Date of Award
8-16-2024
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
Sharon DeWitte
Abstract
Given our current climate crisis and urban population increases, researchers are increasingly interested in the health outcomes at the intersection of climate change and urbanization. Since climate change and urbanization affects human health in a variety of ways, more work is needed in diverse cultural contexts to understand temporal and geographic variations of such phenomena more fully. Using skeletal individuals from 13th – 18th century Berlin (n = 387), this project analyses demographic and health trends from the founding of the city in the late medieval period (c. 1200 – 1500) to the early modern period, when the city was growing and affected by the advent of the Little Ice Age (c. 1500-1800). To better conceptualize health, this project uses a life course approach, which emphasizes the fact that health is more than the outcome of our immediate environment. It specifically tests how stress experienced during early life periods and stress experienced throughout childhood and adolescence effects morbidity and mortality outcomes.
Results reveal a decreased risk of mortality for all adults in the early modern period compared to the late medieval period. Females also faced a significantly higher mortality risk relative to males in the early modern period. These findings suggest that even in the face of climatic variability from the Little Ice Age, the urban setting was protective in some way, possibility in part due to the growing number of hospitals and proliferation of health information. Additionally, the early modern period introduced different social challenges for women: the Protestant Reformation (c. 1517) resulted in a more fixed gender hierarchy, and witchcraft persecutions began in earnest across Europe as religious tensions and climatic challenges persisted. Climatic variability can be considered a risk multiplier, and it can exacerbate pre-existing risk factors associated with violence, including economic disparities and political instability. These results highlight the fact that different social groups may experience climate change differently and solutions to challenges due to climate change should consider such intersectionality.
Overall, individuals who experienced stress in both early and late childhood or adolescence faced a higher risk of mortality compared to both individuals who only experienced early childhood stress and individuals who experienced no stress. These results suggest that it is continual exposure to stressors, not just experiencing stress during an early critical period, that has a greater impact on risk of death. These results demonstrate the utility of utilizing a variety of markers across life course when studying skeletal individuals, in order to better study health trends in the past.
Rights
© 2024, Emily Brennan
Recommended Citation
Brennan, E.(2024). Histories of Stress: a Life Course Approach to Population Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern Berlin. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/7868