Human Biologists in the Archives: Demography, Health, Nutrition and Genetics in Historical Populations: 35 (Cambridge Studies in Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology, Series Number 35)

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/5/2002
EAN 9780521801041, ISBN10: 0521801044

Hardcover, 360 pages, 23.6 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm
Language: English

Many physical anthropologists study populations using data that come primarily from the historical record. For this volume's authors, the classic anthropological 'field' is not the glamour of an exotic locale, but the sometimes tedium of the dusty back rooms of libraries, archives and museum collections. This book tells of the way in which archival data inform anthropological questions about human biology and health. The authors present a diverse array of human biological evidence from a variety of sources including the archaeological record, medical collections, church records, contemporary health and growth data and genetic information from the descendants of historical populations. The papers demonstrate how the analysis of historical documents expands the horizons of research in human biology, extends the longitudinal analysis of microevolutionary and social processes into the present and enhances our understanding of the human condition.

Foreword S. Silverman and M. A. Little
1. Human biology in the archives A. Swedlund and D. A. Herring
2. The use of archives in the study of microevolution
changing demography and epidemiology of Esxazú, Costa Rica L. Madrigal
3. Anthropometric data and population history J. H. Relethford
4. For everything there is a season
Chumash Indian births, marriages and deaths at the Alta California missions P. L. Walker and J. R. Johnson
5. Children of the poor
infant mortality in the Erie County Almshouse during the mid-nineteenth century R. L. Higgins
6. Worked to the bone
the biomechanical consequences of 'labour therapy' at a nineteenth century asylum S. Phillips
7. Monitored growth
anthropometrics and health history records at a private New England middle school, 1935–60 L. Leidy Sievert
8. Scarlet Fever epidemics of the nineteenth century
a case of evolved pathogenic virulence? A. Swedlund and A. Donta
9. The ecology of a health crisis
Gibraltar and the 1965 cholera epidemic L. A. Sawchuck and S. D. A. Burke
10. War and population composition in Ã…land, Finland J. H. Mielke
11. Infectious diseases in the historical archives
a modelling approach L. Sattenspiel
12. Where were the women? A. Grauer
13. Malnutrition among northern peoples of Canada in the 1940s
an ecological and economic disaster D. A. Herring, S. Abonyi and R. D. Hoppa
14. Archival research in physical anthropology M. T. Smith
Index.