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Old 01-31-2014, 12:58 AM   #1 (permalink)
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Overall Health during the Black Plague

The professor wrote:

Quote:
Your research questions did not address a social/ environmental/ demographic factor which affected how well your hypothesis could draw a connection between a change in health through time and a social factor.
I thought that transitioning from a hunter\gatherer culture to an agricultural one was plenty social\environmental\demographic.

My assignment:

This assignment regards a burial site that was found in England, seemingly a mass grave from the Black Plague, but as they excavated it, they found two older graveyards underneath it, and for the assignment, "I" sent DNA samples from ten skeletons from the medieval layer for analysis.

Here is most of the data, which I really did not think was very complete:


This is my award-winning response. I appreciate any feedback, even if it is just "Do push-ups!" Dental caries refer to cavities. I think that the rest of the terms are explained later on, but since I have gone through a great deal of information, I may be taking some of it for granted.

1. Identify evidence from the Berkchister data that demonstrates a change in a specific health outcome over time.

31% of the skeletons found in Pit VI, from the Mesolithic Period, were of infants or children, while it was 21.2% for the Neolithic period, and 14.5% for the Medieval Period, for individual graves. It was 9% for Medieval mass graves.

2. Given this piece of evidence, write a research question that investigates the relationship between the change in health outcome and change in a social, environmental, or demographic factor.

What lifestyle changes across these three periods caused the infant and child mortality rate to drop?

3. Pose a hypothesis that states the nature of the relationship between the change in health outcome and change in a social, environmental, or demographic factor.

There was an increasingly more stable food source, reducing the risk of malnutrition.

4-6: Repeat steps 1-3 but start with a different line of evidence that generates a new research question and new hypothesis.

4. Evidence #2

The percentage of medieval adolescent skeletons in mass graves is more than double the percentage in individual graves.

5. Research Question #2

If the medieval mass graves represent poorer people and individual graves represent richer people, why were poor youth aged 10-17 dying at least twice as fast as their rich counterparts?

6. Hypothesis #2

The poor medieval adults had better jobs, allowing them to distance themselves more from the disease vectors, while the adolescents were more exposed.

7. Write a summary report (approximately 2 paragraphs) that includes your final interpretation of the changes in health through time at the Berkchister Parish site. Use the module materials and Berkchister statistics to address the following: 1) Does overall health improve or decline through time? 2) What factors (social, environmental, cultural, demographic, etc.) likely contributed to these changes?

This data left me with far more questions than the two that I described above. Was the medieval site used before or after the bubonic plague? Twenty-six-point-four percent of the skeletons at the medieval dig site were in mass graves, but that statistic is not necessarily representative of victims. Since the only indication of dying of the plague were being buried in the pits and the one aDNA result that was positive for Yersinia pestis, is there any way of knowing whether the rich who died of the bubonic plague were buried individually or were also buried in the mass grave? One skeleton was positive for tuberculosis and the spine showed the extreme distortion characteristic of Pott’s disease, but the chart shows 1.6% of the skeletons in the individual graves had tuberculosis. There were 186 skeletons in individual graves, so two other spines showed the characteristic distortion? The Mesolithic skeletons did not show Cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis; Kent Johnson explained in the video that these conditions could have been the body’s response to fighting anemia or malnutrition. Larsen explained that the change in diet from meat to grain would not have provided sufficient iron (Larsen, 2006). He also described the starch-rich diet, particularly sugar, as being responsible for the increase in dental caries, which roughly quadrupled after the Mesolithic Period.

Daniele Antoine suggested that the plague might not have been the bubonic plague as always believed (Antoine, 2008), although the aDNA evidence from the Berkchister Parish site demonstrates otherwise. The video discussed bone trauma, like the tibia that had broken and then healed, from the Mesolithic age, and then introduced skull trauma during the Neolithic age. Larsen explained that humans have always engaged in violence amongst ourselves, especially due to competition for resources, and this escalated as population increased (Larsen, 2006). However, the population exploded between the Neolithic and Medieval periods, with a slight decrease in trauma. Plague might not exactly cure war, although it undoubtedly would be a distraction; however, 8.6% of individuals buried in individual graves had trauma. Did the rich need to fight off the poor? There is not any indication of life expectancy, aside from the percentage of adult skeletons. Did they die at eighteen or fifty? Finally, Lawn and Zumla explain that Tuberculosis is not new, it has existed for thousands of years, killing one in one thousand in the 17th century (Lawn and Zumla 2011). Did the earlier dig sites pre-date this disease? Was it not common enough to show up? It seems difficult to separate the overall health of the medieval area, due to the plague. Taking that into account, it seemed decidedly worse.


