The Bioarchaeology of Virginia Burial Mounds

4. Bioarchaeological Analysis: Skeletal Inventory, Subsistence and Health Patterns, and Mortuary Activity

In this chapter the bioarchaeological evidence for subsistence and health patterns in the Virginia mound burial populations is presented. Given the well-established synergy between disease and nutrition, it is impossible and undesirable to separate fully a consideration of paleonutrition from health. The ¤rst section of this chapter describes the skeletal remains for each site in terms of bones and teeth present and estimations of sex and age at death. The evidence indicative of subsistence patterns in late prehistoric interior Virginia is then considered, followed by an examination of the skeletal evidence for infectious disease, accidental trauma, and deliberately in®icted hostile trauma in the study populations. Finally, taphonomic indicators of changing mortuary activity are considered. Skeletal Inventory Several factors contribute to the dif¤culty of reconstructing complete demographic pro¤les for the study populations. First, of course, is the nature of secondary burial. Even in the single or small multiple interments at Lewis Creek and Hayes Creek mounds, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that smaller bones and anterior teeth would have been lost during the mortuary processing period. Furthermore, secondary burial involves a greater amount of exposure and handling of bones compared to primary interment, and it may lead to bone breakage or otherwise obscure skeletal indicators of age and sex. The bones of the pelvis, the best indicator of both sex and age at death for adults, are irregularly shaped, cancellous bones; they are less likely than other parts of the skeleton to remain intact over long periods of time. At Rapidan Mound each burial feature contains the disarticulated and jumbled remains of at least thirty individuals. Nearly all of the bones are fragmentary and none of them can be reliably associated with any other. Determining sex and age at death from skeletal Bioarchaeological Analysis Skeletal Inventory, Subsistence and Health Patterns, and Mortuary Activity 4 remains is most accurate when multiple characteristics (such as cranial sutures and pelvic morphology) can be examined for a single individual. The Lewis Creek and Hayes Creek collections are also disarticulated and jumbled, although in these cases the disturbance happened in historic times. At Lewis Creek Mound looters excavated burials and threw the bones back into the mound soil, with the result that skeletons that were articulated at the time of burial were excavated as individual bones and fragments. At Hayes Creek Mound the disturbance happened after the skeletons came out of the ¤eld, when they were placed in museum displays arranged by bone element. Although the processes are very different, the end result for all three sites is a skeletal collection for which complete and accurate demographic information cannot be determined. More than 15,000 individual bones and bone fragments were examined from the Lewis Creek, Hayes Creek, and Rapidan mounds. The skeletons of 37 identi¤able individuals from Lewis Creek and 47 from Hayes Creek were also studied; in some cases these skeletons were nearly complete, although in many cases they were fragmentary. Also 4,213 teeth were examined , the vast majority as single, isolated teeth (Table 4.1). As shown in Figure 4.1, arm and leg bones are highly overrepresented in all of the assemblages in this study. Cranial and axial bones are slightly overrepresented, while the bones of the hands and feet are strongly underrepresented in each burial feature. This pattern occurs at all of the sites in this study and conforms to expectations of bone preservation based on taphonomic factors: the dense limb bones survive disproportionately well Bioarchaeological Analysis | 81 while the small bones of the hands and feet may be carried away by rodents or erosion, or perhaps overlooked or lost during the secondary interment process or during excavation. There is no indication that any body parts were deliberately removed at any point during the burial program. The distribution of teeth in the burial features is similar to that of the skeletal remains in that there is no evidence for deliberate exclusion or removal of certain elements. As illustrated in Figure 4.2, incisors were underrepresented as they were at all of the sites in this study. This is not surprising, as the incisors (with their single, shallow root and prominent location) are the most commonly lost teeth both ante- and postmortem. The underrepresentation of incisors here is likely a result of some combination of antemortem tooth loss and loss of incisors during the transport and processing connecting the primary and secondary interments. There is no evidence that antemortem incisor loss was a deliberate cultural...