Biodistance

Pottery Mound is a large Ancestral Puebloan site situated within the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) region of New Mexico. This article adds to our understanding of relationships between Pottery Mound, the Western Pueblos, and Mexico through use of biological distance analysis based on dental nonmetric traits. Extensive material and cultural influences, as well as migration events from Western Pueblos to Pottery Mound, have been proposed by several scholars, while others have highlighted parallels to Mexico, especially Paquimé. A total of 1,528 individuals from the U.S. Southwest and Mexico were used to examine relationships between Pottery Mound and these areas. We find no evidence of close biological similarity between Pottery Mound and the Western Pueblos or northern Mexico. Instead, the results indicate biological affinity between Pottery Mound and sites in the MRG region and Mogollon areas. This similarity suggests that although there is evidence for trade between Pottery Mound and oth...

In this talk, I briefly discuss how I became involved with Ban Chiang and what we have learned, in the decades since, from our studies of the approximately 142 human skeletons (2100 B.C. - 200 A.D.) excavated in 1974 and 1975 by the Thai Fine Arts Department and University of Pennsylvania. Specifically, I discuss what we know about health, diet, life span, and lifestyle of some of the earliest inhabitants of Northeast Thailand, people who were in the transition from hunting and gathering lifestyle to one that increasingly relied on agriculture. I also discuss some of what we have learned about the biological relationships of the ancient inhabitants of Ban Chiang. Then, I will mention one particular burial from these excavations, BC Burial 23, given the nickname, “Vulcan”. My talk will end with on-going research and plans to repatriate the Ban Chiang skeletons to Thailand.

Much of the information discussed in this talk derives from our monograph on the human skeletons from Ban Chiang published by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2002 and other publications by me, Michele Toomay Douglas, and others over the years. In addition to the systematic recording of thousands of measurements and nonmetric observations and detailed descriptions of paleopathology, there have been more specialized chemical analysis of bone and teeth from Ban Chiang including isotope analysis and, most recently, attempts to obtain ancient DNA from these skeletons.

The results of an examination of a number of indicators of health (e.g., life expectancy, adult stature, linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH), cribra orbitalia (CO), trauma, infectious disease, and dental pathology) indicate that Ban Chiang/Southeast Asia does not follow the general global decline in health with increased sedentism and/or the adoption and intensification of agriculture. Some possible reasons for this are discussed in the talk. In addition to unusually good health, our studies also found no evidence for skeletal trauma from warfare and little evidence for interpersonal violence. These studies further suggest that individuals of both sexes led strenuous lives at Ban Chiang. Analyses of stable isotopes indicate evidence for temporal changes and gender differences in diet and support for a matrilocal residence pattern.

In addition to skeletal evidence for genetic affiliations within the spatial groups at Ban Chiang, the results of applying multivariate statistical procedures to cranial measurements support models of local continuity in the late lithic to Neolithic/Bronze Age of mainland Southeast Asia. These studies also indicate major differences between the inhabitants of Khok Phanom Di, a site in south central Thailand, and Ban Chiang. Broader biodistance analysis indicates connections between prehistoric and modern inhabitants of Southeast Asia, suggestive of long-term continuity rather than models that argue for intrusion and displacement.

Special mention is given to one of the Early Period burials from the 1974 excavations at Ban Chiang, nicknamed “Vulcan” after the Roman god of fire and metalworking. Osteological examination indicates this individual was a 45-50 year old male at the time of his death. Further features of his skeleton, including his relatively tall stature, are consistent with the designation as a skilled village craftsman and hunter who married into the community.

It has been a privilege to serve as the sole curator of the skeletons from the 1974 and 1975 excavations at Ban Chiang, which has meant that new studies, such as the DNA studies now in progress, could be undertaken allowing new research questions to be addressed. Currently, the skeletons for the 1974 and 1975 excavations at Ban Chiang, which are currently curated at the University of Hawaii, are being prepared for repatriation to Thailand. It is hoped that additional research on these remains will continue to uncover new information about the prehistoric people of Thailand and Southeast Asia.

Family is a fundamental organizing aspect of human society, but family organization is understudied within bioarchaeology. Historically, bioarchaeological research has focused on kinship analysis, the reconstruction of biological relationships within archaeological contexts. Kinship analysis has generated important insights into past community organization and cultural practices, but it is rooted in biologistic and heteronormative values. As a result, traditional kinship research inadvertently emphasizes biological relatedness and nuclear family organization and limits our ability to recognize different ways of forming families.

