George Milner - US grants

For a relatively brief period, the central United States witnessed a florescence of prehistoric culture focussed on the Mississippi river site of Cahokia. The site, which dates to approximately 1000 A.D., may have been inhabited by up to 50,000 individuals. It likely controlled a stretch of river and hinterland of 250 miles in length, and the construction of temple mounds indicates a stratified society with complex religious ritual. Dr. Milner and his students will conduct archaeological research which will provide insight into the Cahokia phenomenon and set it into a broader regional context. Over the course of two summers, Dr. Milner, assisted by two graduate students, will visit and study materials from a series of Cahokia related sites located in the Mississippi River floodplain and adjacent tributary drainages. Although they will visit many sites to examine surface remains and geographical situation, they will rely primarily on data collected by previous excavators. They will work at a number of institutions which house such materials and study both field maps and notes as well as excavated remains. In particular they will focus on ceramics and examine a large body of data using a single recording and analysis scheme. This will allow direct cross site comparison. This research is important for several reasons. First, it will address the archaeologically significant question of how such complex societies as Cahokia arise and are maintained. Some archaeologists have argued that the site of Cahokia itself exercised direct and tight control over outlying settlements. Others postulate a more indirect rule with a significant degree of local autonomy. Secondly, the project will make maximal use of data collected by many investigators over a number of years, and thus increases the significance and contribution of past work. Finally, the project will assist in the scientific training of two graduate students.

9408398 Stoneking/ Stone The recovery of ancient DNA from human remains has great potential to address anthropological issues concerning migration, residence patterns and genetic relationships of ancient human populations. To date, however, only a few researchers have applied these techniques to archaeological questions. The technical issues are very difficult to resolve. This project on a completely excavated cemetery, the Norris Farms #36 site in Illinois, integrates genetcis, archaeology, and osteology in a new and powerful way to analyze the social organization and genetics of pre- Columbian poulations. It dates to 1300 A.D. and represents a "frontier" society of the Oneonta cultural tradition. The DNA extracted from the skeletons will be used to determine the sex and genetic relatedness of members of this society to clarify aspects of social organization such as post- marital residence patterns, status and cemetery organization. The project will also result in the effective training of an excellent young researcher in this exciting area of research.

Archaeological materials provide a temporally deep perspective on the nature and intensity of warfare among the small-scale, or "tribal," societies that dominated most of human existence. Of particular interest is variation over time and space in the chances of intergroup tensions escalating into outright violence, measured archaeologically using walled settlements and skeletons of casualties. Sufficient data have been collected from several parts of the world to indicate the existence of long periods when conflicts were common, but also prolonged stretches of relative peace. Little is known, however, about precisely where and when fighting among groups was likely to break out, and why that occurred. This subject is of enduring significance as people today continue to confront conflicts involving groups defined along community and kin lines (tribal as opposed to national identities) that can be exceedingly costly in lives and property.

This three-year National Science Foundation project, conducted by Dr. George R. Milner and Mr. George Chaplin, will produce the first comprehensive account of when, where, and why people fought each other in prehistoric eastern North America, with an emphasis on the last 1500 years of prehistory (prior to ca. AD 1500). Dramatic cultural changes occurred during that time as early food-producing communities characterized by relatively egalitarian social relations were transformed into larger agricultural societies, many of which were dominated by hereditary chiefs. The project completes a multi-year (unfunded) effort to assemble the archaeological (settlements surrounded by palisades) and osteological (skeletons with conflict-related trauma such as arrow injuries) data necessary to understand how warfare was conducted, who was involved (casualties), and how the intensity of conflict varied over time and across prehistoric eastern North America.

The first step in the project involves the generation of multiple density surfaces, interpolated through Geographic Information Science (GIS) procedures, that summarize the spatial distribution of archaeological evidence for conflict. The result can be loosely visualized as a series of overlays at various points over a 1500 year-long period that show areas with abundant evidence of warfare as opposed to those with little or no signs of conflict. Taken together, the density surfaces, each representing a separate slice of time, will depict the waxing and waning of intergroup conflict across eastern North America.

Once assembled, that information will be combined with broadly characterized cultural areas and environmental zones to identify conditions associated with periods and places where warfare was likely to occur and where it was not. This second component of the project evaluates the correspondence between parts of density surfaces characterized by high and low warfare and a patchwork of cultural and natural areas, which varied in their spatial distribution, resource productivity, the boundaries between them, and their relative isolation from one another. By doing so, it should be possible to establish whether conflicts, at a coarse-grained level, were largely a function of the material conditions of life, social relations defined by particular cultural systems and institutions, or a combination of both.

