Dr Elizabeth Currie

Dr Elizabeth Currie is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Experienced Researcher and Global Fellow at the Department of Archaeology, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Health Sciences, University of York. Elizabeth has regularly worked across disciplinary and methodological boundaries throughout her rich and varied career which has consisted of two principal trajectories: that of South American archaeology and anthropology, and health sciences and health workforce research. In recent years she developed her lifelong interests in ethnographic and ethnohistorical study of Latin America, during which period she lived and worked with indigenous Andean communities in Ecuador, researching Andean traditional culture and medicine.

Her interests include cognitive approaches to human behaviour and construction of identity as seen through material culture, and in expressions of indigenous cosmology, being and belief, especially with societies practising shamanistic religions. The impact of imposed Christian religion upon indigenous pre Columbian cosmology, beliefs and rituals and how this is reflected in material culture is a particular interest.

‘MEDICINE’ represents the culmination and alignment of the two principal trajectories in her life, that of South American archaeology and health sciences and workforce research and will develop her long standing interests in indigenous Andean cosmology and traditional knowledge.