Assessing Oneota Diet And Health: A Community And Lifeway Perspective

ABSTRACT This preliminary study uses a gross measure of potential nutritional adequacy as a starting point from which to examine the interplay of the dietary impact of corn agriculture and the complexity of community health. We use subsistence data from three Oneota sites (ca. A.D. 1300 to 1650) in the La Crosse locality of southwestern Wisconsin, Tremaine (47-Lc-95), OT (47-Lc-262) and Filler (47-Lc-149), to model nutritional adequacy of diet at each site. Following the assessment of available nutrients, skeletal pathologies often interpreted within a dietary framework in Oneota studies (dental caries, enamel hypoplasias, porotic hyperostosis, and cribra orbitalia) are considered. The Tremaine site with its longhouses and associated human burials provides an important context for understanding health, diet and disease in an Oneota community. We suggest that the etiology of the skeletal pathologies is best understood within a framework that incorporates lifeway choices linked to settlement and subsistence impacts on the community, such as increasing population density within longhouses, rather than explanations that focus on issues of nutrient availability due to food shortages or narrowing of food choices.

The relationship between a population's subsistence pattern and its overall health is complex. Not only are people affected by the foods they eat, but also the social circumstances of production and distribution. The investigation of skeletal health offers one important way to look at the health of a population archaeologically. Historically, the examination of skeletal health has revealed a notable change in skeletal health with the adoption of intensive agriculture. Due to the understanding that reliance on limited agricultural staples rarely fulfills nutritional needs, there has been a great deal of attention on the adoption of agriculture as having major negative nutritional effects.

The last quarter-century has brought an increasing focus on the complex nature of skeletal health and subsistence. Skeletal health is affected by multiple factors and the decline in skeletal health associated with the adoption of agriculture may reflect nutritional stress as well as other factors such as infectious disease or parasitism. An increase in the prevalence of skeletal pathologies related to stress accompanies the intensification of maize agriculture in most groups in North America, but it does not necessarily follow that when we see skeletal indicators of stress they are a reflection of a scarcity of a particular nutrient. Social factors, as well as nutritional and biological factors, affect community health (Milner 1982, 1992; Goodman et al. 1988). Nutritional deficiencies have a complex synergistic relationship with infections: nutritional deficiencies may increase a host's susceptibility to infection and, conversely, an infection can mitigate or aggravate nutritional deficiencies (Milner 1982; Keush and Farthing 1986; Lallo et al. 1977). It is important to note that nutritional deficiencies may be metabolic rather than dietary in origin and a number of researchers have suggested that in some cases, nutritional deficiencies may actually serve as a form of immune protection (Keush and Farthing 1986; Stuart-Macadam 1992).

Despite a call for integrated studies in paleonutrition (Sobolik 1994a), little information has been produced regarding the actual nutritional effects of various subsistence strategies, particularly subsistence strategies which exploited a broad spectrum of resources (but see Smith 1996 and Sobolik 1994b). The subsistence pattern of the Upper Mississippian Oneota tradition had what appears to have been a very successful mixed economy that included corn, bean and squash agriculture along with other native cultigens. Farming was important, but so too were hunting, gathering and fishing. In addition to the growing numbers of site-specific reports on floral and faunal remains, others have looked at Oneota diet from the perspective of adaptive strategies and decision making, preferred environmental diversity in choice of site location, and general seasonal diversity (Arzigian et al. 1989; Gallagher and Arzigian 1994; Gallagher and Stevenson 1982; Michalik 1982; Stevenson 1985; Tiffany 1982). These studies build a general picture of variation in the Oneota diet that is, for the most part, a successful adaptation. Our interest in Oneota community health and diet is rooted in the notion of this particular kind of economic diversity as a successful subsistence strategy. Our intention is to examine this general picture of success within a model that incorporates nutritional data on the actual foods that Oneota people consumed. We then look at a related skeletal population and consider the nutritional and other community factors that contribute to that particular community's health.

Specifically, in this article, we examine the interplay between physiological stress and subsistence patterns at a group of three archaeological sites known as the Tremaine Complex Oneota sites. Taking the archaeologically recovered subsistence remains from these sites, we assess the potential for nutritional adequacy of these foods. Potential nutritional adequacy is evaluated by assessing apparent diet composition at the Tremaine site complex using the Nutrient Database for Standard Reference values published by the United States Department of Agriculture (2002).