Topographies of Mississippian Conflict and Health in the Middle Cumberland Region

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Dawnie Wolfe Steadman博士和Charles Cobb博士以及一组研究生和同事将对田纳西州中坎伯兰地区（MCR）的密西西比战争的性质和强度进行为期两年的研究。生物考古学目前的趋势是将密西西比时期（约公元1000-1500年）的健康状况不佳主要归因于玉米的营养不足以及定居和种群成核的生物危害。然而，本研究试图了解冲突和相关社会过程如何与生存相互作用，从而对健康产生不利影响。战争在许多密西西比地区都有很好的记录，但文化和生物对冲突的反应却没有很好地描述。就像其他社会进程一样，密西西比战争在东南部的强度和规模各不相同，然而MCR似乎是密西西比人口更密集的地区之一，其特点是与13世纪战争高涨有关的许多强化定居点。当地人口似乎承受着相当大的压力，有传染病的迹象，如肺结核，以及与冲突有关的创伤。迄今为止，在东南部其他地方还没有评估社区卫生和战争的区域综合，而这个项目将是第一个开发这样一个框架的项目。该研究将地理信息系统（GIS）分析与来自13个地点的近1600具骨骼数据相结合，以解决三个主要研究目标：(1)冲突引起的创伤、传染病和生理应激的患病率；(2)战争对聚落规模、结构和位置的影响；(3)战争与定居和成核是如何影响社区健康的。社区卫生可以看作是一个流行病学三角形，是人类宿主、病原体和社会生态环境之间的脆弱平衡。在整个人类历史的进程中，这三个变量中的任何一个的进化或行为的变化往往伴随着疾病的急剧增加和其他适应性下降的表现。与战争有关的流行病学三角的社会环境角落的变化与从斑疹伤寒到流感等重大疫情有关。我们在中坎伯兰地区提出的研究促进了冲突的地形-分析了农业实践，定居主义和冲突的相互关系所促进的人类在景观上的聚集和互动的生物和社会后果。这项研究的更广泛的影响是，它将为评估冲突、传染病和生理压力因素之间的相互作用建立一个基线，这将与研究人类健康长期模式的研究人员有关。在线数据库将有助于向其他学者传播我们的结果和经验数据。研究生将参与该项目，以加强他们的培训和专业发展。

With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Dawnie Wolfe Steadman and Dr. Charles Cobb and a team of graduate students and colleagues will conduct a two-year study of the nature and intensity of Mississippian warfare in the Middle Cumberland Region (MCR) of Tennessee. The current trend in bioarchaeology is to attribute poor health during the Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000-1500) primarily to the nutritional inadequacies of maize and the biohazards of sedentism and population nucleation. However, this study attempts to understand how conflict and related social processes interact with subsistence to adversely impact health. Warfare is well documented in many Mississippian regions yet the variability of cultural and biological responses to conflict has not been well delineated. Just like other social processes, Mississippian warfare varied in intensity and scale across the Southeast, yet the MCR appears to have been one of the more densely populated Mississippian regions, characterized by numerous fortified settlements related to an upsurge in warfare in the thirteenth century A.D. Local populations appear to have been under considerable stress, with indicators of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, and conflict-related trauma. To date there have been no regional syntheses elsewhere in the Southeast that evaluate community health and warfare, and this project will be the first to develop such a framework. The study combines geographic information systems (GIS) analyses with skeletal data of nearly 1600 skeletons from 13 sites to address three primary research objectives: (1) the prevalence of conflict-induced trauma, infectious disease, and physiological stress; (2) how warfare affected settlement size, structure and location; and (3) how warfare, in conjunction with sedentism and nucleation, impacted community health. Community health can be viewed as an epidemiological triangle, a fragile balance between the human host, the pathogen and the social and ecological environment. Throughout the course of human history, shifts in evolution or behavior in any one of the three variables have often been accompanied by dramatic upsurges in disease and other manifestations of declining fitness. Transformations in the social environment corner of the epidemiological triangle related to warfare have been implicated in major outbreaks ranging from typhus to influenza. Our proposed research in the Middle Cumberland Region promotes a topography of conflict - an analysis of the biological and social consequences of the clustering and interaction of humans on the landscape fostered by the interrelationship of agriculture practices, sedentism, and conflict. The broader impacts of this study are that it will establish a baseline for evaluating the interaction of conflict, infectious disease and physiological stressors that will be relevant to researchers who address long-term patterns of human health. On-line databases will help disseminate our results and empirical data to other scholars. Graduate students will participate in the project to enhance their training and professional development.