Archaeologist and Forensic Osteologist

B.A., Archaeology, University Estacio de Sa in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1991

Yonara earned her B.A. in archaeology from the University Estacio de Sa in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1991. While living in Brazil, she worked on various historic site excavations including cemeteries, farms, and urban areas, as well as on precontact shell midden sites from the Rio de Janeiro coast.

After moving to the United States in 1992, she worked for multiple CRM companies in the Pacific Northwest region before joining the WillametteCRA team in 2019. She is currently the lead field director for the Seattle office.

For over 20 years Yonara has conducted and supervised numerous surveys, monitoring, site testing and data recovery projects for private, local, state, and federal agency clients in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska.

Many of these projects were related to the identification, recovery, and analysis of human remains where she worked as a liaison with Native American tribes. Yonara mobilized and directed field crews on large archaeological monitoring and data recovery projects and has participated in subsurface reconnaissance at some of the largest archaeological excavations in western Washington, including the SR-101 Sequim Bypass archaeological project in Sequim, the Tse-whit zen shell midden village site in Port Angeles, and the Paleoindian Bear Creek Site in Redmond.

Yonara is an associate member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and member of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society.