New York African Burial Ground Skeletal Biology Final Report, Volume 1. Chapter 10. Osteological Indicators of Infectious Disease and Nutritional Inadequacy

The present chapter investigates the prevalence of infectious diseases and nutritional inadequacies in the New York African Burial Ground (NYABG) sample, as represented in bone. A broad range of skeletal indicators of pathology was assessed in the Cobb Laboratory. Diagnoses of specific diseases represented by skeletal indicators were usually attempted, as per the long-standing standards of paleopathologists. Data were also gathered in accord with the more strictly descriptive criteria of the new Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains (Buikstra and Ubelaker 1994). Indeed, the pathology coding section of the Standards is clearly the most novel and complex feature of the guide, and we think it constitutes a significant forward step in paleopathologic methodology. Yet, as one of the first projects to utilize and test the Standards in their entirety, we found the strict pathology coding approach to be somewhat cumbersome and time consuming. To mitigate this problem, we developed pathology codes for computerization that saved time and effort without the loss of useful information. Therefore, the skeletal pathology and non-metric trait computer database developed at the New York African Burial Ground Project (NYABGP) is a simplified version of the pathology portion of the Standards (Buikstra and Ubelaker 1994:107-158).