In this chapter, I propose an alternative framework that facilitates a more inclusive approach to family organization in the past. By approaching family as a multiscalar form of social identity, integrating multiple lines of bioarchaeological data, and using analytical methods that do not prioritize biological data, bioarchaeological family research can potentially identify diverse forms of family organization in archaeological contexts. Bioarchaeologists can leverage the knowledge produced using this framework to contribute to public discussions of “the family,” destabilize contemporary common sense conceptions of kinship rooted in the perceived naturalness of the nuclear family, and promote more inclusive conceptions of relatedness and ways of forming families.

The current paper reviews the two most common distance measures employed for the calculation of biodistances based on nonmetric traits, the mean measure of divergence (MMD) and the tetrachoric Mahalanobis distance (TMD). In addition, two new approaches for the estimation of biodistances from nonmetric traits are proposed and assessed. The first is based on the direct application of the Mahalanobis distance to ordinally recorded data before their transformation to binary dichotomies. The second approximates the covariance matrix of the Mahalanobis distance by the Pearson correlation coefficients calculated in the binary dataset. By applying all above methods to artificial datasets, it is shown that the two new approaches perform much better than the conventional MMD and TMD measures. The influence of the number of traits, the effect of missing values homogeneously and non homogeneously distributed, and the presence of strongly correlated traits on the results obtained from the various biodistance measures as well as on the validity of the test statistics used to assess biodistance significance are also examined and discussed.

Cranial anomalies vary in degree of expression. Although some are nominal i.e. slight in expression, other anomalies are quite striking in appearance. Such is the case in a cranium recovered from the archaeological site of Carthage in Tunisia. Based on observations during ongoing research by the second author, this specimen was seen to exhibit a twinned right external auditory meatus. Possible explanations for the presence of this anomaly are explored. Trauma and perhaps disease can likely be excluded; congenital or epigenetic variation is more of a probable cause. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Bioarchaeological research has become one of the main subdisciplines, either in archaeology or in biological anthropology that has contributed to the information of ancient society through the study of human remains applying different theories and methods. Bioarchaeological research has focused on both individuals (osteobiographies) and populations. From its origin, bioarchaeology has positioned itself in diverse topics such as gender, identity, violence, ethnicity, and so on in different geographic areas. The main aim of this symposium is to put together diverse topics from bioarchaeological specialists who have been working in the area of Oaxaca, Southern México, among groups such as the Zapotecs, Mixtecs and the Chontal people as an example. This symposium is the first academic forum either in the US, Mexico, or in other countries to invite and concentrate a variety of Mexican and foreign researchers to present, share, discuss and enrich the bioarchaeology of Oaxaca.

Gregoricka, L.A. (2021). Moving forward: The bioarchaeology of mobility and
migration. Journal of Archaeological Research, 29(4), 581-635.

Growing interest in bioarchaeology and its ability to address complex questions tied to social and biological identities in the past has led to the development of nuanced methods for evaluating mobility and migration using human skeletal remains. Improving our ability to identify both short-and long-term migration through observations of body modification, analyses of biological distance, and applications of biogeochemical and aDNA techniques has enabled us to move beyond the simple dichotomous classification of past individuals as either local or nonlocal. These approaches have elucidated the complexity of migration processes while also revealing the heterogeneous ways in which individual agents and social groups incorporate , instigate, experience, and adapt to movement. These data have likewise demonstrated the potential of bioarchaeology to reveal broader patterns of social organization, social and ethnic identities, fictive kinship, postmarital residence, gender roles and relations, detailed life courses, responses to climate stress, and pathways of disease transmission. As bioarchaeology continues to contribute to mobility and migration studies, human skeletal data should be further contextualized by the archaeological record and linked to anthropological, archaeological, and bioar-chaeological theoretical frameworks as part of more holistic attempts to explain the diversity and dynamics of human movement, interaction, and identity construction among communities in the past.

