Human Biologists in the Archives Demography, Health, Nutrition and Genetics in Historical Populations

About this book

Many physical anthropologists study populations using data that come primarily from the historical record. For this volume's authors, the classic anthropological `field' is not the glamour of an exotic locale, but the sometimes tedium of the dusty back rooms of libraries, archives and museum collections. This book tells of the way in which archival data inform anthropological questions about human biology and health. The authors present a diverse array of human biological evidence from a variety of sources including the archaeological record, medical collections, church records, contemporary health and growth data and genetic information from the descendants of historical populations. The papers demonstrate how the analysis of historical documents expands the horizons of research in human biology, extends the longitudinal analysis of microevolutionary and social processes into the present and enhances our understanding of the human condition.

Contents

Foreword S. Silverman and M. A. Little; 1. Human biology in the archives A. Swedlund and D. A. Herring; 2. The use of archives in the study of microevolution: changing demography and epidemiology of Esxazu, Costa Rica L. Madrigal; 3. Anthropometric data and population history J. H. Relethford; 4. For everything there is a season: Chumash Indian births, marriages and deaths at the Alta California missions P. L. Walker and J. R. Johnson; 5. Children of the poor: infant mortality in the Erie County Almshouse during the mid-nineteenth century R. L. Higgins; 6. Worked to the bone: the biomechanical consequences of 'labour therapy' at a nineteenth century asylum S. Phillips; 7. Monitored growth: anthropometrics and health history records at a private New England middle school, 1935-1960 L. Leidy Sievert; 8. Scarlet Fever epidemics of the nineteenth century; a case of evolved pathogenic virulence? A. Swedlund and A. Donta; 9. The ecology of a health crisis: Gibraltar and the 1965 cholera epidemic L. A. Sawchuck and S. D. A. Burke; 10. War and population composition in Aland, Finland J. H. Mielke; 11. Infectious diseases in the historical archives: a modelling approach L. Sattenspiel; 12. Where were the women? A. Grauer; 13. Malnutrition among northern peoples of Canada in the 1940s: an ecological and economic disaster D. A. Herring, S. Abonyi and R. D. Hoppa; 14. Archival research in physical anthropology M. T. Smith; Index.

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Biography

D. Ann Herring is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, Ontario. Alan C. Swedlund is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.