No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Numerous postcranial discrete characters and cranial and postcranial metric traits are compared among skeletal samples derived from four east-central Arizona Western Pueblo sites that were inhabited from the 12th through the 14th centuries A.D.: Grasshopper, Kinishba, Point of Pines, and Turkey Creek. Pearson's Lambda Criterion and discriminant analysis are used to reveal patterns of morphological variation among the four groups from which their biological relationships could be inferred. It is concluded that both discrete and metric skeletal traits should be used for biologically differentiating human skeletal series. After all traits were checked for intraobserver error, preliminary data analyses were conducted to elicit appropriate traits for differentiating the groups. Based on these analyses, it is notable that (1) the discrete traits of the postcranium used in this study are relatively independent of age, sex, robusticity, and each other, (2) craniofacial metric traits are influenced little by either occipital or lambdoidal deformation, (3) several postcranial metric traits significantly differ between younger and older adults, though this is not so for cranial metric traits, and (4) correlations among postcranial metric traits are moderate to strong; among cranial metric traits they are rather weak, and very weak among cranial and postcranial metric traits. For both metric and discrete traits, biological distance results obtained from analyses of axial and appendicular skeletal data are discordant. For the axial skeleton, excluding the mandible, the four Western Pueblo groups are relatively biologically homogeneous. For the appendicular skeleton the opposite is the case. Distance results provided by metric and discrete traits, respectively, of the axial skeleton are much more consistent than are those yielded by metric and discrete traits, respectively, of the appendicular skeleton. It is suggested that the axial skeleton, omitting the mandible, is probably less plastic than is the appendicular skeleton and is the appropriate unit of analysis in studies of biological differentiation of skeletal samples.

The human skeletal remains from Grasshopper Ruin, Arizona, constitute an excellent series for the study of growth and development. A total of 390 subadults, fetal through 18 years of age, have been recovered, in a mortality distribution comparable to that observed in most anthropological populations. Children are extremely sensitive to metabolic upsets during the growth process, and an individual's history of illness is often recorded in his bones and teeth. This research is concerned with reading this record and developing a picture of the biological quality of life during pueblo occupation. On the whole, incidence of skeletal stress markers is low. Just 145 children have one or more markers, indicating a low disease load for the subadult community. Based on ethnographic and clinical records of disease among Southwestern Indians, it is believed that most children without visible stress markers were victims of common and virulent gastrointestinal and upper respiratory infections. Those children with stress markers appear to have been subject to underlying morbid conditions (parasitism, dietary deficiencies) which would have intensified the effects of infectious diseases. In order to determine whether a particular sector of the community was at greater risk, the skeletal sample is partitioned into temporal and spatial groups. The impetus for this analysis derives from a long-standing archaeological research focus: the factors precipitating abandonment. Most evidence points to an environmental change and subsequent shortfall in the normal food supply. Behavioral responses to this stress have been documented, but until this research, no direct measure of the effect on pueblo inhabitants had been devised. Differences in stress marker frequency among temporal groups reveal no clear pattern. When spatial groups are analyzed, children from outliers are found to have significantly greater prevalence of Harris lines, implying a pervasive, recurring stress. These findings are interpreted in light of the unique temporal and spatial placement of outliers, and are believed to be due to a combination of factors including depletion of resources, differential access to resources, and increasing contamination of site environs.

No description available.