No abstract

In spring of 1846, the George and Jacob Donner families and some 80 traveling companions began their overland trek to California. When the party ascended the Sierra Nevada in late October, a snowstorm forced the group to bivouac. At this point, the train became separated into two contingents; the larger party camped near Donner Lake and the smaller group—including the Donner families—settled at Alder Creek. Though written accounts from the Lake site imply many resorted to cannibalism, no such records exist for Alder Creek. Here we present archaeological findings that support identification of the Alder Creek camp. We triangulate between historical context, archaeological traces of the camp, and osteological remains to examine the human condition amid the backdrops of starvation and cannibalism. A stepped analytical approach was developed to examine the site’s fragmentary bone assemblage (n= 16,204). Macroscopic and histological analyses indicate that the emigrants consumed domestic cattle and horse and procured wild game, including deer, rabbit, and rodent. Bladed tools were used to extensively process animal tissue. Moreover, bone was being reduced to small fragments; pot polish indicates these fragments were boiled to extract grease. It remains inconclusive, however, whether such processing, or the assemblage, includes human tissue.

This long-term assessment of the use of HealosMP52 in posterolateral instrumented spine fusion indicates that HealosMP52 possesses safe and efficacious bone grafting properties and can potentially serve as anosteoinductive alternative to autograft bone.

The perimortem butchering of human remains has been proposed for many sites in the Anasazi Culture Area of the southwestern United States at around ad 1000. This paper presents evidence that similar practices occurred in an adjacent culture area to the north. A cluster of Fremont sites in south‐central Utah show evidence of this same processing pattern including scalping, dismemberment, cooking, and fracturing of long bones. The material from one of these Fremont sites, Backhoe Village, is presented to illustrate the similarities with butchering patterns found among the Anasazi. These parallels raise questions of contact between the two populations as well as having implications for the motives involved in these butchering practices. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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