Strontium isotopic reconstruction of the composition of an urban free black population from the 19th century United States

Nystrom, Kenneth C.; Amato, Linda A.; Jankowitz, Lindsay A.

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2011.08.013

Cited by 13 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…WIC's 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios (Table ) fall within the 87 Sr/ 86 Sr isoscape (0.711–0.713) of the region of Bataille and Bowen () derived from regional geologic bedrock and tap water 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios (Figure b). WIC's 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios overlap those of interpreted local individuals interred in the colonial period New York City African Burial Ground in Manhattan (Goodman et al, ) as well as majority of individuals from the free Black community of Newburgh, NY (Nystrom et al, ), located in the Hudson Valley (Figure ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Enamel 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values of Woman in the Iron Coffin (WIC; Table ) compared with those of South American/Caribbean burials and New York burials. Burial data taken from Goodman et al (), Price et al (), Schroeder et al (, ), Nystrom et al (), and Bastos et al (). Boxes represent general 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ranges of various bedrock ages/lithologies (data from Goodman et al, ; Hodell et al, ; Price et al, ) and New York (Goodman et al, ; Nystrom et al, )…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The majority of burials from the free Black community of Newburgh, NY (data of Nystrom et al, ), have very similar 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios as WIC. Although the Newburgh burials also represent unknown residential histories, Nystrom et al () suggested that the underlying Palaeozoic metamorphic rocks of the Hudson Valley of New York provided elevated 87 Sr/ 86 Sr ratios to the people residing there and thus concluded local residence for the majority of the samples. The Hudson Valley bedrock extends into Manhattan, and Queens has a substantial glacial till derived from Hudson Valley sources overlying its Cretaceous bedrock (Fisher et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…We compared WIC's enamel 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values with those of burials from the free Black community of Newburgh, NY (Nystrom, Amato, & Jankowitz, ), dated to 1830–1870 and the enslaved Black peoples buried in the New York African Burial Ground in Manhattan during the 17th and 18th centuries (Goodman et al, ). For a larger geographic context, we compared WIC's 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values with those of the burials of enslaved Black peoples in the Americas spanning the 17th to 19th centuries.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Biogeochemical evidence for residence, diet, and health of theWoman in the Iron Coffin(Queens, New York City)

Quinn

Warnasch²,

Watson

et al. 2020

Intl J of Osteoarchaeology

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In 2011, the mummified body of a Black adult female was discovered in a mid‐19th‐century Fisk iron coffin buried in Queens, New York City. Archival research points to the identity of the woman as Martha Peterson, a domestic worker who lived in the home of William Raymond, the business partner and neighbour of Almond Fisk, the coffin inventor and manufacturer. Here, we apply biogeochemical methods to provide information about the Woman in the Iron Coffin's (WIC's) residence, diet, and health to complement the biological profile and test the archival‐based interpretation of identity. We conducted stable isotopic (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O, 87Sr/86Sr, and 206Pb/207Pb) and elemental (As, Sr, and Pb) concentration analyses of a second premolar and one strand of hair to characterize her lifeways during middle childhood and near the time of death. We interpret WIC's geographic location during the time of tooth formation as local to the New York region, compared with established δ18O and 87Sr/86Sr isoscapes of the United States and 206Pb/207Pb values of regional coal and ore. WIC's δ13C and δ15N values indicate a mixed diet similar to contemporaneous peoples from other Mid‐Atlantic States. Pb concentrations are potentially indicative of acute Pb‐caused health problems in a period of ~1 year during middle childhood. Our biogeochemical results bolster archival‐based interpretations of WIC's identity as a member of the Peterson's, a local free Black family, and provide a glimpse into the life of a Black woman in 19th‐century New York City.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Biogeochemical evidence for residence, diet, and health of theWoman in the Iron Coffin(Queens, New York City)