RESUMEN Los modelos bioantropológicos y arqueológicos proponen cambios en la demografía, en la organización social, en las dinámicas poblacionales y en las redes de interacción social entre los grupos cazadores-recolectores del norte de la Patagonia y del sur pampeano durante los últimos 1000 años. El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar, desde la
perspectiva de la antropología dental, si los individuos recuperados en el curso inferior del río Colorado (transición pampeano-patagónica oriental, provincia de Buenos Aires), inhumados durante el Holoceno tardío (ca. 3000-250 años AP), pertenecieron a diferentes poblaciones biológicas o si, por el contrario, compartieron un pool génico común a lo largo
de ese período. Para alcanzar este objetivo se realizaron
análisis métricos de la dentición permanente de 21 individuos adultos de ambos sexos, procedentes de tres sitios arqueológicos.
Los resultados indican una similitud en la dispersión de
los valores obtenidos, lo que permitiría inferir cierta continuidad fenotípica. En este sentido, no se observan segregaciones claras entre grupos de individuos, de manera que es posible plantear que no habrían existido divergencias biológicas entre los grupos humanos que inhumaban a sus ancestros en el área durante todo el lapso considerado. Estos datos contrastan con la información generada en áreas vecinas (p. ej., Pampa
occidental), lo que indicaría que durante el Holoceno tardío final (ca. 1000-250 años AP) se habrían desarrollado diferentes procesos y dinámicas poblacionales (p.ej., regionalización) a nivel macro-regional.

ABSTRACT Bioanthropological and archaeological models propose changes in demography, social organization, population dynamics, and social network interactions among hunter-gatherer groups of northern Patagonia and southern Pampas over the last 1000 years BP. Following this argument, the aim of this paper is to examine, from a dental anthropological perspective, whether the individuals recovered in the lower course of the Colorado river (Eastern Pampean-Patagonian transition, Buenos Aires province, Argentina), buried during the late Holocene (ca. 3000-250 years BP), belonged to different biological populations or, on the contrary, whether they shared a common gene pool
throughout this period. To achieve this goal, dental metrics were performed on adults from both sexes, recovered from three archaeological sites. The results indicate a similarity in the dispersion of the values obtained, which would allow the inference of certain phenotypic continuity. In this sense, no clear segregations among groups of individuals are
observed, so that it is possible to argue that biological differences would not have existed among the human groups that buried their ancestors in the lower course of the Colorado river during the period considered. These data contrast with the information generated in neighboring areas (e.g., western Pampas), indicating that during the final late Holocene (ca. 1000-250 years BP) different processes and population dynamics (e.g., regionalization) developed at a macro-regional level.

This investigation examines change in post-cranial osteometric markers in temporally distinct New World populations of African ancestry:  Newton Plantation series (17th-19th century Barbados; N = 16); two subsamples from the Hamann-Todd (H-T) series (U.S.) based on birth year, 1865-1900 (N = 66) and 1901-1915 (N = 62); and the Forensic Databank Collection (FDB) (20th century U.S.; N = 137).  It was anticipated that individuals from Newton would exhibit less admixture than those from H-T or FDB.  They were also predicted to demonstrate greater skeletal robusticity due to mechanical loading.  Additionally, it was expected that stature would increase over time due to better nutrition and healthcare.

Nineteen measurements were taken on the os coxae, femur, and tibia.  Crural and platymetric indices were calculated to assess admixture.  Stature and robusticity were utilized to evaluate environmental variation.  Statistical methods included linear regression, one-way ANOVA, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA).
Platymeric index means for all groups were in the range of African Americans.  Crural index indicated a temporal trend toward European values in both sexes.  Surprisingly, robusticity was increasing rather than decreasing over time, with greater robusticity ratios seen in females.  Similar workloads, better nutrition, and weight gain likely contributed to this.  Stature also showed a temporal increase for both males and females, most likely due to better nutrition.  PCA indicated that most measurements clustered positively over time, with transverse measurements at joints and bone lengths having the most notable correlations. These findings support the project hypotheses and demonstrate the value of using analysis of post-cranial remains to explore the African American experience.

The Casas Grandes region of northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico, is significant for understanding later Southwestern and Northwest Mexican prehistory. A recent resurgence of archaeological interest in the region has generated new interpretations of Casas Grandes prehistory. This study investigates post-marital residence and kinship patterns at the central Casas Grandes site of Paquimé, using architectural and biological datasets. The results suggest that Paquimé was organized patrilocally and patrilineally. Implications for the development of social complexity and interpretations of violence are discussed.

