Paradox and promise: research on the role of recent advances in paleodemography and paleoepidemiology to the study of "health" in Precolumbian societies (original) (raw)

American journal of physical anthropology, 2014

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...

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