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Stephen L. Whittington and David M. Reed 12 Commoner Diet at Copan: Insights from Stable Isotopes and Porotic Hyperostosis Archaeological excavations, even when directed by someone sensitive to the value of human skeletal remains for helping answer important questions about Maya civilization, do not always result in large, well-preserved, wellprovenienced , or statistically representative samples. Whether or not a collection of human bone from the Maya area has characteristics approaching some ideal, however, it is worthy of analysis because it contains data concerning ancient diseases, causes of death, and population structure. Osteologists have the responsibility of describing relevant cultural, temporal, geographic, and statistical characteristics for a sample and presenting data on pathology and demography within these contexts. In what follows , we attempt to live up to this responsibility as we describe results of our analysis of commoner skeletons from Copan, Honduras. The population of Copan, a major center of Maya civilization, was affected by the processes that caused Classic civilization to collapse at many sites throughout the southern lowlands. Dated monuments ceased to be erected at Copan in the early 9th century A.D. (Schele and Freidel 1990), at which time centralized political authority is assumed to have disappeared, but the valley continued to be populated until the early 13th century (Webster and Freter 1990a). There is evidence from pollen cores that environmental degradation was associated with the collapse (Abrams and Rue 1988; Rue 1987). We studied human skeletons from the lowstatus segment of Copan's population in order to learn about health and diet around the time of the collapse. We considered individuals buried in Type 1 and Type 2 sites as defined by Willey and Leventhal (1979), Aggregate sites as defined by Webster and Freter (1990a), or various types of nonmound sites to be commoners . Type 1 and Aggregate sites are similar in their small size and structural simplicity, so we grouped them together under the heading "Type 1" for this analysis. Except for oonmound sites, commoners came from small residential compounds with between two and eight 157 Methods Whittington recorded state of preservation and evidence of pathology, including size of lesions and whether they were active or healed, for all Various problems complicated analysis of the low-status skeletal sample at Copan. Poor preservation of bone was the major obstacle, interfering with determination of age and sex and forcing us to deemphasize negative evidence of lesions in reconstructing disease processes . Small sample size was another problem, because high variance in small samples allows spurious and contradictory data patterns to arise. There is evidence, especially in terms of infant underrepresentation, that the distribution of age-at-death derived from the sample of skeletons at Copan may not accurately reflect the structure of the living population. Finally, some basic archaeological data for the burials could not be determined with desired precision. Characteristics of Copan LowStatus Skeletons (n = 163) 54 97 12 42 47 74 13 17 114 19 47 116 an = number of individuals. Skeleton From Site type Type 1 or Aggregate Type 2 Nonmound or unknown Site location Rural Urban Phase Acbi Early Caner Late Coner Unknown Sex Male Female Unknown Table 12.1 structures, usually organized around one or two plazas. We considered individuals from larger, more complex Type 3 and Type 4 sites to be high-status or elite. In all, 163 skeletons excavated in the Copan Valley during the 1970s and 19805 fit the definitionoflow status (Table 12.1). Whittington subjected the skeletal remains of 145 low-status individuals to detailed osteological analysis and 3 to cursory examinations. This produced data on pathological bone and tooth lesions, age-at-death, and sex used in this study. Reed performed stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis on 22 of the 148, on an additional 3 commoners, and on 57 elite individuals . Rebecca Storey (pers. comm. 1991) determined age and sex for the elite and the additional low-status individuals. Reed chose materials for isotopic analysis to represent all social, political, and demographic spectra and to assess expected dietary variability. In all, he analyzed 82 humans, 5 deer, and 1 jaguar. Skeletons of low-status people came from both urban and rural locations. The density of structures in the Main Group and surrounding crowded residential areas is 1484/km2• Outside of this area structure density decreases to between 30/km2 and 139/km2 (Webster and Freter 1990a). Skeletons in the sample were from three archaeological phases as defined by Webster and Freter (1990a). The Acbi phase (A.D...

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