The nature and timing of the peopling of the Americas is a subject of intense debate. In particular, it is unclear whether high levels of between-group craniometric diversity in South America result from multiple migrations or from local diversification processes. Previous attempts to explain this diversity have largely focused on testing alternative dispersal or gene flow models, reaching conflicting or inconclusive results. Here, a novel analytical framework is applied to three-dimensional geometric morphometric data to partition the effects of population divergence from geographically mediated gene flow to understand the ancestry of the earlySouth Americans in the context of global human history. The results show that Paleoamericans share a last common ancestor with contemporary Native American groups outside, rather than inside, the Americas.Therefore, and in accordance with some recent genomic studies, craniometric data suggest that the NewWorld was populated by multiple waves of dispersion from northeast Asia throughout the late Pleistocene and early Holocene

C.G. Turner II made dental morphological observations on thousands of Eskimo-Aleuts and American Indians and concluded they were derived from ancestral populations in northeast Asia during the last stages of the Pleistocene. He further distinguished two dental patterns in Asia. In East Asia, populations exhibit Sinodonty, a specialized dentition with intensified trait expressions. Southeast Asians exhibit Sundadonty, a more generalized dentition for crown and root traits. Turner argued all New World groups were derived from Sinodonts. Recent work has led some researchers to conclude there is evidence for the Sundadont pattern in Native American populations, an observation in accord with craniometric research that argues for an early migration of a generalized Asian population, followed by an influx of more specialized northeast Asians. A reanalysis of Turner's dataset fails to reveal evidence for a Sundadont component in the settlement of the Americas, but it does provide support for the Beringian Standstill model proposed by geneticists.

Objectives: In the Late Intermediate Period Andes (AD 1100-1450), the proliferation of above-ground sepulchers reconfigured social boundaries within and between communities engaged in protracted conflict. However, the biosocial dimensions of these mortuary practices, and their implications for conflict and alliance formation, remain unexplored. This study examines patterns of phenotypic variation to: (1) evaluate if open sepulchers were organized on the basis of biological relatedness, and (2) explore if sex-specific phenotypic variability conforms to models of postmarital residence. Materials and methods: Cranial nonmetric traits were recorded in five skeletal samples from two cemeteries in the Colca Valley, Peru. Biological distances between burial groups were calculated using the Mean Measure of Divergence (MMD) statistic. Postmarital residence was explored by calculating and bootstrapping the ratio of male-to-female mean pairwise differences (MPD) at the within-group level. Results: The MMD analysis yields greater than expected between-group distances for burial groups with a minimum sample size of 20 individuals. In contrast, a prevailing pattern of sex-specific, within-group phenotypic variability is not apparent from the analysis of MPD. The use of 12 or 24 dichotomous traits produces similar results. Discussion: Greater than expected biological distances suggest that above-ground mortuary practices reinforced biosocial boundaries between corporate household groups. Intracemetery heterogeneity persisted even as cranial vault modification, a correlate of social identity, became more homogenous, revealing how corporate group organization was negotiated at multiple scales. Sex-specific variation does not conform to traditional migration models. If migration occurred, it did not have a homogenizing effect on phenotypic variation. These results should be viewed with caution in light of the smaller sample sizes of sex-specific groupings.

The movement of people into Paquime has been frequently discussed as an important causal factor for the development of sociopolitical complexity, though there are several competing hypotheses about the source and size of immigrating populations.  In this presentation, cranial non-metric traits are used to examine genetic heterogeneity within the site of Paquime, and to estimate the effects of gene flow on the local population structure.  The results of intra-cemetery analyses and comparisons with Viejo, Anasazi, Mogollon, and Mesoamerican samples demonstrate a complex pattern of extra-regional social interactions involving both immigration and in situ population processes.

Non-metric dental traits provide useful information for assessing temporal changes as well as for assessing biological relationships among living and ancient populations. Dental morphological traits were employed in this study as direct indicators of biological affinities among the populations that inhabited the Armenian Highland from the Late Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age to Modern times. Sixteen morphological features in 2643 permanent adult teeth from 41 samples coming from 5 areas within the Armenian Highland were scored. Both Zubov's standard protocol and Turner's ASUDAS were employed. Given the paucity of odontological data for this area, this study contributes to the dental non-metric traits' history of Armenian Highland and is a summary compilation and comparison of previously conducted work where non-metric traits were used in relation to dental reductions within the ancient Caucasus and Near East. The chronological sequence is considerable and spans from the Late Chalcolithic-Bronze Age to the Modern Age. It is suggested that offspring of ancient inhabitants of Armenian Highland continued to inhabit this area during the Late Iron Age, Classical/Late Antiquity, Middle Age and Modern period. This scenario indicates genetic continuity and gene flow between populations. Such a perspective is supported by the archaeological and molecular findings.

