Department of Anthropology
Appalachian State University
416 Sanford Hall (office)
401 Sanford Hall (lab)
Boone NC 28608
828-262-7505 (office)
828-262-2982 (fax)
Robbinsgm(at)appstate.edu

Teaching Schedule 2009-2010

ANT 4330 Bioarchaeology will be offered again in Spring 2011

Research Interests

My research primarily concerns South Asian prehistory, bioarchaeology of children, paleodemography, bone growth, and histology.

The Deccan Chalcolithic Bioarchaeology Research project: I am interested in reconstructing population statistics, childhood health, and lifestyle for three villages (Daimabad, Inamgaon, and Nevasa) occupied during a period of climate and culture change in central-west India 3000 years ago. During this time, the semi-arid region of peninsular India was becoming increasingly dry and the monsoon climate was increasingly unpredictable. Despite a millennium of successful settlement in this region, after 1000 B.C. Deccan Chalcolithic people departed. My research seeks to characterize the demography and health of these communities just prior to the collapse. I am using a new method for fertility-centered paleodemography in subadult samples (an equation for estimating GRR from the proportion of perinates in a subadult sample) to demonstrate that just before the region was abandoned, there was a high pressure demographic situation of higher fertility, higher infant mortality, and declining settlement density. My research also involves an examination of long bone growth using a new method for estimating body mass in subadult human skeletons. Comparison of body mass to height indicates that infants and children in Chalcolithic India were not significantly different from contemporary children. This work, combined with the results of the paleodemography and previous studies on dental health, indicates that the osteological paradox may have been at work: the subadult specimens (particularly infants) appear healthy because they died prior to expressing chronic growth disruption. I suggest that there were indeed dire consequences for infant health and human populations living in the context of climate change in India at the end of the Deccan Chalcolithic. This work was the subject of my dissertation and my most recent research results will be published in my book, Climate Change and Bioarchaeology: a view form the Deccan Chalcolithic (University Press of Florida, forthcoming).

Leprosy in South Asian Prehistory: Recently I have begun work on a project that involves evidence for leprosy in skeletal material from Balathal, a village in Rajasthan occupied during the Indus Age. There is one skeleton from a 40-year old male that demonstrates lesions on his face that are characteristic of leprosy (Robbins et al., 2009). The differential diagnosis analysis of this individual was completed with a senior from Appalachian, Kelsey Gray. This individual represents the oldest documented skeletal evidence for the disease in the world. His presence (at 2000 BC) in a village in Rajasthan indicates that Vedic burial traditions in cases of leprosy were present in northwest India by the second millennium B.C. The skeleton also provides support for the suggestion that early Vedic scriptures composed before the first millennium B.C. are the first textual reference to leprosy. The presence of leprosy in skeletal material dated to the post-urban phase of the Indus Age also has implications for theories about the origin and intitial migration routes of M. leprae. If the disease evolved in Africa during the late Pleistocene, then it migrated to India before the Late Holocene, possibly during the third millennium B.C. at a time when there was substantial interaction among the Indus Civilization, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. This evidence is impetus to look for additional skeletal and molecular evidence of leprosy in India and Africa during the Late Holocene to confirm the African origin of the disease.

Bioarchaeology and the Donner Party Campsite: I recently completed work on the osseous material from the Donner Party campsite. The Donner Party was a large group of 87 immigrants who traveled out west (to California) in 1846. They suffered from bad luck and bad choices that left them stranded in October in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during one of the worst winters in 100 years, just 100 miles from the safety of Sutter’s Fort. The group is almost synonymous with the idea of starvation cannibalism as many members of relief and rescue parties returned with macabre reports befitting their Victorian sentiments. My work involved examining tiny burned fragments of bone from a hearth at the camp site to determine whether the fragments belonged to human or non-human animals (see this presentation from the 2005 Society for Historical Archaeology meetings in Sacramento). In 2007, several students at Appalachian completed analysis of bone fragments from the campsite hearth as part of a larger project that reconstructed life at the camp, which was featured in an article in The New Yorker magazine (Dana Goodyear--April 24, 2006) and on a History Channel special Cannibalism: Secrets Revealed, which aired originally in the spring of 2006. The more recent, expanded analysis of over 100 bones (out of 16000 fragments smaller than 1/2" in diameter) demonstrates that the butchered, burned and fragmented bones from the hearth belonged to many mammals (including cows, horses, deer, and most likely the family dog) but that humans were not among the refuse. An article entitled Archaeology of the Donner Party Alder Creek Camp is forthcoming in American Antiquity and in a chapter in an edited volume co-authored with several undergraduate students at ASU (forthcoming in 2009 from University of Nebraska Press).

Previous projects available online:

Histology and Age Estimation at Damdama (World Cat Listing)