This NSF project also serves as a "proof of concept" for procedures that can be applied to many kinds of archaeological data suitable for conversion to density surfaces for analytical purposes. It squarely addresses a particularly vexing archaeological problem: how to deal quantitatively with uneven-quality data from the large geographical areas that are the appropriate scale for analyses of many forms of human interaction. This work complements more focused studies of specific regions and individual sites that emphasize local effects, specific accommodations to social and natural settings, the proximate motivation for fighting, and the ritual and social roles of war or peace-related activities in specific societies.

As today's climate fluctuates and severe weather events occur more frequently, sustainability of resources is a prominent concern, not just of scientists but also of government leaders and the public. Humans have adjusted to climate changes in the past. Why have some of these adjustments been more resilient and sustainable than others? Archaeologists are uniquely positioned to provide insights on sustainability because their studies provide information over many centuries. In some cases, archaeological data permit tracking of the development of human societies from small-scale egalitarian groups to large-scale socially and politically complex societies. Inherent to this transition is reliance on and the sustainability of natural resources, including the development of food storage economies. The long-term trajectory of natural resource use and management in this context is pivotal. Dr. Lee Newsom of the Pennsylvania State University, along with colleagues at the Florida Museum of Natural History, will undertake archaeological research on coastal fisher-gatherer-hunter societies that lived in southern Florida for several millennia. The research emphasizes the role of fuelwood resources as a means to preserve surplus food in an emerging storage economy. This research will examine the influence of a past society on forest resources. Insights into the legacy effects of sustained wood use on the modern forest landscape/seascape, and generally the influence of humans on coastal environments, will be of interest to other academic disciplines and to planners. Mangrove forests are endangered world-wide and this investigation will further inform ecologists about their resilience at the edge of their range. Modern management and conservation of coastal forest resources can benefit from the long-term record, as policy makers consider further habitat disruption and loss from coastal development, sea level rise, and global change.

The project focuses on the Calusa Indians and their predecessors in southern Florida, using ethnohistoric records and especially archaeological evidence. The research team will test the hypothesis that the development of a food storage economy was a critical factor underlying cultural complexity, and that fuelwoods from coastal mangrove forests were an indispensable and sustainable natural resource inherent to this process. The team will undertake intensive wood-anatomical analysis of charcoal excavated from archaeological sites in the Calusa core area along the southwest coast, emphasizing the characteristics of the fuel supply, the influence of environmental perturbations on the availability of wood, and the role of human agency and influence over local forest resources. Basic wood data collection will include taxonomic assignments, observations on anatomical variation, age, growth form, and growth rate. The research will incorporate modern forest ecological data and experimental methods to establish the hypothetical limitations of the fuel supply. Relevant paleoecological and archaeological data will provide temporal and cultural resolution. All data can be compared in order to test hypotheses on the effects of sustained fuelwood selection and use, the impact of natural disruptions to the fuel supply, and the potential for management.

Researchers seek to understand the emergence of social inequality in prehistory and its effect on cultural organization and development. The European Bronze Age, roughly ca. 2500 to 800 B.C., was a time of swift cultural change that resulted in new social, political, and economic lifeways. Bronze tools and weapons began to be mass-produced in standardized forms. Social differentiation and ranking became more entrenched, and peoples and ideas became increasingly mobile in Europe. Archaeological methods are well suited for identifying both the material and organizational changes that happened during this time (e.g. changes in status, diet, belief systems, settlement), and their effect on local populations. This project examines changing burial practices, settlement patterns, and subsistence strategies as proxies for increasingly complex socio-economic systems in Bronze Age northern Croatia. Results will characterize trajectories of social complexity and inequality in prehistory, but can also be used to inform research on the emergence and maintenance of inequality in modern groups. Data collection will actively involve and train undergraduate and graduate students in quantitative methodology crucial for studying the human past.

The research team will analyze burial assemblages and grave contexts from museum collections to reconstruct basic levels of social structure, with an emphasis on changes over time at both household and community levels. Mortuary and osteological data will be complemented by archaeometric analyses on bone, including an AMS 14C radiocarbon dating program and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes. Variation in stable isotope values can signal social differences within the population, and will be used to complement more traditional archaeological correlates of sociopolitical organization (e.g., settlements and architecture, burials, distribution of exotic or symbolic artifacts). Radiocarbon dating will be used to date the progression of these material markers, and link them to broader sociopolitical and economic changes. Research will be conducted on Late Bronze (1300-800 BC) and Early Iron (800-600 BC) Age collections of the Iapodian cultural group, currently held at the Archaeological Museum Zagreb (AMZ) in Croatia. This project represents an important first step in a long-term investigation of Iapodian sociopolitical development in the context of the European Bronze and Iron Ages. More generally, results will contribute to understanding of how and when social inequality materializes, the resulting consequences for individuals and groups, and how these power structures are maintained (or not) over time. Results will be published in international publications and presented in lectures and workshops to public audiences in the US and Croatia.

