Biology Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-9-2019
Publication Title
Plos ONE
Keywords
Teeth, Osteology, Europe, Catholicism, Calculus, Strontium, Infectious disease, Polymerase Chain Reaction
ISSN
1932-6203
Volume
14
Issue/No.
9
First Page
1
Last Page
50
Abstract
In July 2011, renovations to Yale-New Haven Hospital inadvertently exposed the cemetery of Christ Church, New Haven, Connecticut’s first Catholic cemetery. While this cemetery was active between 1833 and 1851, both the church and its cemetery disappeared from public records, making the discovery serendipitous. Four relatively well-preserved adult skeletons were recovered with few artifacts. All four individuals show indicators of manual labor, health and disease stressors, and dental health issues. Two show indicators of trauma, with the possibility of judicial hanging in one individual. Musculoskeletal markings are consistent with physical stress, and two individuals have arthritic indicators of repetitive movement/specialized activities. Radiographic analyses show osteopenia, healed trauma, and other pathologies in several individuals. Dental calculus analysis did not identify any tuberculosis indicators, despite osteological markers. Isotopic analyses of teeth indicate that all four were likely recent immigrants to the Northeastern United States. Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA were recovered from three individuals, and these analyses identified ancestry, hair/eye color, and relatedness. Genetic and isotopic results upended our initial ancestry assessment based on burial context alone. These individuals provide biocultural evidence of New Haven’s Industrial Revolution and the plasticity of ethnic and religious identity in the immigrant experience. Their recovery and the multifaceted analyses described here illuminate a previously undescribed part of the city’s rich history. The collective expertise of biological, geochemical, archaeological, and historical researchers interprets socioeconomic and cultural identity better than any one could alone. Our combined efforts changed our initial assumptions of a poor urban Catholic cemetery’s membership, and provide a template for future discoveries and analyses.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
NSUWorks Citation
Aronsen, Gary P.; Lars Fehren-Schmitz; John Krigbaum; George D. Kamenov; Gerald J. Conlogue; Christina Warinner; Andrew T. Ozga; Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan; Anthony Griego; Daniel W. DeLuca; Howard T. Eckels; Romuald K. Byczkiewicz; Tania Grgurich; Natalie A. Pelletier; Sarah A. Brownlee; Ana Marichal; Kylie Williamson; Yukiko Tonoike; and Nicholas F. Bellantoni. 2019. ""The dead shall be raised": Multidisciplinary analysis of human skeletons reveals complexity in 19th century immigrant socioeconomic history and identity in New Haven, Connecticut." Plos ONE 14, (9): 1-50. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0219279.
ORCID ID
0000-0003-4540-7106
ResearcherID
D-1147-2018
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0219279
Comments
© 2019 Aronsen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.