NSF Award
9911273
This project examines heel spurs and subtalar joint (STJ) variations as a new way of interpreting the lives of people in the past. The objectives are: 1) to establish the association of heel spurs with occupational stress, age, and STJ configurations; and 2) to demonstrate that spur patterns reflect habitual activities and can be used to distinguish prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups from agriculturalists. In previous work from Illinois sites, Middle Woodland hunters and gatherers had fewer heel spurs than their agriculturalist descendants of the Late Woodland-Mississippian Period. In the Middle Woodland sample, age was a factor: older individuals had heel spurs and younger people did not. In the Late Woodland-Mississippian sample, the combination of age and STJ configurations that restricted joint motion ("rigid STJ configurations") was associated with heel spurs. Aged individuals with rigid STJ configurations had a higher incidence of heel spurs while aged individuals with mobile STJ configurations did not. A second area of investigation is spur patterns. In the Middle Woodland sample, spurs tended to be bilaterally symmetric reflecting the bilaterally symmetric activities of hunters and gatherers. In the Late Woodland-Mississippian sample, spur patterns were asymmetric reflecting the asymmetric activities that agriculturalists engage in when using hand tools. The researcher will analyze STJ configurations and heel spurs of the collections of the Alabama Museum of Natural History, including the remains of 1500 individuals from the Mississippian site of Moundville and approximately 1500 individuals from the Perry site's Archaic and Mississippian periods. The potential impact of this project is the development of a new way to assess occupational stress and to distinguish prehistoric samples of hunter-gatherer populations from agriculturalist populations by examining tarsal bones.
