The Week in Work

Week 1 in Springfield: 43 mandibles and 11 crania. That's reasonable productivity, considering how much of the first few days with a new collection are spent getting oriented to a new setup and museum record-keeping system.

I finally figured out how to convert images of my data output into a format suitable for uploading to the blog (thanks, Joe)...

I'm concerned that the fragmentary nature of subadult specimens in the Springfield agriculturalist collections will mean I can't take obtain a large enough sample for certain developmental stages. Having looked through over 80% of the subadult remains from a burial mound consisting of over 900 individuals, I've only collected data on 8 subadult crania. Most of these crania are incomplete, so that in fact, I'll be limited to conducting shape analysis on just the face and/or the shape of the cranial vault. This isn't all that surprising. Juvenile crania are more delicate than adult crania, and the sutures that bind together the multiple cranial bones are less securely established.

Of greater concern is the absence of well-preserved mandibles from individuals approximately 6-11 years of age (after eruption of first adult molar but prior to eruption of second adult molar). My research design calls for 10 individuals who lie within this developmental stage. Again, having looked through over 80% of the agriculturalist burials, I've found only two suitable mandibles from this stage (by "suitable" I mean jaws on which each of the landmarks I'm taking are preserved on at least one side). This isn't entirely random. A study of life span examining 261 burials from the same population I'm working with found that more than 20% of the burials were children between birth and 6 years of age, while less than 8% were between the ages of 7 and 13. (Female mortality rates spike as women reach child-rearing age; males who survive adolescence have relatively low mortality rates until about 35 years of age).

Separately, on Saturday, I made the two hour drive from Springfield to Dickson Mounds to visit the Native American history museum that now lies on the burial site from which the remains discussed above were excavated. Dickson Mounds is waaaaaaaaaay out in the middle of Illinois farm country. For 3/4 of my drive, I saw nothing but cornfields and soybean fields, along with the occassional grain silo or barn.

Southern Illinois is truly farm country. I had no idea. And if the signs posted at the the edge of the fields along the roadway are an accurrate indication, most of these farms grow genetically modified crops.

The Dickson Mounds museum is a nice structure--sort of an art deco recreation of a large ceremonial building from the Native American Mississippian period in the Illinois River Valley. It's nestled within a thick tree stand; I've got no good photos of it. As for the exhibits, well, I'd read about and was hoping to see a partial excavation with burials still exposed, but the docent informed me the State closed this part of the museum 17 years ago. Which makes good sense, and made the inappropriateness of displaying the remains suddenly clear to me. So I looked at the artifacts. They were well displayed, well described and interesting. But for me, not as interesting as bones.