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

这个博士论文研究项目旨在了解饮食，社会不平等和过去产生的健康相关结果之间的关系。新的生物分子方法补充考古方法，以解决有关过去生活在城市社会的热带农业家的地位，健康和福祉的及时生物文化问题。了解社区和个人为满足其营养需求而采用的战略的生物后果，同时受到体制不平等的限制，是当今一个高度相关的主题。世界上大多数人口都直接或间接地受到社会不平等的影响，这些不平等影响了食物的种类、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以及随后的健康相关结果联系起来，来深入了解过去这些复杂的关系。本研究的重点是三个问题：（1）在一个结构性不平等的系统中，人们使用什么策略来获取食物;（2）这些策略如何与他们所面临的社会和环境限制有关;（3）不同地位的个人的健康相关结果是什么？本研究探讨了如何在社会和环境条件的变化，可以观察到在个人的生物遗骸，以及他们如何构建壁龛，以应对社会驱动的选择压力。基于人类和植物生理学的多种类型的稳定同位素分析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饮食联系起来。这些样本是从大约1500年前被占领的三个政治中心恢复的。博士生接受了氨基酸的碳和氮化合物特定同位素分析的新应用的培训。这些都适用于人类和植物，并与骨生物磷灰石的散装碳的研究相结合，以重建人类的饮食比单独的散装组织同位素分析更详细。这种方法被应用于一个热带农民的人口，使研究人员能够探索社会和环境压力之间的复杂关系，社区用来减轻这些压力的战略，以及对那些生活在制度不平等系统中的人的潜在生物影响。此外，本发明还这项研究为未来的考古学研究提供了一个路线图，重点关注生命最后十年左右的个人饮食和健康，也适用于碎片和不完整的骨骼收集，这些骨骼收集可能会混淆基于骨骼学的方法，并允许研究人员提出有关考古人群生理学的更微妙的问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估。

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.