Sara Jaramillo is a first-year student in the Historical Archaeology master’s program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Sara graduated from SUNY Stony Brook with a major in Anthropology and a minor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Sara joined the zooarchaeology lab at Stony Brook during her undergraduate education, where she learned basic animal bone identification. During this volunteer work, she participated in the processing of faunal remains from the Mesopotamian city of Ur. From this collection emerged her undergraduate honors thesis, which focused on the differentiation in consumption and use of fish in the city, and how this broadens our understanding of Mesopotamian societies’ foodways and use of resources. Additionally, as an undergraduate student, Sara completed an internship at the African American Museum in Southampton, New York. During this internship, she assisted in the assemblage of an exhibition exalting some of Southampton’s Black-owned businesses from the mid-20th century and how they reinforced the sense of community. 

In 2022, she participated in the Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School in Stonington Connecticut, which sparked her interest in community-based archaeology. During the field school, she learned the importance of practicing ethical archaeological research that respects the community’s decisions regarding their land, material culture, and heritage. In her current research assistantship at the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston, she is helping in the sorting and processing of archaeological material from the 17th and 18th centuries from a Spanish rancho in New Mexico, evidencing the strong presence of ceramic traditions and cultures of Puebloan peoples during the Spanish colonial expansion throughout the United States Southwest. Part of Sara’s research assistantship is dedicated to helping with different tasks at the Latin American Historical Archaeology Lab at UMass Boston, where she works under the supervision of Dr. Daniela Balanzátegui. For her graduate studies at UMass Boston, Sara wants to explore diverse topics related to colonialism, the persistence of Indigenous and African Diasporic groups, their practices, foodways, social structures, and identity. Sara is mainly interested in the archaeology of Latin America and how processes that took place during colonial rule translate into the present.