Lived Experiences of Disease and Trauma among Manteño Burials from Buen Suceso

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Skeletal measures of pathology and trauma can reveal lived experiences of individuals and broader patterns of health and disease within past communities. These are important lines of inquiry at both the individual and community level as they may reflect the identities held by those persons and inequalities present within society. The Manteño burials at Buen Suceso offer an opportunity to examine this, as these individuals lived on the edge of the Manteño sphere of influence and may have lived differently than those more closely associated with urban cores at Jaboncillo or Agua Blanca. In this paper, we present a bioarchaeological analysis of seven individuals buried at Buen Suceso in order to understand their daily lives. Preliminary results indicate significant dental pathology indicating regular maize consumption and periosteal new bone formation suggesting low level chronic stress. Additionally, cutmarks and missing skeletal elements from two of the burials suggests postmortem ritual involving dismemberment and disarticulation of hands and limbs. These data suggest that Manteño peoples at Buen Suceso shared some cultural traits with the larger Manteño tradition but also were creating new mortuary practices, perhaps because of their liminal position on the landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37204.0