Dissertation Research: Medicinal Plants in the Greater Mississippi River Valley

在Dr. Gayle Fritz的指导下，MS Michele Williams将为她的博士论文收集数据。她将在美国的四个博物馆和大学研究考古记录和挖掘材料。她的工作重点是来自美国中西部土著遗址的植物材料，这些材料跨越了大约1000年的时间，记录了从狩猎和采集的生活方式向以农业为基础的生存方式的转变。考古资料清楚地表明，在这段时间内出现了规模越来越大的定居地，人口密度增加，社会呈现出越来越高的等级结构。有趣的是，这些情况导致健康状况净下降，骨骼分析表明，死亡年龄下降，疾病负担加重。威廉姆斯女士对伴随这种转变而来的医疗实践的变化很感兴趣。对现存美洲土著社会的人种志记载表明，有广泛的野生植物被用于医药目的，我们有理由认为这种做法相当古老。虽然从许多地点发现了碳化的植物残骸，并对其进行了广泛的分析，以提供对生存的深入了解，但从医学角度来看，还没有一个进行过检查。由于这种功能，种子和其他植物部分被认为是罕见的，难以识别，从单一地点的分析结果不太可能描绘出令人信服的画面。通过跨越相当大的地理区域和时间段的多地点分析，应该可以搜索模式，特别是当结果根据人种学数据进行解释时。这就是威廉姆斯研究的目标。这项研究之所以有说服力，是因为它利用了来自骨骼分析的医学数据，并且应该有可能确定文化习俗如何随着疾病模式的变化而变化（或不变化）。这是一项创新研究，将利用现有数据和博物馆藏品。它将为史前美洲原住民的适应提供新的见解，并为许多考古学家提供感兴趣的数据。它还将帮助培训一名有前途的年轻科学家。

Under the direction of Dr. Gayle Fritz, MS Michele Williams will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will study archaeological records and excavated material in four museums and universities in the United States. Her work focuses on botanical materials from native American sites in the Midwest which span an approximately 1,000 year period and which document the transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to a mode of subsistence based on agriculture. Archaeological data clearly demonstrate that over this span sedentary settlements of ever larger size appeared, population density increased and that societies assumed an increasingly hierarchical structure. It is interesting to note that these conditions resulted in a net decrease in health and skeletal analysis indicates decreasing age of death and a heavier disease load. MS Williams is interested in the changes in medicinal practice which accompanied this transition. Ethnographic accounts of extant native American societies indicate the utilization of a wide range of wild plants for medicinal purposes and it is reasonable to assume that this practice has considerable antiquity. While carbonized plant remains have been recovered from many sites and have been extensive analyzed to provide insight into subsistence, none have ever been examined from a medicinal perspective. Seeds and other plant parts attributable to this function are assumed to be rare and hard to identify and the analytic results from a single site are unlikely to paint a convincing picture. Through a multisite analysis which spans both a considerable geographic region and time period, it should be possible to search for patterns, especially when the results are interpreted in light of ethnographic data. Such is the goal of MS Williams' research. The study gains power because it makes use of medical data derived from skeletal analysis and it should be possible to determine how cultural practices change (or do not change) in response to changing disease patterns. This is innovative research which will make use of extant data and museum collections. It will provide new insight into prehistoric native American adaptation and provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will also assist in training a promising young scientist.