Skeletal morphology, grave goods, and cemetery organization: Mortuary archaeology to community life
Open Access
Author:
Tremblay, Suzanna
Graduate Program:
Anthropology
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Document Type:
Dissertation
Date of Defense:
May 15, 2020
Committee Members:
George Robert Milner, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor George Robert Milner, Committee Chair/Co-Chair Kirk Dow French, Committee Member Stephen Augustus Matthews, Outside Member James William Wood, Committee Chair/Co-Chair Lee Ann Newsom, Special Member Timothy Michael Ryan, Program Head/Chair
In order to access the daily lifeways of archaeological populations, this dissertation relies on three types of mortuary archaeological evidence: the skeleton, the grave and it’s grave goods, and the cemetery. Skeletal morphology is used to measure asymmetric femoral torsion which is a byproduct of side sitting. This is contextualized at the regional level to document additional evidence of habitual side sitting in females through a broad range of time, potentially as far back as the Archaic and across the Midwest. Grave features and funerary objects from an Archaic period hunter-gatherer society are combined with new skeletal age-at-death estimation techniques to examine age- and sex-dependent social status. While males in this population lose social status with age, females maintain their status suggesting that post-menopausal women provide something to society that is not rooted in their reproductive potential. Finally, the spatial layout of a Mississippian period cemetery is studied to see how it reflects the social organization of the society that used it.
