Browsing by Autor "Manuel E. Tam"

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Contact in the Andes: Bioarchaeology of systemic stress in colonial Mórrope, Peru
(Wiley, 2008) Haagen D. Klaus; Manuel E. Tam
Abstract The biocultural interchange between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres beginning in the late fifteenth century initiated an unprecedented adaptive transition for Native Americans. This article presents findings from the initial population biological study of contact in the Central Andes of Peru using human skeletal remains. We test the hypothesis that as a consequence of Spanish colonization, the indigenous Mochica population of Mórrope on the north coast of Peru experienced elevated systemic biological stress. Using multivariate statistical methods, we examine childhood stress reflected in the prevalence of linear enamel hypoplasias and porotic hyperostosis, femoral growth velocity, and terminal adult stature. Nonspecific periosteal infection prevalence and D 30+ /D 5+ ratio estimations of female fertility characterized adult systemic stress. Compared to the late pre‐Hispanic population, statistically significant patterns of increased porotic hyperostosis and periosteal inflammation, subadult growth faltering, and depressed female fertility indicate elevated postcontact stress among both children and adults in Mórrope. Terminal adult stature was unchanged. A significant decrease in linear enamel hypoplasia prevalence may not indicate improved health, but reflect effects of high‐mortality epidemic disease. Various lines of physiological, archaeological, and ethnohistoric evidence point to specific socioeconomic and microenvironmental factors that shaped these outcomes, but the effects of postcontact population aggregation in this colonial town likely played a fundamental role in increased morbidity. These results inform a model of postcontact coastal Andean health outcomes on local and regional scales and contribute to expanding understandings of the diversity of indigenous biological variation in the postcontact Western Hemisphere. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2009. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Economic intensification and degenerative joint disease: Life and labor on the postcontact north coast of Peru
(Wiley, 2009) Haagen D. Klaus; Clark Spencer Larsen; Manuel E. Tam
This study tests the hypothesis that the colonial economy of the Lambayeque region of northern coastal Peru was associated with a mechanically strenuous lifestyle among the indigenous Mochica population. To test the hypothesis, we documented the changes in the prevalence of degenerative joint disease (or DJD) in human remains from the late pre-Hispanic and colonial Lambayeque Valley Complex. Comparisons were made using multivariate odds ratios calculated across four age classes and 11 principle joint systems corresponding to 113 late pre-Hispanic and 139 postcontact adult Mochica individuals. Statistically significant patterns of elevated postcontact DJD prevalence are observed in the joint systems of the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and knee. More finely grained comparison between temporal phases indicates that increases in prevalence were focused immediately following contact in the Early/Middle Colonial period. Analysis of DJD by sex indicates postcontact males experienced greater DJD prevalence than females. Also, trends between pre- and postcontact females indicate nearly universally elevated DJD prevalence among native colonial women. Inferred altered behavioral uses of the upper body and knee are contextualized within ecological, ethnohistoric, and ethnoarchaeological frameworks and appear highly consistent with descriptions of the local postcontact economy. These patterns of DJD appear to stem from a synergism of broad, hemispheric level sociopolitical alterations, specific changes to Mochica activity and behavior, regional economic intensification, and local microenvironmental characteristics, which were all focused into these biological outcomes by the operation of a colonial Spanish political economy on the north coast of Peru from A.D. 1536 to 1751.