Departmental News

Posted:  Jan 06, 2023 - 12:00pm

Paige Lynch, doctoral candidate in Evolutionary Anthropology, has been awarded the 2022 Frieda Butler Award.  Her presentation is titled, Sociocultural Change and its Impact on Non-elite Individuals in Medieval Poland and will be presented in a public talk. 

The goal of this project is to test how sociocultural factors affect the biology of non-elite people. Data will draw from economically (i.e., non-elite) and geographically (i.e., rural) homogenous populations from Late Medieval and post-Medieval Poland. Traditionally, non-elite individuals are overlooked in historical records and archaeological studies, despite that they make up the majority of the population. Migration, resource access, and physiological stress are global and timeless issues in which history recorded how sociopolitical upheavals impacted the elites but fall short for the average individual, the non-elites. Paige will address this question using a combination of standard and cutting-edge techniques never applied to these little- understood issues. To understand the body’s strategy in adjusting under differing cultural conditions, stable isotopic analyses in conjunction with specific skeletal markers will be used.