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

危机死亡率是由单一因素引起的死亡率的急剧但暂时的增加，例如疾病流行、饥荒、洪水和战争。危机死亡率在过去很重要，现在仍有可能极大地影响人口统计学和生物多样性。关于过去死亡危机的人类学工作尚未充分阐明在不同危机事件期间造成易受死亡影响的因素以及人口危机的长期后果。南卡罗来纳大学的Sharon DeWitte博士利用中世纪英格兰的大量骨骼样本，与英国布拉德福德大学的Julia Beaumont博士和英国达勒姆大学的Janet Montgomery博士合作，将整合古人口和同位素分析，以研究14世纪黑死病时期饮食和移民的时间变化，以及中世纪饥荒和鼠疫死亡危机背景下饮食、移民、人口统计学、健康、性别和社会经济地位之间的相互作用。该项目将突出影响危机事件及其结果的文化和社会因素。该项目的结果有助于对未来人口危机可能发生的情况进行预测。澄清死亡危机的更广泛的社会和经济背景有助于制定能够减少其发生和影响的政策。黑死病及其背景提供了引人入胜的例子，吸引了公众的注意和想象力，可以利用这些例子产生积极的变化。通过揭示黑死病发生时发生的事情，该项目可以激励人们在今天面对危机时采取行动。这样的行动可能包括增加疾病研究的支出，努力减少在获得食物、医疗保健和其他资源方面的差距，这些资源会影响疾病的易感性和死亡率。厘清中世纪时期饮食资源的分配方式将允许审查在面对社会、经济或政治规定的获取这些资源的模式时，人口中普遍的资源可获得性不一定转化为广泛的好处的方式。该项目还将有助于了解在灾害情况下移徙的长期变化，特别是其对健康的影响。该项目将使用2400多具中世纪英格兰的骨骼，使用基于危害分析的方法，结合同位素数据，以实现以下目标：1)确定黑死病后不同社会阶层的饮食是否显著改善；2)检查移民身份对黑死病期间死亡风险的影响，并确定移民模式或移民健康在黑死病后是否发生变化；3)确定影响中世纪饥荒死亡风险的因素；以及4)确定在黑死病、其他中世纪饥荒期间以及在中世纪正常死亡的条件下，饥荒经历是否对死亡风险产生了重大影响。

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.