Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2002

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Anthropology

Major Professor

Richard L. Jantz

Committee Members

Faye Harrison, Charles Faulkner

Abstract

Anthropologists have been interested in the interaction of health and status in prehistoric populations for many years. Utilizing a biocultural perspective, this paper will investigate how social stratification affected health at sites from the Tellico Reservoir in eastern Tennessee. These sites, Citico (40MR7), Toqua (40MR6), and Tomotley (40MR5), were occupied in the late Mississippian period in Tennessee, during the Dallas phase (A.D. 1300-1600) (Schroedl, 1998). Skeletal indicators of stress were used to determine the health of the people interred at the three sites, and burial location was utilized to establish the status of these people.

Intra-site and inter-site analyses were conducted on the data collected from 649 skeletal remains from the three sites. The intra-site analysis compared the occurrence of stress markers between mound burials and village burials at Citico and at Toqua, while the inter-site analysis compared stress indicator incidence between the two mounds, among the three villages, and between combined mound data and combined village data. A comparison of stress marker occurrence was also performed between males and females to determine whether gender differences affected the amount of stress endured.

The determination of status was another area of focus for this paper. Analyses were conducted in order to ascertain whether classes of burial goods based on raw material were correlated in any manner with the stress indicators. Positive and negative correlations could then be used to establish the status of an individual. Correlation tests were also used to analyze the association between periostitis and anemia. The two are thought to have a synergistic relationship, in which the presence of one stress increases the susceptibility to the other stress.

The results of these various analyses indicate that there are differences in the incidence of stress markers based on status; individuals buried in mounds were less affected than individuals buried in villages. This outcome is probably due to differential distribution of food. Individuals in the Toqua mound were more stressed than those in the Citico mound, which may be the result of population size, and, therefore, food availability. Toqua village had the most stress of the three villages, which is possibly a function of political structure and food distribution. The results of the gender analysis suggest that both females and males were comparably stressed.

The correlation tests reveal that no significant relationship exists between stress markers and the classes of burial goods. As a result, the class of burial goods based on raw material cannot be used to determine the status of an individual. Finally, the correlation tests indicate that there is, indeed, a synergistic relationship between anemia and periostitis.

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