy of a Sacrifice: Burial 6 of the Patio Hundido at el Teul
    Perez, Ventura R.; Jiménez Betts, Peter
    El Teul’s eighteen centuries of continuous occupation, from ca. 200 b. c. e. till the Spanish conquest in 1531 offers a unique opportunity to understand aspects of ancient society in Southern Zacatecas. This poster focuses on a ritually-sacrificed male whose body was deposited as an offering in one of the main architectural complexes of the site during the early to mid-Classic (ca. 200 d.C. – 400/450 d.C.). Ritual landscape models currently applied to larger sites such as Teotihuacán using Huichol cosmology suggest the possible correspondence of this building with ritual sacrifice related to winter solstice with Venus playing an active role.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    From the Singing Tree to the Hanging Tree: Structural Violence and Death within the Yaqui Landscape
    (2010-10-01) Perez, Ventura R.
    The military events in Sonora, Mexico involving Yaquis during the last quarter of the nineteenth century seemed to most Mexicans at the time as necessary forcible measures for civilizing a recalcitrant, semi-savage people and resolving the Yaqui “problem”. On the morning of June 8, 1902, more than 124 men, women, and children were massacred by troops under the command of General Luis Torres in the Ubalam Valley of the Sierra Mazatan mountain range in Sonora, Mexico. Three weeks after the massacre of the Yaqui at Sierra Mazatan, Aleš Hrdlička, the father of Physical Anthropology and the founder of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, traveled to the Yaqui massacre site and collected the heads of twelve individuals along with some miscellaneous human bones and artifacts and brought them back to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. The structural violence inherent in the oppressive Mexican policies towards the Yaqui can help us understand how the heads of twelve men came to sit on the shelves of the American Museum of Natural History.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Memorial to Mexico's victims of violence
    (2011-05-26) Pérez, Ventura R
    This image serves as the main image for our laboratory, the Violence & Conflict Research Laboratory (VCL). The VCL at the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides the infrastructural and analytical support for the creation of a cohort of students working on issues of violence in both its biological and cultural manifestations. Through the lenses of bioarchaeology and cultural, linguistic, and forensic anthropology, it facilitates research and teaching development with collaborators within the University of Massachusetts Amherst community and worldwide. Additionally, the VCL provides editorial and publication opportunities through the open-source, peer-reviewed academic journal, Landscapes of Violence.