Using the Index of Care on a Bronze Age Teenager with Poliomyelitis: From Speculation to Strong Inference

Summary

Bioarchaeology has come a long way in using differential diagnosis, attending to the Osteological Paradox, using biocultural frameworks to integrate different levels of analysis, and developing ways to work with small sample sizes and fragmentary remains. Designed by Lorna Tilley (U. Aukland), the Index of Care offers a new scientifically-based and systematic tool to collect and integrate a range of information in life history, disease processes, and cultural context. This online tool tests hypotheses using multiple lines of evidence with a rigorous four step process for describing pathologies, determining disabilities, constructing a care model, and examining caregiving implications. In this study the Index of Care is applied to a previously described and published 18 year old female from the Bronze Age site of Tell Abraq (UAE). The application of this tool provide a much more nuanced and complete interpretation of past pathology and caregiving. This study highlights the usefulness of the Index of Care in using strong inference and hypothesis testing on ancient cases of unusual and extreme diseases.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Building a Bioarchaeology of Care

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