Traumatic injury risk and agricultural transitions: A view from the American Southeast and beyond

Abstract

The results of this study support the hypothesis that, with respect to traumatic injury risk, low-intensity farming is a risk-averse subsistence strategy in comparison with full-time foraging or high-intensity agriculture. These data suggest that it is not agriculture per se that predicts an increase in this health risk, but rather the mode and intensity of agricultural production, findings that have important ramifications for our understanding of the health consequences of major subsistence transitions.

Revisiting traumatic injury risk and agricultural intensification: Postcranial fracture frequency at Cerro Oreja in the Moche Valley of north coastal Peru

“…Agricultural methods exist on a spectrum from low‐intensity, shifting cultivation of river floodplains requiring minimal technological intervention or landscape modification, to high‐intensity agricultural practices characterized by the extensive use of techniques such as irrigation, terracing, and plowing to increase the productivity of existing fields and/or to enable the cultivation of less desirable tracts of land (Lambert & Welker, ). As discussed in Lambert and Welker (), the IFD model of HBE predicts that individuals will selectively occupy those areas from which resources can be extracted with the least amount of labor investment given their subsistence practices (Kennett et al, ; Kennett, Winterhalder, Bartruff, & Erlandson, ). Agricultural populations operating within this model are predicted to first occupy the most well‐watered, flattest, and most fertile environments available to them (McClure et al, ).…”

“…In Lambert and Welker (), the authors used the IFD model to make predictions about injury risks associated with different subsistence strategies. They presented evidence in support of the hypothesis that, in addition to costs associated with increased labor and managerial infrastructure (Billman, ), a rise in the incidence of physical injury might represent yet another cost of agricultural intensification.…”

“…Unfortunately, comparative data for the earlier periods were not available for the Moche Valley. However, published data on low‐ and high‐intensity agriculturalists from other world regions provided an alternative means to evaluate relative fracture risk with intensification in the Moche Valley (Lambert & Welker, ). It was hypothesized that the Moche Valley sample would exhibit an overall fracture frequency in the range of values observed for other high‐intensity agriculturalists ( = 2.4%), and well above the = 0.7% obtained for low‐intensity agriculturalists from other world regions.…”

“…In Lambert and Welker (), the authors employed the ideal free distribution (IFD) model of human behavioral ecology (HBE) (Kennett, Anderson, & Winterhalder, ; McClure, Jochim, & Barton, ) to generate predictions about postcranial fracture risks associated with different subsistence strategies: specifically, those associated with foraging, low‐intensity agriculture, and high‐intensity agriculture. Using fracture frequencies in seven postcranial skeletal elements (clavicles, humeri, radii, ulnae, femora, tibiae, and fibulae) as proxy measures of injury risk in 19 globally distributed human population samples, the authors found that high‐intensity agriculturalists experienced significantly higher rates of injury than low‐intensity agriculturalists.…”

Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street

“…Conflation of this kind is evident in many studies of human skeletal remains, especially those that group whole societies according to standard demographics, subsistence strategies, social complexity, or other types (e.g., Botha and Steyn ; Lambert and Welker ; Marklein et al. ).…”