Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Biocultural Impacts of Emerging Inequality and Health Disparities in the Past

社会不平等在世界各地的疾病和健康差距中发挥着作用，过去人口的骨骼遗骸为探索社会不平等的发展和跨越时间和空间的现代健康模式的起源提供了一种独特的手段。这一博士论文研究项目是一项关于社会不平等对儿童发展障碍的影响的生物考古学研究，探索早期生活压力对晚年炎症、疾病和死亡率的影响。跨学科调查将侧重于将发展与个人和人口健康结果联系起来的生物过程，从而推动生物考古知识和方法的发展。该项目将支持STEM实验室和实地研究方面的本科生和研究生培训，并为正在进行的国际合作和科学能力建设作出贡献。这个项目使用骨骼遗骸来研究过去社会不平等、发育可塑性、免疫功能、发病率和死亡率之间的相互作用。来自三个研究地点的骨骼数据将用跨学科的方法(潜在类别分析、因果调节分析和方差分析)进行分析，以探讨两种关系：发育表型对发病率和死亡率结局的直接影响；以及后续免疫表型在调节发育经验对发病率和死亡率结局的影响方面的作用。这个项目通过汇编亲属群体的表型和结果来探索不平等的可能决定因素，这些表型和结果是通过分析非度量和度量牙齿变异的生物距离(主成分分析、多维比例和聚集性聚类)来估计的，以评估健康差距的分布，并确定亲属关系是否形成了不平等的经历。该项目由NSF考古学和生物人类学项目共同支持。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Social inequality plays a role in disease and health disparities worldwide, and the skeletal remains of past populations offer a unique means of exploring the development of social inequality and the origins of modern health patterns across time and space. This doctoral dissertation research project is a bioarchaeological study of the impact of social inequality on childhood developmental disruption, exploring the effects of early life stress on inflammation, disease, and mortality later in life. The interdisciplinary investigation will advance bioarchaeological knowledge and approaches by focusing on the biological processes that link development to individual and population health outcomes. The project will support undergraduate and graduate student training in STEM laboratory and field research and contribute to ongoing international collaborations and scientific capacity building. This project uses skeletal remains to examine the interactions between social inequality, developmental plasticity, immune function, morbidity, and mortality in the past. Skeletal data from three research sites representing key shifts in sedentism, agriculture, and social complexity will be analyzed with interdisciplinary approaches (latent class analysis, causal mediation analysis, and analysis of variance) to explore two relationships: the direct effect of developmental phenotypes on morbidity and mortality outcomes; and the role of subsequent immune phenotypes in mediating the effect of development experience on morbidity and mortality outcomes. This project explores possible social determinants of inequality by compiling phenotypes and outcomes for kin groups, estimated through an analysis of biological distance (principal components analysis, multidimensional scaling, and agglomerative clustering) of non-metric and metric dental variation, to assess the distribution of health disparities and determine if kinship shaped experiences of inequality. This project is jointly supported by the NSF Archaeology and Biological Anthropology programs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.