Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: New Approaches for Reconstructing Health in the Past: Accounting for Age-Dependent Processes in the Archaeological Record

This award was provided as part of the NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Biological Anthropology program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research.

NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields.

Under the sponsorship of Dr. Sharon DeWitte at the University of Colorado Boulder, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how to improve our ability to understand the deep history of population health from evidence in the archaeological record. Much of what we think we know about the human cost of social and environmental change over most of human history relies on interpreting evidence of health and disease from the skeletal remains of our ancestors.

Yet cemeteries, like hospitals, are not representative of health in the general population. To address the challenges of reconstructing population health from the unrepresentative and incomplete information that the archaeological record provides, we must account for the unobserved processes of life and death that produce observable patterns of disease in archaeological cemeteries.

This project will accomplish this goal by developing and using a combination of cutting-edge methods—generative modeling and Bayesian inference--to test the accuracy of current analytical methods in archaeology and to better constrain and map the range of interpretations that can be made from a single archaeological data set. The findings as well as the novel computational models we develop are expected to substantially advance the field's understanding of how to interpret skeletal signs of stress and disease in the archaeological record, with the potential to transform our current understanding of health in the past.

More broadly, the interactive web application that will be developed to demonstrate the relationships between living populations and their archaeological remains will serve as an invaluable teaching tool for the field.

This research aims to improve the study of health in past populations by testing the influence of several hidden variables on estimates of mortality risk associated with skeletal indicators of disease. The project will develop a series of agent-based models to demonstrate how individual life histories produce observable patterns of disease (skeletal lesions) in cemetery samples.

These models will draw on existing literature about health and population dynamics to set the parameters in each simulated scenario. These simulated cemeteries will then be analyzed using the current statistical standard in the field—survival analysis and multistate models—to assess the accuracy of these commonly used statistical tests at estimating known values from the simulated data.

Finally, the applicability of computer simulated insights to real-world data will be tested using data from a contemporary mortality sample in New Mexico. Real-world data analysis will focus on estimating mortality risks associated with cribra orbitalia, a skeletal lesion widely used by bioarchaeologists as an indicator of nonspecific childhood stress but largely ignored in contemporary medicine, despite its potential relevance as a risk marker for premature mortality.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.