Age-at-death estimates from skeletal remains are essential for archaeological studies of human longevity, mortality patterns, population growth, disease experience and mortuary practices, as well as medicolegal identifications of missing persons, crime victims, migrant border deaths, and war-crime victims. Despite over a century of development, the accuracy (estimated and actual age correspondence) and precision (age interval length) of adult age estimates produced by existing methods are insufficient to reach these ends. That means much current understanding of the age-structure of past populations, long-term population trends, pathogen load and its effect on human hosts, and human longevity may be seriously flawed by age-estimation error. In response to this pressing theoretical and practical need, an international research team that includes Dr. George Milner and his doctoral student Sara Getz (Penn State University) are developing a method to produce more accurate, precise, and unbiased skeletal age estimates for the entire adult lifespan, building on their earlier statistical procedure (Transition Analysis, TA). This ongoing work will significantly reduce age-estimation error, describe and quantify skeletal variation, and refine statistical methods. It involves a fundamental shift from assessing only a few skeletal characteristics with simple statistics to analyzing traits throughout the skeleton using sophisticated statistical methods to extract the most information possible from age-related changes in bones. This project will validate the newly expanded TA method on a large number of modern known-age European skeletons, and then apply the procedure to two large medieval and early modern samples as a proof of concept for archaeological applications. At the conclusion of the project, revised TA will be disseminated as a free, downloadable, and easy-to-use program and illustrated scoring manual. Data will be maintained and made available for other researchers' use. The project PI and Co-PI will train students (undergraduate and graduate) and professionals through peer-reviewed publications, professional meeting presentations, and invited lectures and workshops.

Validation on numerous known-age European skeletons will demonstrate the increased accuracy and precision of revised TA. This focused study is the first step in expanding the research team?s method to a wide range of geographically diverse populations. After validation, two urban cemetery samples from the Danish city of Horsens - Ole Worms Gade (1100 -1500 CE) and Monastery Church (1500 -1800 CE) - will be used to investigate the potential implications of improved age estimates for our understanding of important social and demographic trends over time, such as changes in migration and adult life expectancy. This application will demonstrate how better skeletal data can bridge the gap between archaeological and historical sources. In particular, it will provide information about the characteristics of past populations that cannot be obtained through historical documents or from skeletons where ages were estimated using standard methods.

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) caused by Treponema pallidum subp. pallidum bacteria. It has recently reemerged as an urgent worldwide health crisis. The origin of the disease has been a mystery since its sudden appearance in Europe at the end of the 15th century and its subsequent rapid global spread. It has long been debated whether syphilis was introduced to Europe, perhaps from the Americas, or evolved from a form of treponemal infection that had been in Europe all along. Graduate student Ziyu Wang and collaborators at The Pennsylvania State University will take a multi-faceted approach to investigate the pathogen's genetic diversity over the past 500 years in Europe to explore several possibilities to explain syphilis' origin in Europe. The current T. pallidum pathogens - associated with several related diseases - likely represent only the most successful or recently emerged genetic variants. Examined through an anthropological lens, ancient genomes when considered within the context of human sociocultural systems yield clues about the processes through which pathogens have achieved their evolutionary success. Ultimately a more informed understanding of the factors that contribute to the complex and dynamic interactions between humans and their pathogens provides a deep-time foundation for predicting the evolutionary trajectories of modern infectious pathogens and human responses. Today, as in the past, STI-related stigma has done much to interfere with the development and implementation of effective intervention programs. Lessons learned from historic epidemics and the public response will provide valuable tools for training healthcare professionals, STI high-risk groups, and the public.

To untangle syphilis' origin, its evolution, and its worldwide spread, the research team will sequence T. pallidum genomes from representative specimens sampled from temporally and socially well-characterized European skeletal assemblages dating to the 16th to 19th centuries. Ancient T. pallidum has previously not been well studied because of the limited ability of conventional genetic techniques (e.g., polymerase chain reaction) to recover highly-degraded ancient pathogen DNA. Here a sensitive targeted hybridization capture technique will be used to recover complete, or near-complete, ancient T. pallidum genomes. By comparing temporally known ancient pathogen genomes with their modern equivalents, the research team can track the sequential changes that occurred in the pathogen's genetic history. Doing so will narrow the possible evolutionary scenarios for the origin of syphilis and point to when the pathogen variant that causes syphilis first emerged.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.