On this month’s episode, Jessica talks with Dr. José Capriles Flores (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Penn State). We talk about Dr. Capriles’ journey from visiting Tiwanaku as a child with his late biologist and ornithologist mother to studying zooarchaeology and environmental archaeology across extremely varied ecosystems in South America today. Dr. Capriles discusses how archaic pre-pastoral communities adapted through time with outside influences from Tiwanaku, Spanish, and modern society, but whose descendants have maintained their connections to the land, livestock, and their past. Dr. Capriles describes several recent creative community collaborations, the balance of development with maintaining identity and belonging, and wide reaching networks of exchange from the archaeological record to the international archaeological collaborations today.