Historical narratives tend to minimize the lives of people who struggled with poverty. Bioarchaeological analyses can illuminate those lives and, critically, the marginalization they endured by evaluating aspects of structural inequality that are embodied in skeletal remains and situating them within the context of institutionally produced and normalized inequality. In Western contexts, the remains of people from the recent past who struggled with poverty are often recovered from defunct public burial sites specifically for those who could not afford private burial. In the 1800s, urban expansion drove the establishment of formal cemeteries outside of the city throughout the West. Likewise, the same forces cause the redevelopment of burial grounds, and often disproportionately affect public rather than private ones. People buried on public grounds reflect diverse lived experiences of marginalization during urbanization, and of further marginalization during their deaths, expressed through mortuary treatment and the collective forgetting that permits land redevelopment. The aims of this dissertation were first to characterize insights from bioarchaeological analysis of public burial grounds and then to use those insights to explore heterogeneous experiences of inequality in life and death in a skeletal assemblage from a public burial site in Bogotá, Colombia. A systematic review of bioarchaeological literature from public burial sites synthesizes the major themes and insights. Then, a study of a skeletal assemblage from Cementerio Central explores heterogeneous experiences of inequality across the life course and death course in urbanizing Bogotá during the late 1800s to mid-1900s. First, variability in lived experiences of marginalization during urbanization is explored by comparing skeletal stress and oral health between isotopically determined locals and nonlocals and between skeletal males and females. Results show little difference between groups, suggesting disparate experiences of inequality may be embodied similarly. Then, marginalization in death is examined through correspondence analysis of variables reflecting taphonomic damage and the observability of variables associated with identity and lived experience. This analysis suggests that mortuary treatment and excavation and storage had a direct effect on remains that contributed to the erasure of their identities.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a deadly disease that infects millions of people annually. TB has a global distribution and remains a significant cause of mortality, despite decades of eradication campaigns and antibiotic development. TB is caused by genetically similar pathogens in the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), and human infections are generally caused by human-associated strains, although humans can contract animal-associated strains. Skeletal evidence of TB on archaeological human skeletal remains and evolutionary dating of MTBC genomes reveal that TB has afflicted humans for approximately 6,000 years. Previous research has shown that MTBC pathogens were introduced into the Americas through a zoonotic transmission from seals and sea lions along the coasts of South America by at least 1000 CE. Characterizing the introduction and enigmatic intercontinental spread of a successful zoonotic transmission over hundreds of years provides valuable insight into the potential of zoonotic MTBC infections. Through the recovery and phylogenomic analysis of the first ancient MTBC genomes (n = 2) from pre-contact North America, I establish that there were multiple contemporaneous MTBC lineages circulating in human populations in the Americas. The high genomic diversity and deep divergence of strains from Mesoamerica suggest that TB was endemic in the region. To reveal the impact of TB within a Mesoamerican city, I examined human skeletons (n = 137) for evidence of disease from sacrificial and natural mortality burial contexts within Tlatelolco, a ceremonial precinct and interregional marketplace at the heart of the Aztec Empire (1300-1521 CE). I found that TB disproportionately affected sacrificial victims, who also exhibited evidence of food insecurity and resource inequality. These results mirror the socioeconomic patterns of TB distribution today. Further, I sampled broadly from sacrificial victims with skeletal evidence of TB not only for biomolecular confirmation of MTBC but also to uncover associations between skeletal TB manifestation and ability to recover ancient MTBC DNA. I identify 10 additional cases of MTBC at Tlatelolco and link ancient MTBC DNA recovery to TB skeletal lesion characteristics and age-at-death of the infected individual. Overall, this body of work combines paleogenomic and paleopathological data to highlight the impact of ancient TB zoonoses.

Published in 1992, “The osteological paradox: problems of inferring prehistoric health from skeletal samples” highlighted the limitations of interpreting population health from archaeological skeletal samples. The authors drew the attention of the bioarchaeological community to several unfounded assumptions in the field of paleopathology. They cautioned that bioarchaeologists needed to expand their methodological and theoretical toolkits and examine how variation in frailty influences mortality outcomes. This dissertation undertakes this task by 1) establishing a new approach for handling missing paleopathology data that facilitates the use of new analytical methods for exploring frailty and resiliency in skeletal data, and 2) investigating the role of prior frailty in shaping selective mortality in an underexplored epidemic context. The first section takes the initial step of assessing current techniques for handling missing data in bioarchaeology and testing protocols for imputation of missing paleopathology variables. A review of major bioarchaeological journals searching for terms describing the treatment of missing data are compiled. The articles are sorted by subject topic and into categories based on the statistical and theoretical rigor of how missing data are handled. A case study test of eight methods for handling missing data is conducted to determine which methods best produce unbiased parameter estimates. The second section explores how pre-existing frailty influenced mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Skeletal lesion data are collected from a sample of 424 individuals from the Hamann-Todd Documented Collection. Using Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional hazards, this chapter tests whether individuals who were healthy (i.e. non-frail) were equally likely to die during the flu as frail individuals. Results indicate that imputation is underused in bioarchaeology, therefore procedures for imputing ordinal and continuous paleopathology data are established. The findings of the second section reveal that while a greater proportion of non-frail individuals died during the 1918 pandemic compared to pre-flu times, frail individuals were more likely to die at all times. The outcomes of this dissertation help expand the types of statistical analyses that can be performed using paleopathology data. They contribute to the field’s knowledge of selective mortality and differential frailty during a major historical pandemic.