Traditional morphometrics and the use of measurements have a long history in physical/biological anthropology. The application of multivariate statistical procedures, such as stepwise discriminant function (canonical) analysis and Mahalanobis distance, to traditional morphometric data, using either model-free or model-bound approaches, allows researchers to address a broad array of questions including the reconstruction of population history and biological relationships as demonstrated in the example provided. Traditional landmark measurements, the precursors of geometric morphometrics, and the irreplaceable datasets that have accrued in the last half-century, still provide an attractive and convenient alternative to coordinate data. Access to computers, improvements in imagining technology, access to user-friendly software, and sharing of data and computer programs will guide future studies that analyze both traditional as well as geometric morphometric data in biological anthropology.

The term Hyksos commonly refers to the foreign dynasty that inhabited and held power in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, circa 1640-1530 BCE. Although research suggests the Hyksos were of Levantine origin, the exact provenance of the dynasty has remained elusive, calling for further employment of archaeological material. Previous work has integrated archaeological, artistic and textual evidence, but human skeletal material has remained lightly investigated. To remedy the situation, human remains drawing from known Hyksos samples and potential Near Eastern sites are analysed under the auspices of the ERC-funded project " The Hyksos Enigma ". The skeletal material is investigated using both conventional methods as well as novel approaches in order to create biological and demographic profiles for further bioarchaeological analysis. Biological affiliation is investigated using methods analysing skeletal and dental similarity and dissimilarity, employing techniques...

The term Hyksos commonly refers to the foreign dynasty that inhabited and held power in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, circa 1640-1530 BCE. Although research suggests the Hyksos were of Levantine origin, the exact provenance of the dynasty has remained elusive, calling for further employment of archaeological material. Previous work has integrated archaeological, artistic and textual evidence, but human skeletal material has remained lightly investigated. To remedy the situation, human remains drawing from known Hyksos samples and potential Near Eastern sites are analysed under the auspices of the ERC-funded project " The Hyksos Enigma ". The skeletal material is investigated using both conventional methods as well as novel approaches in order to create biological and demographic profiles for further bioarchaeological analysis. Biological affiliation is investigated using methods analysing skeletal and dental similarity and dissimilarity, employing techniques considering both metric and non-metric information. This allows for the exploration of similarities and differences within the population, currently defined only as Hyksos, as well as between populations from sites associated with the Hyksos. The presentation offers a first look in to the project, explaining the reasoning behind the selected methodology and sites. Preliminary results are presented from an examination conducted on a skeletal sample from Tell el-Dab'a, the ancient Hyksos capital Avaris, with a special emphasis on dental analysis. Researchers studying associated material and areas are invited to discuss the results.

Objectives: We are testing competing scenarios regarding the population history of the ancient Greek colonization of southern Italy using dental phenotypic evidence.
Materials and Methods: We collected dental metric and nonmetric trait data for 481 human skeletons from six archaeological sites along the Gulf of Taranto, dating to pre-colonial (900-700 BC) and post-colonial periods (700-200 BC). We are evaluating scenarios through an individual-level biodistance analysis using a three-pronged approach: (a) by analyzing levels of mobility in pre-and post-colonial periods under a model of isolation-by-distance; (b) by quantifying differences in group means and variances in pre-and post-colonial periods utilizing permutational multivariate analysis of variance and Betadisper analyses; and (c) by identifying ancestries of post-colonial individuals using naïve Bayes classification. Results: Southern Italy during pre-colonial times was characterized by low levels of mobility and marked differences in group means and variances. During post-colonial times, mobility increased and there were no differences in group means and variances. About 18% of the people in post-colonial times were of Greek ancestry and lived equally distributed across Greek colonies and indigenous villages. Nevertheless, the overall biological composition and variability of southern Italy remained relatively unchanged across pre-and post-colonial periods. Discussion: Our results support a scenario in which only few Greek colonists migrated to southern Italy and lived in smaller numbers alongside indigenous people in Greek colonies as well as in indigenous villages. Our results contradict a scenario in which large numbers of Greek invaders founded biologically isolated and substantially homogeneous colonial enclaves within conquered territories.