Phenotypic Perspectives on Biological Variation at Phaleron

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Phaleron is an important site in the history of ancient Athens and preserves a unique record of life in the past. One of the more compelling aspects of the site is the range of mortuary treatments documented there, including multiple groupings of non-normative burials, a series of co-interments buried in shackles, as well as pit and jar burials. Given the variation of mortuary treatments, and in particular clear evidence of violent death for some individuals, one question to address is how these different burial subsets relate to each other in terms of biological variation. Dental morphological data were collected from approximately 600 burials using the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology System. These kinds of data have been repeatedly shown to reflect patterns of biological relatedness at different scales of analysis and serve as useful proxies for neutral genetic variation. As such, they complement more direct genomic approaches and generally use larger sample sizes and are non-destructive in their implementation. Data were cleaned using standard trait registration techniques and subjected to multivariate biological distance analysis. Patterns of variation are compared among Phaleron subgroups as well as with published data from other sites in Greece that reflect suitable broad-scale comparative outgroups.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Bioarchaeology of the Phaleron Cemetery, Archaic Greece: Current Research and Insights   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39599.0