By Kami L. Rice

As an undergrad at UK, Heather Worne was on a pre-med track, planning to study pathology or orthopedics in medical school or to expand on her interest in the skeletal system by becoming a physical therapist. Her plans changed, though, after she took Introduction to Biological Anthropology taught by Dr. Deborah Crooks, current associate professor of anthropology and Interim Chair for the Department of Anthropology.

During that course, Worne fell in love with biological anthropology and realized she liked the perspective anthropology brought to the study of medicine. “The way biological anthropology addresses human biology is different from the way medicine or biology does,” she explains, noting that anthropology takes culture into account, and biology and culture cannot really be separated.

Prior to taking the course, Worne had read about people who study bones, but it was not until she encountered Crooks’ enthusiasm for the topic that she discovered studying bones could be a job, one held by more than just a handful of people in the world.

Now Worne has that job she read about years ago and is back at UK after earning her Ph.D. this year from Binghamton University in New York. She says the list of questions she would like to research is long, but first she is continuing research related to her dissertation work on regional conflict and warfare in the late prehistoric Mississippian populations from the Middle Cumberland region of Tennessee.

In Worne’s field of biological anthropology and bioarchaeology, she tries to understand past populations through the skeletons of the people who lived in a particular place or region. Specifically, Worne is concerned with the interaction between health and the natural and social environment in the past, such as the interrelationships among settlement choices, warfare and community health.

She works closely with archaeologists since there are many questions their expertise allows them to answer that support her work, such as, for example, unearthing settlement patterns and how villages are laid out, things Worne is interested in but cannot decipher solely from looking at skeletal remains. Most of Worne’s work takes place in a lab, where she studies skeletons excavated years ago and studies site reports from the archaeologists involved in the bones’ excavation. When she does get to be onsite, she works to determine such clues as mortuary practices and who was buried at the site and why.

“When you’re working in the past, it’s difficult because you’re working with limited information to answer the questions,” notes Worne. “So [sometimes] the best way is to come up with new questions.”

She plans to expand her research to include studying late prehistoric populations’ sites in Kentucky and hopes these sites will provide information that can help answer lingering questions regarding the Mississippian populations in Tennessee.

Worne is also working to expand her work on warfare to include community health, seeking to determine how warfare affected health and whether victims suffered from debilitating conditions making them more vulnerable to attack. Additionally, once evidence indicates whether victims were malnourished despite having adequate food resources nearby, Worne can begin to determine whether the threat of warfare limited the populations’ movements and access to those resources. Altogether such information helps paint a clearer picture of what warfare and its effects looked like for these populations.

Other scholars studying prehistoric populations have investigated questions like rates of warfare and groups’ geographic spread. As an anthropologist, Worne instead considers questions on a community level, such as how warfare affected populations’ ability to move around. “What I’m more interested in [than the cause of war] is the consequences of warfare and how it affected everything else in their life,” she says.

Worne’s family moved to Kentucky when she was 10, and she considers Lexington home. Her plan when she left for grad school was to return to teach at UK, but when she learned that in academia you go where the jobs are, she did not expect that dream to be fulfilled. She didn’t know anybody who got to pick where they went, so she counts herself lucky that the perfect job opened up back at UK at the right time. “I learned what it is to be an anthropologist in this department, so I’m happy to be back and do that for other students.”

Speaking of students, Worne loves teaching. “Seeing somebody understand and the light go on in their eyes is so rewarding,” she explains. “I can’t imagine doing my job without some component of teaching involved.”

In fact, Worne is now teaching the very course that changed her academic direction: Introduction to Biological Anthropology. Dr. Crooks is now one of her colleagues. “I only hope that I can inspire as many students as she did,” says Worne. “I really enjoy teaching this class because it was so important to me and changed my life plan.”