Grant Builds on Office of Archaeology Studies Bioarchaeology Database

Database to include variables on the health of Ancestral Puebloan communities between AD 800 and 1600

The Office of Archaeological Studies (OAS) announces the award of a National Science Foundation grant to Ann Stodder, Co-PI with Scott Ortman (University of Colorado), for the project "Human Networks, Sustainable Development, and Lived Experience in a Nonindustrial Society." Collaborators at other institutions include Keith Kintigh and Matt Peeples (Arizona State), Barbara Mills (University of Arizona), Bill Doelle, Jeff Clark and Joshua Watts (Archaeology Southwest), and Kyle Bocinsky (Montana State).

The two-year project starts in January 2023 and will involve Ann Stodder, Mary Weahkee, Nadia Neff, and our NMBIOARCH database guru Shamsi Berry. We will create a bioarchaeology database (offspring of NMBIOARCH) that includes a set of variables to characterize the health of Ancestral Puebloan communities between AD 800 and 1600. This will articulate with other Big Data resources on SW paleoclimatic data, paleodemography, and social network analyses based on ceramics. Among the larger questions addressed by the project is the impact of different kinds of social networks on community health and resilience in contexts of climatic changes and the earliest decades of European contact. Ann and Mary will add a novel component to the "lived experience" aspect of the project through meetings with a group of community advisors from nearby Pueblos, sharing stories of individual life histories of ancient people based on osteobiographies, and learning their interpretations of those stories and the roles of health, caregiving, and personal experience in traditional Puebloan communities.

This article is from the Friends of Archaeology Newsletter, August 2022.