Ancient DNA Analysis of Orton Quarry

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Orton Quarry site is a Late Prehistoric ossuary along the coast of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania. In March 1991, heavy-equipment operators accidentally destroyed a majority of the site before archeologists arrived. Since the excavation very little had been published on the Orton Quarry site, it’s importance or its original inhabitants. One of the primary objectives of this project is to change that. By extracting and analyzing the mtDNA using the Dabney et al. (2013) protocol and standard aDNA contamination avoidance protocol, we have obtained valuable data on the site’s genetic ancestry. Ancient DNA from the seven samples were isolated and amplified for the hypervariable region of the mtDNA mitogenome. Following this, the whole mitogenome for the individuals (n=7). Haplogroups were assigned and the resulting sequences were compared to a relevant dataset from the surrounding region to gauge population relatedness and shared derived mutations. Despite the small sample size, comparing the data from these individuals through haplogroup and haplotype data from the Great Lakes region, this research has expanded our knowledge of the Orton Quarry Ossuary, the genetic data for the Great Lakes region as well as grown our genetic understanding of ancient mitochondrial DNA in North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24467