Paradox and promise: Research on the role of recent advances in paleodemography and paleoepidemiology to the study of “health” in Precolumbian societies

Abstract

Bioarcheology has made tremendous strides since the subdiscipline's inception, subsequent syntheses, the standardization of data collection methods, and analytical advances ranging from molecular analyses through age-estimation and biodistance. Concurrently, health and the adaptive success of past populations have remained primary concerns. However, questions are routinely raised about lesions and whether or not changing frequencies are synonymous with increases or decreases in stress, morbidity, and overall health. These include how and why healed lesions can simultaneously represent stress and survival, demanding that researchers understand how population dynamics influence skeletal sample formation. In this study, methods to analyze age- and sex-specific mortality patterns prior to, and in conjunction with, the analysis of linear enamel hypoplasias are demonstrated. Paleodemographic and paleoepidemiological models are presented for late Pre-Columbian skeletal samples from the Eastern Woodlands. Results of hazard modeling demonstrate that elevated mortality rates were commonplace during the latter half of the Mississippian period (AD 1200-1450) with reproductive-age females experiencing high age-specific risk of death attributed to the development of fortified villages and novel environments for increased pathogen loads. Corollary results are presented for the age-specificity of linear enamel hypoplasias in the central Illinois River valley. The epidemiological models demonstrate that the relationship between adult mortality and early childhood stress varied through space, culture, and time. These findings highlight the need to effectively operationalize measurements related to health and stress in past populations and support the adoption of selective mortality and heterogeneity in frailty as key concepts in bioarcheological research. Am J Phys Anthropol 155:268-280, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Bioarchaeological evidence for adaptive plasticity and constraint: Exploring life‐history trade‐offs in the human past

“…In another instance, individuals with LEH had an increased mortality risk during medieval famine in London . LEH was associated with decreased survivorship in prehistoric dental remains from the Illinois Valley, and differences in survivorship between individuals with LEH were found between time periods, with diminished survival found among samples dated to periods of environmental deterioration . These findings suggest that early life stressors reduce the capacity to survive future stress events, particularly during periods of ecological catastrophe.…”

“…106 LEH was associated with decreased survivorship in prehistoric dental remains from the Illinois Valley, and differences in survivorship between individuals with LEH were found between time periods, with diminished survival found among samples dated to periods of environmental deterioration. 107 These findings suggest that early life stressors reduce the capacity to survive future stress events, particularly during periods of ecological catastrophe. That said, Amoroso and colleagues 108 Taken as a whole, the findings of these studies provide tantalizing evidence for interactions between early life stress with cultural and ecological contingencies, specifically those associated with environmental deterioration, epidemic disease, famine, and socioeconomic inequality.…”

The Osteological Paradox 20 Years Later: Past Perspectives, Future Directions

“…Given that so few of these domains can be observed in skeletal samples, perhaps the only unambiguous assessment of health that we can make for skeletons is that they are all, at the time of observation, in very poor health, as death is the ultimate state of poor health. A recent special issue of American Journal of Physical Anthropology includes several articles that grapple with the problems of defining health in the past (e.g., Reitsema and McIlvaine 2014;Temple and Goodman 2014;Wilson 2014), highlighting the persistence of these issues and potential avenues for incorporating findings and perspectives from other fields (e.g., DeWitte 2014; Kinnally 2014;Piperata et al 2014;Tanner and Team 2014;Vercellotti et al 2014). The fundamental fact that we use samples of the dead to reconstruct characteristics of once-living people is both obvious and perplexing and anchors what is known as the Osteological Paradox.…”

In sickness and in death: Assessing frailty in human skeletal remains

“…While these recording standards have since been universally utilized in bioarchaeology, how these data are analyzed and interpreted relative to health and frailty is not yet universally established. Multiple definitions for frailty and statistical approaches to quantifying frailty currently exist in bioarchaeological literature (DeWitte & Hughes‐Morey, ; Piperata, Hubbe, & Schmeer, ; Wilson, ; Wood, Milner, Harpending, & Weiss, ).…”

“…Wood et al () exposed the inherent paradox of these statistical interpretations, which apparently overlooked concerns of demographic non‐stationarity, selective mortality, and individual heterogeneity (see Goodman, for response). Since publication of the osteological paradox, alternative methods for dealing with these inescapable issues in bioarchaeology have been proposed: hazard models (Boldsen, ; DeWitte, ; DeWitte & Wood, ; DeWitte, Boulware, & Redfern, ; Wilson, ) and life‐history studies (Wright & Yoder, ). Both approaches enable bioarchaeologists to study health among individuals rather than overall population proportions and ratios, which tend to mute population variability.…”