汤头条

Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擱esearch by Molly Zuckerman, professor in Mississippi State鈥檚 Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, is featured in Communications Biology鈥攁 division of Nature鈥攁s part of a multi-institution, interdisciplinary project challenging the perspective of using human remains as objects for scientific study and, instead, using them as a pathway for reconstructing unique experiences, circumstances and places within history.

The article 鈥淩emembering St. Louis individual鈥攕tructural violence and acute bacterial infections in a historical anatomical collection鈥� was published Oct. 3. Visit to read the complete article.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, University of Oklahoma and Smithsonian Institution, the interdisciplinary investigation explores the cause of death and social, political and economic circumstances surrounding the death of 鈥淪t. Louis Individual鈥濃�攔eferred to as St.LI鈥攁 23-year old Black or African American male who died in the 1930s in St. Louis, Missouri. The results reveal evidence of structural violence and chronicle the impact of systemic racism in historically marginalized communities.

St. LI is part of the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Collection, which is held at the Smithsonian Institution鈥檚 National Museum of Natural History. The Terry Collection includes about 1,700 human skeletons, which represent individuals who lived and died around St. Louis between 1898 and 1967.

Historical collections of human skeletons are found at universities and museums across the world and have long been considered important for teaching and research on human health and disease in medicine and anthropology.

In new research by Zuckerman and her colleagues, the team challenges that perspective and the scientific dehumanization of individuals within these historical documented collections and instead seeks to look at the 鈥減erson as a whole,鈥� the study explains.

According to lead principal investigator and lead author of the article Rita Austin, postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum of Oslo, 鈥淐ombining information from DNA preserved within calcified dental plaque, or calculus, on St. LI鈥檚 teeth with historical documents that contextualize their life, and information about their overall health gleaned from their skeleton has given us an extraordinary look into their life and how racism, poverty and violence in 1930s St. Louis, Missouri, shaped this person鈥檚 life.鈥�

Dental calculus studied from St.LI yielded bacteria that commonly caused pneumonia and hospital infections before antibiotics became widespread in the 1940s.

鈥淚ndeed, pneumonia was one of the most common causes of death amongst humans in the past, especially for the poor, older adults, and other marginalized communities living in progressively crowded and cramped cities from the medieval period into the Industrial Revolution,鈥� said Zuckerman, a co-PI on the project.

鈥淭his means that despite being one of the biggest killers in history, pneumonia is largely invisible in the past. Indeed, it鈥檚 extremely rare that researchers can identify exactly what killed people in the past, or their cause of death. But the bacterial DNA in St.LI鈥檚 calculus precisely matches their recorded cause of death of pneumonia. This means that calculus, which dentists scrape off the teeth of the living, can give us an otherwise impossible window directly into what killed many people in the past and shed light into the end of their lives, which for many who were marginalized, such as those shuttered in institutions, like public hospitals and asylums, have largely been lost to history,鈥� said Zuckerman.

She and other researchers on the team are actively working with the Smithsonian and researchers at other museums and universities to usher in new guidelines for teaching, research and care of individuals in these collections to produce scholarship that pays attention to the origins of these individuals, the social and historical factors that led to their inclusion in collections, and that recognizes and respects skeletal individuals as once living human beings.

Communications Biology聽is an open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the biological sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances bringing new biological insight to a specialized area of research.

Part of 汤头条鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures is online at . The university鈥檚 Cobb Institute of Archaeology is online at . 聽

汤头条 is Mississippi鈥檚 leading university, available online at .