Dr. Rachel Gabrielle Witt

Rachel, the daughter of Donna Witt, was valedictorian of her class at Johnson County High School. She graduated from Vanderbilt University with departmental honors in anthropology and a second major in art history. She served as president of the Anthropology Club, and participated on the Arts and Science Undergraduate Advisory Board. Her honors thesis was titled, “The Health Profile of a Mortuary Skeletal Sample from Hualcayan: A Bioarchaeological Perspective of a Middle Horizon tomb from the North-Central Highlands, Peru.: Her paper, “The Painted Programs of Alexandrian Tombs” was published in the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal.

Rachel earned her P.h.D. in the biological anthropology program at Tulane University. She received two grants from the Rust Family Foundation and a Lambda Alpha Honors Soceity Research Grant to carry out her first year of bioarchaeological field work in Peru, for her dissertation. She worked as an adjunct and a graduate assistant. She served as the president of TASA: Tulane Anthropology Student Association. She received grants from the J.E. Land fund for School of Liberal Arts and Stone Center Tinker Foundation. She received honorable mention from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Dr. Witt received a $20,000.00 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant for her dissertation research in Peru.  With this grant, she was able to conduct a second field season at her site, where they continued to document examples of human sacrifice carried out 500 years ago by the Chimu Empire on the north coast of Peru.

She is a tenure-track assistant professor in biological anthropology at Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia. Previously, she was a visiting assistant professor at Tulane University.  Some of her work was published in the May, 2024 edition of Archaeology Magazine.