With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Dawnie Wolfe Steadman and Dr. Charles Cobb and a team of graduate students and colleagues will conduct a two-year study of the nature and intensity of Mississippian warfare in the Middle Cumberland Region (MCR) of Tennessee. The current trend in bioarchaeology is to attribute poor health during the Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000-1500) primarily to the nutritional inadequacies of maize and the biohazards of sedentism and population nucleation. However, this study attempts to understand how conflict and related social processes interact with subsistence to adversely impact health. Warfare is well documented in many Mississippian regions yet the variability of cultural and biological responses to conflict has not been well delineated. Just like other social processes, Mississippian warfare varied in intensity and scale across the Southeast, yet the MCR appears to have been one of the more densely populated Mississippian regions, characterized by numerous fortified settlements related to an upsurge in warfare in the thirteenth century A.D. Local populations appear to have been under considerable stress, with indicators of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, and conflict-related trauma. To date there have been no regional syntheses elsewhere in the Southeast that evaluate community health and warfare, and this project will be the first to develop such a framework.
The study combines geographic information systems (GIS) analyses with skeletal data of nearly 1600 skeletons from 13 sites to address three primary research objectives: (1) the prevalence of conflict-induced trauma, infectious disease, and physiological stress; (2) how warfare affected settlement size, structure and location; and (3) how warfare, in conjunction with sedentism and nucleation, impacted community health.
Community health can be viewed as an epidemiological triangle, a fragile balance between the human host, the pathogen and the social and ecological environment. Throughout the course of human history, shifts in evolution or behavior in any one of the three variables have often been accompanied by dramatic upsurges in disease and other manifestations of declining fitness. Transformations in the social environment corner of the epidemiological triangle related to warfare have been implicated in major outbreaks ranging from typhus to influenza. Our proposed research in the Middle Cumberland Region promotes a topography of conflict - an analysis of the biological and social consequences of the clustering and interaction of humans on the landscape fostered by the interrelationship of agriculture practices, sedentism, and conflict.
The broader impacts of this study are that it will establish a baseline for evaluating the interaction of conflict, infectious disease and physiological stressors that will be relevant to researchers who address long-term patterns of human health. On-line databases will help disseminate our results and empirical data to other scholars. Graduate students will participate in the project to enhance their training and professional development.
