History of health in the Chinese Bronze Age: Results from five seasons of the Mogou bioarchaeology projectElizabeth BERGER1, Jenna DITTMAR2, Ivy Hui-Yuan YEH3, Ruilin MAO4, Hui WANG5, Guoke CHEN4

1University of California, Riverside; 2Cambridge University; 3Nanyang Technological University; 4Gansu Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology; 5Fudan University

The Mogou cemetery, in Lintan County, Gansu Province, China, was excavated from 2008-2012 by the Gansu Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the School of Cultural Heritage of Northwest University. The cemetery dates to 1750-1100 BCE, the middle and late Bronze Age material culture horizons of Qijia and Siwa. It is located in the Tao River Valley, in the upper Yellow River drainage, in the western Loess Plateau. The site yielded 1688 graves and over 5000 skeletons.1,2 3,4 Bioarchaeologists from Cambridge University were initially invited to do an inventory and analysis of the human remains. The team began work in 2015, and grew to include scholars and students based in or originating from China, the UK, the US, Canada, and Singapore. The team has visited the collection five times, growing to 8+ participants in the lasttwo seasons. The work has included some post-excavation organizing and curation, as well as basic inventory, and collecting data on paleopathology, metrics, and paleodemography. The hope is to eventually analyze the entire skeletal series, while training Chinese and foreign students in skeletal analysis. Other teams and graduate projects, primarily from within China, have conducted or are in the process of conducting analyses of dietary stable isotopes, human aDNA, and pathogen aDNA.5,6

Project background

The bioarchaeology team has collected data on approximately 760 individuals so far. Preservation is generally very good at the site, and the collection includes individuals from neonatal to old adult ages at death, making it an ideal collection for assessing Bronze Age social, environmental, and health changes in Northwest China. An initial analysis found the prevalence of nonspecific indicators of physiological stress (41.6% of individuals with CO/PH, 43.1% of individuals with dental enamel hypoplasias, 47.1% of individuals with subperiosteal new bone formation on the appendicular skeleton) are higher than those at other published sites in the region. The population also experienced a notably high prevalence of interpersonal violence (11.4% of adults), largely perimortem cranial trauma.7 Eleven adult individuals have presented with healed circular trepanations on the parietal bones, which appear to be ritualistic rather than medical, given the consistency in location and size, as well as the lack of other cranial pathological lesions in these individuals.8

The cemetery has also yielded individuals with lesions suggestive of a range of specific infectious, metabolic, and congenital illnesses (including tuberculosis, scurvy, DISH, ankylosing spondylitis, and carcinomas), for which radiographic and DNA analyses are ongoing.

Findings to date

The Gansu Institute is still seriating the grave goods from the large number of excavated graves, so a detailed temporal analysis is pending, but it is known which areas of the cemetery come from the early Qijia occupation, the late Qijia occupation, and the smaller Siwa occupation. We plan to examine changes through time in measures of health and paleodemography. These can then be correlated with regional settlement data and climate change proxies to understand the interaction of cultural, technological, and biophysical factors in the human skeleton. Analyses are in progress to examine the relationship between fertility, morbidity, and mortality and environmental conditions; changes in fine-grained oral health data through time for dietary reconstruction; distribution of osteoarthritis within the skeleton and across the population, as well as metric analysis, to reconstruct changes in mechanical stressors and activity; and specific cases of presumed disability due to congenital conditions and injuries. Specific infectious diseases are also being examined through aDNA analysis by collaborators at Fudan University. We anticipate a continuing fruitful long-term international collaboration, and the chance to train many future cohorts of students.

Analyses in progress

1. Mao, R., Qiang, Y., Xie, Y., Zhu, Y., Zhou, J., 2009. Gansu Lintan Mogou Qijia wenhuamudi fajue jianbao (Brief report on the excavation of Qijia culture graves at the Mogou cemetery, Lintan, Gansu). Wenwu 641, 10–24.

2. Mao, R., Xie, Y., Qian, Y., Wang, Y., 2014. Gansu Lintan Mogou mudi Siwa wenhuamuzang 2009 nian fajue jianbao (Brief report on the 2009 excavations of Siwa culture graves at the Mogou cemetery, Lintan, Gansu). Wenwu 2014 (6), 24–38.

3. Qian, Y., Zhou, J., Mao, R., Xie, Y., 2009. Gansu Lintan Mogou Qijia wenhua mudifajue de shouhuo yu yiyi (The main findings and meaning of excavations of Qijia graves in Mogou, Lintan County, Gansu Province: one of the "2008 top 10 archaeological discoveries in China”). Journal of Northwest University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition) 5, 5–10.

4. Xie, Y., Qiang, Y., Mao, R., Zhou, J., Zhu, y, 2009. Gansu Lintan xian mogou Qijia wenhua mudi (A Qijia cultural cemetery, Mogou in Lintan County, Gansu Province). Kaogu 49 (7), 10–17.

5. Liu, Xinyi, Emma Lightfoot, Tamsin C. O’Connell, Hui Wang, Shuicheng Li, Liping Zhou, Yaowu Hu, Giedre Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute, and Martin K. Jones. From necessity to choice: Dietary revolutions in West China in the second millennium BC. World Archaeology 46, no. 5 (2014): 661-80.

6. Ma, Minmin, Guanghui Dong, Xin Jia, Hui Wang, Yifu Cui, and Fahu Chen. Dietary shift after 3600 cal yr bp and its influencing factors in Northwestern China: Evidence from stable isotopes. Quaternary Science Reviews 145 (8/1/ 2016): 57-70.

7. Dittmar, Jenna M., Elizabeth Berger, Xiaoya Zhan, Ruilin Mao, Hui Wang, and Hui-Yuan Yeh. Skeletal evidence for violent trauma from the Bronze Age Qijia Culture (2,300-1,500 Bce), Gansu Province, China. International Journal of Paleopathology 27 (2019/12/01/ 2019): 66-79.

8. Dittmar, Jenna, Xiaoya Zhan, Elizabeth Berger, Ruilin Mao, Hui Wang, YongshengZhao, and Hui-Yuan Yeh. Ritualistic cranial surgery in the Qijia Culture (2300-1500 Bce), Gansu, China. Acta Anthropologica Sinica 38, no. 3 (2019): 389-97.

References

Funding to carry out this research was provided by the NAP Start-Up Grant from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; a Chinese National Social Science Key Project Grant for ‘The Mogou Cemetery Project: Multidisciplinary Research in Gansu Lintan’ (grant number: 18ZDA225); Banco Santander through the Santander Mobility Grant scheme at the University of Cambridge; the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan; the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation; the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council; and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists Cobb Professional Development Grant program. The authors would like to thank all the student volunteers of the Mogou project and the staff at the Gansu Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology for their invaluable support and assistance during data collection.

Acknowledgements

M875:R5: perimortem SFT M189:R2: antemortem SFT

M1247: healed trepanation M3:R2 likely spinal TB

2018 team

2019 team

Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles

The work in progress