The Battle of Newtown - This Summer

A combination of bad internet connections, overwork, and old-fashioned hot weather laziness has stifled the blog a bit, but not for long.  One item that I'd been waiting for confirmation of was the reopening of the Newtown Battlefield this summer.  Unfortunately, the Memorial Day Civil War event did not take place this year, but the annual re-enactment of the Revolutionary War event will happen in August.  Although I have always been a bit ambivalent about "living history" events, they are one of the primary venues for the general public to engage with history and the social sciences.  The Battle of Newtown is of particular interest to me, as it was a seminal event in the population history of the Euroamerican settlement of Chemung County, NY. 

Records don't tell the whole story

One topic that pulled me into archaeology was my fascination with the Norse exploration of North America.  Early on as an undergrad I had grand designs centered on working in this field, only to have numerous professors and teaching assistants assure me that there was zero interest and no future in this area.  Granted, Norse sites in North America are anything but plentiful, and it would have been quite a niche field to get into.  But I do wonder sometimes...

What brought about this bit of reminiscence was a recent piece in Science Daily regarding the climate history of Greenland and the effect it had on the various cultures settled there.  Recent ice core samplings appear to give credence to the "Little Ice Age" theory regarding the demise of the Norse Greenland settlements, although the proximal factors likely included conflict with the Inuit populations (as well as an unwillingness to adopt "Skraeling" survival strategies), raids from European pirates, and the erosion of the soil from over-farming.  What is interesting is that the Norse Greenland settlements represented a literate society which provided some record (albeit sporadic) of social and environmental factors relevant to its eventual demise.  For example, the Landnamabok (Book of Settlements) describes famine winters in which "the old and the helpless were thrown over cliffs."

Race and health in historical perspective

The article I am profiling today by Carlina de la Cova is of a study of 19th century health disparities between Euro-Americans and African Americans.  I chose this article since it is an excellent example of how historical data can act to compliment other methodologies in biological anthropology (in this case, skeletal biology and paleopathology).  In fact, the entire study should fall within the purview of archival research, since the skeletal data were derived from three archived anatomical collections; the Hamann-Todd, the Robert J. Terry, and the William Montague Cobb.

From the abstract:  This study analyzed skeletal health disparities among African American and Euro-American males of low socioeconomic status born between 1825 and 1877. A total of 651 skeletons from the Cobb, Hamann-Todd, and Terry anatomical collections were macroscopically examined for skeletal pathologies related to dietary deficiencies and disease. Individuals were separated into age, ancestry, birth (Antebellum, Civil War, Pre-Reconstruction, and Reconstruction), combined ancestry/birth, enslaved versus liberated, and collection cohorts.

de la Cova, Carlina (2010), Race, health, and disease in 19th-century-born males.  American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 144(4):526-537.
 

The Demography of the Aleutian Islands

The Oct-Dec 2010 issue of Human Biology is dedicated to various biological, archaeological and biohistorical studies of the indigenous populations of the Aleutian Islands.  Of particular interest to this blog is the article by Katherine Reedy-Maschner regarding the demographic shifts that impacted the male Aleut population throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.  Using both historical data and ethnographic fieldwork, Reedy-Maschner recounts how various political and economic forces acted to effectively replace the male population via cultural assimilation and displacement.  Today, many Aleuts bear Russian, Scandinavian and other European ancestry within their lineages.  This article also contains a cautionary tale for demographers using surnames as genetic analogs.  Aleut men baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church often took the names of their Russian sponsors, which obviously complicates the direct analogy between surnames and Y-chromosome pattern. 

Reedy-Maschner, Katherine, 2010.  Where did all the Aleut men go? Aleut male attrition and related patterns in Aleutian historical demography and social organization.  Human Biology, 82(5-6): 583.

Historical Demography Data

I am pleased to see that, for those interested in historical demography, there appears to be no small number of organizations and websites with various levels of population statistics throughout the world.  For those interested in general trends the world over, there is the Populations Statistics website of Jan Lahmeyer.  This site breaks down the population levels of various nations throughout the world by administrative division and municipalities, along with some general data about individuals countries and, in the case of the US, individual states.  I'll be reviewing and linking to a number of other historical demography sites in the days to come.

Archaic medical terms

Just a quick post today, but one hopefully valuable to archival researchers.  Anyone interested in historical epidemiology has to deal with the often widely varied terminology for diseases and medical conditions.  For example, ever had a case of Prairie Dig?  How about a bout of Bronze John?  Not to mention the ever-present scourge of Knifegrinders Rot.  Fortunately, there are some handy search references online designed for just this occasion.  One of the best I've found thus far is Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms at www.antiquusmorbus.com.  This one is worth just browsing for a look into the state of the art of medicine a century or two ago, such as the notation that "Love is occasionally a cause of disease, especially of insanity (Dunglison, 1855)." 

Here's an instructive quiz question; how many conditions can you find throughout the list somehow related to tuberculosis?


Finally, I'd like to welcome my very first blog follower.  Go to her weblog for a look at her agricultural prowess.

References

Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms.  www.antiquusmorbus.com.  Accessed February, 2011.

Dunglison, R, 1855.  Dunglinsons Medical Dictionary: A Dictionary of Medical Science.

Cemeteries in Historical Demography

In their excellent article in the May 2010 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Lisa Sattenspiel and Melissa Stoops outline a demographic study utilizing data gathered from cemetery headstones in the city of Columbia, Missouri.  They summarize quite well the potential utility cemetery data have for studies in historical demography, namely that mortality rates gleaned from headstones can fill in the gaps in the historical record.  As the authors note, death registrations were not required for rural areas as late as 1910, leaving some rather sizable gaps in the vital statistics of these areas.  Cemetery data thus provide a supplement to the historical record of mortality statistics, and can be used to tease out significant events in local urban ecology (such as disease outbreaks, seasonality of epidemics, or improvements in sanitation).

This article also points to a sizable gap in historical demographic studies in that the majority of such work is centered on urban populations.  Clearly there is a need to expand the scope of such research into rural communities.  The challenge for cemetery studies within such a rural context is that internments are often far less centralized as in larger population centers.  For example, in many early Euroamerican rural settlements internments often centered on small, family plots now isolated from the general view shed of the modern community.  This would seem to entail a fair amount of field research for the aspiring rural demographer interested in historical mortality rates, although the need for such work is no less apparent.

References

Sattenspiel, L. and Stoops M., 2010.  Gleaning signals about the past from cemetery data.  American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 142:7-22.