Health and nutrition of a coastal population during the Upper Berkeley to Augustine periods : analysis of human skeletal remains from San Mateo 4 (CA-SMa-4)
Analysis of human skeletal remains allows us to develop and expand our knowledge of human history. Through interpretation of biological processes and genetically variable traits, biological anthropologists can develop models of how human populations have moved, interacted, and changed through time. This requires multiple populations with multiple data sets in order to make detailed inferences. The necessary resources are often already collected and housed in museums throughout the country. To connect and expand our knowledge of human populations in the Americas during prehistory it is a matter of collecting the data and connecting population information through time. The San Francisco Bay area, even though it has produced a long archaeological sequence and abundant human skeletal remains, has been understudied by biological anthropologists. I attempt to fill this gap by analyzing health and nutritional indicators of human skeletal remains from a large San Francisco Bay shell mound, CA-SMa-4. The population from CA-SMa-4 was found to be healthy with few skeletal indicators of health disturbances, which is comparable to other coastal archaeological populations in California.
