Doctoral Dissertation Research: Advancing biocultural and molecular studies of agriculturalist diet and nutrition.

这项博士论文研究项目试图了解饮食、社会不平等和过去导致的健康相关结果之间的关系。新的生物分子方法补充了考古学方法，以解决与过去生活在城市社会中的热带农学家的地位、健康和福祉有关的及时的生物文化问题。理解社区和个人在受到体制不平等制约的同时为满足其营养需求而采取的战略的生物学后果，是当今一个高度相关的话题。世界上大多数人口直接或间接地受到社会不平等的影响，这些不平等影响着食物的类型、质量和数量。考古学非常适合通过将环境和社会变量与个人决策和由此产生的与健康相关的结果联系起来，来洞察过去这些复杂的关系。本研究集中于三个问题：(1)在结构不平等的系统中，人们使用什么策略来获取食物；(2)这些策略与他们所面临的社会和环境限制有什么关系；(3)不同地位的个人的健康相关结果是什么？本研究探索了如何在个人的生物遗骸中观察到社会和环境条件的差异，以及他们如何构建生态位来应对社会驱动的选择压力。以人类和植物生理学为基础的多种稳定同位素分析被应用于考古骨骼遗骸和现代新热带植物样本，以评估生理状态，并将植物类别与个人和社区一级的饮食联系起来。这些样本是从大约1500年前占领的三个政治中心找到的。博士生接受过氨基酸碳、氮化合物特定同位素分析的新应用培训。这些都应用于人类和植物，并结合对骨骼生物磷灰石中的块状碳的研究，以比仅进行块状组织同位素分析更详细地重建人类饮食。这一方法被应用于热带农民群体，使研究人员能够探索社会和环境压力之间的复杂关系，社区用来缓解这些压力的策略，以及对那些生活在制度不平等体系中的人的潜在生物影响。此外，这项研究为未来的考古研究提供了路线图，重点是过去十年左右生命中的个人饮食和健康，这也适用于零碎和不完整的骨骼收集，这可能会混淆基于骨学的方法，并允许研究人员在考古人口中提出更多关于生理学的微妙问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This doctoral dissertation research project seeks to understand the relationships between diet, social inequalities, and the resulting health-related outcomes in the past. New biomolecular methods complement archaeological approaches to address timely biocultural questions regarding the status, health, and wellbeing of tropical agriculturalists living in urban societies in the past. Understanding the biological consequences of the strategies that communities and individuals employ to meet their nutritional needs while constrained by institutional inequality is a highly relevant topic today. Most of the world’s population is directly or indirectly impacted by social inequalities that influence the types, quality, and quantity of foods consumed. Archaeology is well suited to provide insight into these complex relationships in the past by linking environmental and social variables to individual decision making and the consequent health related outcomes. This study focuses on three questions: (1) within a system of structural inequality what strategies did people use to procure food; (2) how do these strategies relate to the social and environmental constraints they faced; and (3) What were the health-related outcomes of individuals of differing statuses?This study explores how variation in social and environmental conditions can be observed in the biological remains of individuals and how they construct niches in response to socially driven selective pressures. Multiple types of stable isotope analyses grounded in human and plant physiology are applied to archaeological skeletal remains and to a sample of modern neotropical plants to assess physiological status and link plant categories to individual and community level diets. The samples were recovered from three political centers occupied about fifteen hundred years ago. The doctoral student is trained in novel applications of carbon and nitrogen compound specific isotope analysis of amino acids. These are applied to both humans and plants and coupled with studies of bulk carbon from bone bioapatite to reconstruct human diet in more detail than bulk tissue isotope analysis alone. This methodology is applied to a population of tropical farmers allowing the researchers to explore the complex relationships between social and environmental pressures, the strategies that communities use to mitigate those pressures, and the potential biological impacts on those living within systems of institutional inequality. Additionally, this research provides a roadmap for future archaeological studies focusing on individual diet and health during the last decade or so of life that is also applicable to fragmented and incomplete skeletal collections that can confound osteological based methods and allows researchers to ask more nuanced questions about physiology in archaeological populations.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.