Molecules Destabilized!
¡Bienvenidos & Welcome!
My name is Horvey Palacios and welcome to my new website & blog Molecules Destabilized.I am a Miami native, Cuban-American LatinX man currently attending OU– BOOMER SOONER! I am a broadly trained anthropological bioarchaeologist with a regional focus on the Americas both ancient and contemporary. I currently work at the Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research (LMAMR) within the Department of Anthropology and The Center for the Ethics of Indigenous Genomics Research (CEIGR) at the University of Oklahoma, while completing my Ph.D. in Molecular Anthropology. Additionally, I am pursuing graduate certificates in Applied Statistics and Digital Humanities in conjunction to my doctorate. Lastly, I am a team member of the Proyecto de Interacción Política del Centro de Yucatán & Proyecto Sacbe Yaxuná–Cobá where I conduct fieldwork and community engagement as it relates to our ongoing research projects.
I am originally trained in Anthropological Archaeology at the University of Miami where I specialized in Maya Archaeology. After my time in Miami I attended The University of Central Florida in Orlando where I received my M.A. and specialized in Maya Bioarchaeology. While at UCF I also participated in graduate teaching development at the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and trained in stable isotope methods at the Laboratory for Bioarchaeological Sciences (LBAS). I also have experience working with museums in Florida and Oklahoma on the repartriation of skeletal remains and fullfilling federal NAGPRA compliance. Lastly, I have worked with local Florida Cultural Resource Management archaeologists on both state and federal excavation projects.
I am a big fan of Musicals, Giraffes, Plants, Florence + The Machine, and Magical Realism!!
Bridging Anthropology
As an explicitly community-engaged scholar, I aim to bridge molecular anthropology, archaeology, and digital humanities in my research and, more importantly, in the way I engage numerous audiences with my scholarship. On this website, you will find links to educational materials, journal articles, presentations, public essays, and opinions spanning the breadth of my research. I use digital humanistic tools, including visualization techniques, textual analysis, and computational skills, to make my work accessible through digital formats and across disciplinary, academic, and public boundaries. My work explicitly aims to deconstruct these divides and destabilize research in all three areas that crosscut the boundaries that define these fields and the implicit assumptions of what and how scholarship should be created and accessible to everyone.
Research
My current research area focuses on the intersections of Maya history, ancient biomolecules, and inequality. I am also interested in how molecular approaches to anthropology can be interpolated with community-engaged research practices to co-create ethical and timely research projects. Through a deliberate multidisciplinary approach, my research explores how bio-eco-social inequalities affect individual health, migration, and identity in the past and present.
I am interested in improving dietary and health reconstructions through integrating ancient biomolecules, biogeochemical isotopes, osteological analyses, and qualitative methods. I analyze ancient biomolecules primarily through discovery metagenomics of calcified dental plaque, known as dental calculus. This substrate is composed of genetic material from different sources, including diet, novel pathogens, and microbial ecologies that a molecular anthropologist can analyze and authenticate to gain a molecular picture of an individual’s diet and health. Methodologically, I am interested in improving ancient dietary DNA analysis and integrating proteomics and metabolomics into ancient diet and health research. I am also interested in understanding how multidisciplinary approaches to reconstructions of antiquity can refine our understanding of ancient (and contemporary) narratives of stress.
Additionally, I am interested in comparative osteobiographies and the development of molecular biographies to further refine our interpretations of identity and personhood in antiquity. Theoretically, I am interested in how social bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology relate to concepts of situated biologies, collective memory, personhood, identity, and inequality. My previous research has attempted to identify bioarchaeological and mortuary variation patterns from the earliest individuals of the ancient Maya site of Holtun, Guatemala, to analyze personhood and identity. Additionally, I have studied how body partibility and collective memory play critical roles in how ancient and contemporary Maya individuals remembered their ancestral communities.
What is this site?
I started this site to write about my research and what excites (and worries) me about the intersections of anthropology, molecular sciences, higher education, and our current world. I also want to use this site as a primary vessel to communicate my research to public audiences and make my scholarship more inclusive and accessible for underrepresented communities in STEM or that have limited access to academia due to structural barriers. I am committed to decolonizing academia and eliminating systemic inequities that continue to affect our full-throated inclusion in STEM fields and higher education more broadly.
A major component of my training and work is centering science as a resource to the public, and actively co-creating projects with minority communities that serve them and address questions of scientific inquiry at the same time. Currently, I am Associate Editor of the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network Quarterly OKPAN OQ a History & Heritage Magazine serving the Oklahoma public, now in its sixth year of publication. All opinions and errors in this site are entirely my own— unless cited otherwise haha #academichumor!
I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us. –Edwidge Danticat