Nadia Neff

PhD
Anthropology

Title of Dissertation : The Biocultural Legacy of Inequality: Diet and Health among the Classic Maya

Nadia’s dissertation explores how social inequalities shaped nutrition, health, and survival strategies among the Classic period Maya. She reconstructs human food-web dynamics and health outcomes related to social disparities using amino acid isotope analysis of archaeological human and animal skeletal remains and modern plants. By integrating biochemical data with archaeological evidence of social status, environment, and settlement patterns, her work has shown how individuals and communities adapted to unequal resource access. It offers new insights into the biological consequences of past inequities, while contributing to broader discussions about health, sustainability, resilience, and human-environment interactions in the past and present.