Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Examination of Aging and the Elderly in Bioarchaeological Contexts

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Older adults represent the shared history of communities and play important roles in societies both past and present. In bioarchaeological research, however, they are typically underrepresented. This doctoral dissertation research project focuses on elderly adults in the archaeological record to examine this important source of past biocultural information. The project is framed in terms of a bioarchaeology of aging. This research has potential to inform both historical and clinical understandings of health across the lifespan by connecting interdisciplinary theories of aging from anthropology and public health. The project supports the research of a woman in STEM, provides research and training opportunities for students, and engages with local communities in science outreach.The project integrates evolutionary and social theories into a broader biocultural theory of aging, to reconstruct the experiences of elderly individuals in the past and provide a broader, historical and biocultural context for understanding the aging. Specific pathological and degenerative changes to the skeleton, as well as the Skeletal Frailty Index, are utilized in order to estimate the biological age of skeletons. These changes include those utilized in the estimation of chronological age-at-death (i.e. degenerative changes to the pubic symphysis and auricular surface of the ilium) but also include other changes (i.e. dental wear, antemortem tooth-loss, and the development of osteoarthritis and degenerative joint disease). Severity of degeneration is taken into consideration in addition to the complexity of degeneration experienced (e.g. how many different categories of degenerative or pathological changes are observed). All adult individuals from the site are included in the study sample to provide additional context by which to interpret findings related to frailty and resilience observed among elderly individuals. This research can advance existing methods and definitions for age estimation from skeletal data and proposes a theoretical platform by which bioarchaeologists might better interpret the lived experiences of the elderly from a biocultural perspective.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.