Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Biocultural Impacts of Emerging Inequality and Health Disparities in the Past

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Social inequality plays a role in disease and health disparities worldwide, and the skeletal remains of past populations offer a unique means of exploring the development of social inequality and the origins of modern health patterns across time and space. This doctoral dissertation research project is a bioarchaeological study of the impact of social inequality on childhood developmental disruption, exploring the effects of early life stress on inflammation, disease, and mortality later in life. The interdisciplinary investigation will advance bioarchaeological knowledge and approaches by focusing on the biological processes that link development to individual and population health outcomes. The project will support undergraduate and graduate student training in STEM laboratory and field research and contribute to ongoing international collaborations and scientific capacity building. This project uses skeletal remains to examine the interactions between social inequality, developmental plasticity, immune function, morbidity, and mortality in the past. Skeletal data from three research sites representing key shifts in sedentism, agriculture, and social complexity will be analyzed with interdisciplinary approaches (latent class analysis, causal mediation analysis, and analysis of variance) to explore two relationships: the direct effect of developmental phenotypes on morbidity and mortality outcomes; and the role of subsequent immune phenotypes in mediating the effect of development experience on morbidity and mortality outcomes. This project explores possible social determinants of inequality by compiling phenotypes and outcomes for kin groups, estimated through an analysis of biological distance (principal components analysis, multidimensional scaling, and agglomerative clustering) of non-metric and metric dental variation, to assess the distribution of health disparities and determine if kinship shaped experiences of inequality. This project is jointly supported by the NSF Archaeology and Biological Anthropology programs. 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.