SBE-RCUK: Diet, Migration and Health in the Context of Mortality Crises

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Crisis mortality is a dramatic but temporary increase in mortality rate resulting from a single factor, such as a disease epidemic, famine, flood, and warfare. Crisis mortality was important in the past and still has the potential to powerfully shape human demography and biological variation. Anthropological work on past mortality crises has not yet fully clarified the factors that created vulnerability to mortality during different crisis events and the longer-term consequences of demographic crises. Using large skeletal samples from medieval England, Dr. Sharon DeWitte (University of South Carolina), in collaboration with Dr. Julia Beaumont (University of Bradford, UK) and Dr. Janet Montgomery (Durham University, UK), will integrate paleodemographic and isotope analyses to examine temporal changes in diet and migration at the time of the 14th-century Black Death and the interactions among diet, migration, demography, health, sex, and socioeconomic status in the context of the medieval mortality crises of famine and plague. This project will highlight the cultural and social factors that affect crisis events and their outcomes. The results of this project can aid predictions about what might happen in future demographic crises. Clarifying the wider social and economic contexts of mortality crises contributes to the development of policies that can reduce their occurrence and effects. The Black Death and its context provide fascinating examples that capture the public attention and imagination, which can be leveraged to produce positive change. By revealing what happened at the time of the Black Death, this project can motivate action in the face of crises today. Such action might include increased spending on disease research, and efforts to reduce disparities in access to food, medical care, and other resources that affect vulnerability to and mortality during crises.Clarifying how dietary resources were distributed in the medieval period will allow for an examination of the ways in which general resource availability in a population does not necessarily translate into widespread benefits in the face of socially-, economically-, or politically-prescribed patterns of access to those resources. This project will also contribute to an understanding of long-term changes in migration in the context of disaster and particularly the health consequences thereof. This project will be done using over 2400 skeletons from medieval England using hazards-analysis based approaches in combination with isotope data to achieve the following objectives: 1) determine whether diet improved significantly for different segments of society following the Black Death; 2) examine the effect of migrant status on risk of death during the Black Death and determine whether patterns of migration or the health of migrants changed following the Black Death; 3) determine the factors that affected risks of medieval famine mortality; and 4) determine whether the experience of famine substantially affected risks of mortality during the Black Death, other medieval famines, and under conditions of normal medieval mortality.This proposal is awarded under the SBE-RCUK Lead Agency Agreement.