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

老年人代表着社区的共同历史，在过去和现在的社会中都发挥着重要作用。然而，在生物考古研究中，他们的代表性通常不足。本博士论文研究项目聚焦于考古记录中的老年人，以研究这一重要的过去生物文化信息来源。该项目是根据衰老的生物考古学来构建的。这项研究有可能通过将人类学和公共卫生的老龄化跨学科理论联系起来，为整个生命周期中健康的历史和临床理解提供信息。该项目支持女性在STEM领域的研究，为学生提供研究和培训机会，并与当地社区合作开展科学推广。该项目将进化和社会理论整合到更广泛的老龄化生物文化理论中，重建过去老年人的经历，为理解老龄化提供更广泛的历史和生物文化背景。骨骼的特定病理和退行性变化，以及骨骼脆弱指数，被用来估计骨骼的生物年龄。这些变化包括用于估计死亡年龄的变化（即耻骨联合和髂骨耳面退行性变化），但也包括其他变化（即牙齿磨损、死前牙齿脱落、骨关节炎和退行性关节疾病的发展）。除了变性的复杂性外，还考虑了变性的严重程度（例如，观察到多少不同类别的变性或病理变化）。所有来自该地区的成年人都被纳入研究样本，以提供额外的背景，通过这些背景来解释在老年人中观察到的与脆弱和恢复力有关的发现。本研究可以推进现有的骨骼数据年龄估计方法和定义，并为生物考古学家从生物文化角度更好地解释老年人的生活经验提供理论平台。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

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.