André Menezes Strauss

Adjunct professor at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at USP and associate researcher at the Laboratory of Archeology and Environmental and Evolutionary Anthropology at the Institute of Biosciences at USP. Graduated in Social Sciences by PUC-SP (2006) focused on the epistemological tensions between human and biological sciences. He holds a bachelor's degree in Geology from IGc-USP (2008), with emphasis on tropical geo-archeology and training process studies. He holds a Master of Science degree from the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology of IB-USP (2010). In his dissertation he presented a theoretical revision on hypotheses generated by the Archeology of Death and characterized the funeral practices of the region of Lagoa Santa. In the same period, he studied the relation between genetic and morphological markers as tools of population structure inference. He has a PhD in Archeology at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2016), focusing on the analysis of the archaeological record of Lapa do Santo and the ancestry of pre-colonial Brazil. Between 2010 and 2016 he was a doctoral student in human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, with a sandwich training at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria (2015). He specialized in the emergence of the genus Homo and in quantitative methods, having developed new algorithms of landmarks sliding for geometric morphometry of high resolution. He did postdoctoral studies (2017) at the Center for Advanced Studies 'Tracking linguistic, cultural, and biological trajectories of the human past' of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany, with microarray analysis by confocal microscopy. In Tübingen, he was a Visiting Professor of the Excelence Initiative program of the Institut für Naturwissenschaflitche Archäologie (2015-2017) and taught undergraduate courses. He has published 10 book chapters and 21 papers in scientific journals such as Science Advances, PlosOne, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Antiquity, Journal of Archaeological Science, and Geoarchaeology. He participated in the curating of archaeological and paleontological collections, and was responsible for the collections 'Kiju Sakai' and 'Loca do Suin'. He participated in archaeological excavations in Brazil (e.g. Santa Catarina and Buritizeiros) and abroad (eg, Jordan and Kenya). Since 2011 he is the coordinator of the project 'Death and Life in Lapa do Santo: an archaeological biography of the people of Luzia', being responsible for the excavations of the site 'Lapa do Santo'. He developed excavation management software and implemented advanced techniques of archaeological documentation (eg three-dimensional burial models). He is also coordinator of the bioarchaeology team of the Franco-Brazilian mission in Serra da Capivara and of the FAPESP projects 'Archeology of the northern coast of Espírito Santo' and 'Historical ecology in the Lambayeque valley, northern Peru'. As a specialist in virtual archeology he works with the emergence of symbolic behavior through studies of the modified ocher blocks of Blombos in South Africa and the perforated shells of the Upper Paleolithic of Ksar Akil in Lebanon. In collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, he coordinates the project 'Archaeomics of Precolonial Brazil', a pioneer in the extraction of ancient DNA from archaeological skeletons in Brazil. As an archaeologist of the contemporary past, he served as the forensic expert of the Presidency of the Republic Secretary of Human Rights to the Peruvian Working Group (2015-2016). Organized scientific outreach initiatives, including lectures and organizing events with local communities. He participated in the organization and idealization of the exhibitions 'From the Monkey to the Man' and 'Kiju Sakai' and is currently curator of the exhibition 'Life and Death in Lapa do Santo'. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)