Quinn

Warnasch²,

Watson

et al. 2020

Intl J of Osteoarchaeology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In particular, when craniometrics is explored on a small spatio-temporal scale (region, cemetery), subtle gene flow fluctuations can be detected, as was the case in a number of South African studies exploring past morphological variation during the Holocene (e.g., Grine et al, 2007;Stynder et al, 2007, Stynder, 2009Ribot, 2011). A number of recent bioarchaeological studies have focused on the effects of colonialism throughout the world (Rankin-Hill et al, 2000;Blakey, 2001), and African skeletal collections dating to between A.D. 1600 and the present and located on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have been (re-)analysed to inform various aspects including health and past variation (Renschler, 2007;Nystrom et al, 2011;Botha and Steyn, 2016;Geller and Stojanowski, 2016;Ribot et al, 2017). Since the 17 th century, the composition and distribution of the population of the world has been dramatically re-shaped as a result of Colonialism, war, genocide, epidemics, forced migrations of individuals, and gene flow between local and non-local groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting historical Khoe-San skeletal remains in European collections: A search for identity through craniometric analysis

Botha

Steyn

Scholtz

et al. 2017

HOMO

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As the identity of a large number of Khoe-San skeletal material in European collections recently came into question during its documentation, a re-evaluation of the remains by employing a non-invasive method such as craniometrics was done to investigate the biological affinity. For this purpose, gene flow and population diversity present within the group, as well as between the study sample (N=63) and other modern and historic population groups from southern, central and east Africa were explored. Available comparative groups included the historic Khoe-San from Riet River (N=31), the Sotho-Tswana from southern Africa (N=61), the Basuku from central Africa (N=66) and the Bahutu (N=53) and Teita (N=24) from east Africa. Ten craniometric variables were selected and used to perform population structure analysis based on model bound quantitative genetics and multiple discriminant function analysis (MDA). Quantitative genetic distances revealed that the Khoe-San sample was closest to the Riet River group. Residual variance analysis performed on two-sample subsets of the Khoe-San group (Cape KS and Various KS) showed a higher level of heterogeneity in the Cape KS than seen in the Khoe-San from various other areas in southern Africa. MDA revealed that Khoe-San intra-sample variance is relatively high, with 44% of the sample (sexes pooled) classified into the Riet River group. The remaining individuals were classified (in decreasing order) into Bahutu (24%), Basuku (24%) and Sotho-Tswana (8%). Although the Khoe-San specimens are closest to the Riet River group, they are clearly not homogenous. Their high level of phenotypic diversity most likely originated from a complex population history involving many group interactions driven by social and political marginalization.

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Toward a bioarchaeology of urbanization: Demography, health, and behavior in cities in the past

Betsinger

DeWitte

2021

American J Phys Anthropol

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Urbanization is one of the most important settlement shifts in human history and has been the focus of research within bioarchaeology for decades. However, there have been limited attempts to synthesize the results of these studies in order to gain a broader perspective on whether or how urbanization affects the biology, demography, and behavior of humans, and how these potential effects are embodied in the human skeleton. This paper outlines how bioarchaeology is well-suited to examine urbanization in the past, and we provide an overview and examples of three main ways in which urbanization is studied in bioarchaeological research: comparison of (often contemporaneous) urban and rural sites, synchronic studies of the variation that exists within and between urban sites, and investigations of changes that occur within urban sites over time. Studies of urbanization, both within bioarchaeology and in other fields of study, face a number of limitations, including a lack of a consensus regarding what urban and urbanization mean, the assumed dichotomous nature of urban versus rural settlements, the supposition that urbanization is universally bad for people, and the assumption (at least in practice) of homogeneity within urban and rural populations. Bioarchaeologists can address these limitations by utilizing a wide array of data and methods, and the studies described here collectively demonstrate the complex, nuanced, and highly variable effects of urbanization.

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Strontium isotopic reconstruction of the composition of an urban free black population from the 19th century United States

Cited by 13 publications

References 30 publications

Biogeochemical evidence for residence, diet, and health of theWoman in the Iron Coffin(Queens, New York City)

Biogeochemical evidence for residence, diet, and health of theWoman in the Iron Coffin(Queens, New York City)

Revisiting historical Khoe-San skeletal remains in European collections: A search for identity through craniometric analysis

Toward a bioarchaeology of urbanization: Demography, health, and behavior in cities in the past

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