Last edited by Xist; 02-12-2014 at 06:56 PM.. Reason: I took this down when I submitted it and put it back up after it was graded.
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Old 01-31-2014, 11:09 AM   #2 (permalink)
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Quote:
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You should have also referenced or added this video clip as definitive proof in your conclusion.





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Last edited by redneck; 02-01-2014 at 04:13 PM.. Reason: absurd filter
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Old 01-31-2014, 02:38 PM   #3 (permalink)
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Redneck, I really wanted to! I just did not have any idea if it would help or hurt my grade! Honestly, it seemed perfect! Skeletons from the medieval area showed cranial trauma. Well, yeah!
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Old 01-31-2014, 03:23 PM   #4 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Xist View Post
..."I" sent DNA samples from ten skeletons from the medieval layer for analysis.
If I understand what you've written, your report coould be summarized in one sentence: "10 samples is not enough for statistical significance."
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Old 01-31-2014, 04:23 PM   #5 (permalink)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf View Post
If I understand what you've written, your report coould be summarized in one sentence: "10 samples is not enough for statistical significance."
+1 however as the question is "made up" your answers are kind of what the teachers are looking for so you should be OK from the course point of view.

The conclusions in the paper are flawed because there is no "uniform" use of "burial pits" in the UK. Unless you have records of the time (possible given "parish records" created by the local church) you don't really know what went on.

For example if a local village had an outbreak of flu which killed a few people (say 20) they might make a mass grave, especially if the victims were poor. They might also decide to reopen that pit if another mass death took place which seeing as there was no mass Immunisation at the time would be likely if anyone from over 5 miles away passed through.

The location of "death pits" is unknown. For example there is a project to make a cross city rail link in London which is being built just now and they have hit quite a few "death pits" of unknown origin during the build.

There are similar death pits more or less the world over, even in the US.
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Old 02-01-2014, 08:51 AM   #6 (permalink)
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They're still being made today...
Not necessarily of a genocidal or acute medical nature.
When cleaning up cemeteries, due to lack of space or when the payed for period runs out, the exhumed bodies get tossed together in a pit behind some bushes etc. .
Not something everybody wants to see - or even know.

Makes you wonder what historians will make of it in a couple 100 years


When digging more than 0.5m deep in the garden, bones will come up ...
There used to be a long gone hospital nearby .
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Old 02-01-2014, 11:20 AM   #7 (permalink)
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Overall heath summary:

The living were, barely

The dying were, many

The dead were, well, dead.
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Old 02-01-2014, 11:40 AM   #8 (permalink)
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The biggest sources of info for historians digging stuff up is not graveyards anyway, it is rubbish pits. You can learn far more about a society and what state it was in by what people threw away and what they didn't and also what was in their, er, droppings. Even Roman poo is being analysed these days.
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Old 02-01-2014, 03:38 PM   #9 (permalink)
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If only you guys had posted this stuff before my assignment was due! I removed my first post. Many of our assignments go through some absurd filter that that the instructors allege to prevent plagiarism. The first time that I dealt with this, I submitted a one-page final project with six references. My recycling score was 36 and the professor had put in the syllabus and repeated several times that if the service gave us a score of twenty-five or higher, we would receive a zero, and could be in worse trouble for plagiarizing.

The main part of that score, what apparently would doom me to failing in and of itself, was my works cited page--not actual quotes or rephrased passages from elsewhere, but my works cited page!

Hey, plagiarism is bad, despite what Tom Lehrer may say--and sing, but it was absurd. I e-mailed the instructor, she ignored me, and I finally decided that everyone was probably going through the same thing, and I doubted that she was going to fail all of us.

After I submitted yesterday's assignment, I realized that it could notify my professor that it was almost a word-for-word copy of some forum post, so I took it down, and I will put it back up once I have a grade.

Unless it is a bad one...

When I went to submit this, I saw the grading rubric, which I had missed before I started everything. Then I started panicking, trying to work my assignment to match it, so we will see. It turns out that my ex-girlfriend's sister took the class and we discussed it a little, but it was too late to do much.

I cannot expect you guys to follow my personal life, but the ex and I got back together.

Thanks for your participation thus far. Maybe you will appreciate this:

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Old 02-01-2014, 10:04 PM   #10 (permalink)
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In the scientific world, copying from one scientist is plagiarism, copying from MANY scientists is RESEARCH (wink,wink)!

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