Under the direction of Dr. Kenneth Kennedy MS Cynthia Wilczak will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. She will study MOS (measures of occupational stress) enthesopathies to develop an analytic tool which may be useful in the analysis of human skeletal material recovered in archaeological contexts. Enthesopathies are changes to bone which result from repeated stresses. When bone is subjected to stresses caused by muscle use it may respond by increasing in size at the point of the muscle attachment. Because certain tasks or occupations require repeated use of specific muscles, it is possible in some instances to reconstruct muscle use and then infer task specific activities through examination of bones. However no good techniques exist to quantify enthesopathies and the most immediate goal of this research is to adapt videoanalysis techniques to this end. In the attempt to identify enthesopathies one must take into account that absolute size can affect bone configuration and it is necessary to eliminate this cause of variation if one wishes to examine MOS. MS Wilczak will use methods of regression analysis to elucidate the scaling factors which affect muscle insertion size and determine if similar scaling factors are seen at all insertion sites. She will then apply the technique to a series of skeletal populations with different known subsistence technologies to see if the approach can, in fact, provide useful archaeological information. This research is important for a number of reasons. It will help to develop a tool which can be employed not only in anthropology but in forensic sciences as well. A number of archaeological questions can be directly addressed through application of this technique and researchers, for example, will be able to examine degree of occupational specialization and the development of social hierarchies in cases where skeletal materials are available. Finally the grant will contribute to the training of a promising young scientist.
