A Comparison: Two Methods for Timing Linear Enamel Hypoplasia among a 19th Century African American Population from Newburgh, New York

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Linear enamel hypoplasia, also known as LEH, becomes apparent in dental enamel as horizontal indents from thinner layers of enamel being produced. This defect forms as the dental enamel responds to physiological disturbances from systematic stress attributable to biological, cultural, and environmental factors. LEH has allowed researchers to time the defect formation on human remains and can recover information about a population that was previously unknown. Two commonly used estimation methods are the Goodman (1990) and the Reid and Dean (2006) methods. With these two methods, we compared and contrast the results of a nineteenth century African American subpopulation (n=31) from Newburgh, New York. The results showed a significant difference in the peak ages for LEH formation between the two methods. Through this comparison, we will attempt to reconstruct the roots of why some of the Newburgh population was subjected to early childhood stress producing hypoplastic developments, give insight on the dental health of the subpopulation based off of the prevalence of LEH, consider the history of racism and inequality that took place in the New-York-Newburgh region during the nineteenth century among those of African descent as well as those of poverty, and offer new proposals for future research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24491