Voyageurs in a New World: A French Colonial Cemetery in Nouveau Biloxi (original) (raw)

2018, Bioarchaeology of the American Southeast: Approaches to Bridging Health and Identity in the Past

New World colonization is the subject of Funkhouser and Hester’s analysis of human skeletal remains from the French colony of New Biloxi. They cite results of paleopathological assessment and ancient mtDNA analyses, in comparison with other French colonial cemeteries from the New World, and contemporaneous populations in Europe, finding groups of soldiers and sailors to be most alike, as mostly young and male, and having experienced childhood impoverishment and adult physical strain. As a population, they are comparable with Shuler and colleagues’ (chapter 9) analysis of a later 19th- and early 20th-century historic cemetery complex where sailors, laborers, and the indigent were also laid to rest. Funkhouser and Hester’s comprehensive application of paleopathological indicators is echoed in almost every chapter in this volume, from oral health (e.g., Listi, chapter 2; Betsinger and Smith, chapter 3; Griffin, chapter 4), to nonspecific infections and trauma (Stevens and colleagues, chapter 10). Most frequent in Funkhouser and Hester’s sample, though, appear to be those unfortunates who likely perished of epidemic disease, which may killed them so quickly as to have left no impact on their skeletons.