 So thank you again for inviting me and thank you everyone for staying right until the end. My talk is titled, Using Isostatic Announces to Investigate Diet and Disease in a Medieval German Poor House. This research comes out of a paper that I published in December in Bioarchaeology International. What do I want to talk to you about today? I'm going to talk about what do I mean by poor house? I want to introduce you to my site. I want to talk about the health and diet data that came out of this project. And then what can we say about their lives? What I want to start with though is a question for everyone here. Just reflect for a moment, think back to yourself to a time when your socioeconomic status changed and your diet changed as a result. So this could be when you left the care of your parents and suddenly your diet was not as good as it was. You were putting yourself through school and suddenly ramen noodles were the only things that you were eating. Your diet changes. So there are times in our lives when our socioeconomic status impacts our diet. And when we're thinking about isotopic data we have to think about significant long-term changes as a result. So what do I mean by poor house? Well poor house was the earliest form of social care that we see in this place in time. So not yet a hospital, not where there are caregivers per se, but more just consistent food and shelter for those individuals who could not care for themselves, who could not afford their own food or shelter. So this would include widowed women and their children, elderly who didn't have families to rely on. It could be people who are sick but not really sick, not terminally ill, just unable to take care of themselves for a period, and also the disabled. And what got me thinking about the bioarchaeology of care of course came out of this text. And I really like this quote because it applies really well to this research project. Community responses to care requirements are affected by cultural norms, belief systems, and access to resources. So again consider for yourself when as a community member you've taken care of other members of your community, whether that's by giving donations or perhaps if you attend services you may pay tithe, you may give to hurricane relief, those kinds of things that come up where we act as a community in response. And we have all different kinds of reasons why we feel we need to provide that care. So we need to look at why this community would care for people in a poor house. So there was this Christian obligation to give to charity, to give alms. And it was part of your spiritual salvation. So if you want to go to heaven you better give up some of your wages. There is a big important distinction here between people who deserved charity and people who did not. So who can tell me who would not deserve charity in a medieval community? Prostitutes. Prostitutes, you're out, you're not being cared for by the community. Drunks, vagrants, people who are deserving are those good Christians who for whatever reason are on hard times, down on their luck. Those are the people that get into the poor house. And the people funding the poor house include wealthy residents in the community. They include trade guilds. So if you are part of a brewer or a baker guild, you may be contributing to a poor house that would support people from that trade and their families later on in life. Or possibly lay religious orders as well are helping to run and contribute to these. Poor houses. So the poor house I'm talking about specifically today is in Regensburg, Germany. So the southeast there along the river. That was a picture of it top right last Monday when I got to visit it. Which I was very excited about because originally when I did the data collection for this I only got to go to the museum in Munich. I never actually got to the city. That bridge is a 12th century bridge still standing. I highly recommend a visit to the city if you can make it. How did the skeletal collection get discovered? Well, it was a cemetery sometime between the 12th and 16th century. After that it became a garden. I don't have soapworks on there, but it was a soapworks from a while. People forgot that there were people buried there. It became a parking lot. And then that apartment complex had to go up in 2006. And they discovered almost 500 burials in that parking lot. And for my project I was able to sample 111 individuals as well as some of the fauna remains that were mixed into gray fill that date to that same time period. So how do we know this cemetery was a poor house? Well, there are several lines of evidence we're pulling on to make that conclusion. One is that there is no physical evidence of a church or a monastery in the immediate area. We don't expect a community cemetery to have a chapel or church or some kind of structure nearby that doesn't exist. It was also located on what would have been the city's fringe. So you don't put a poor house and poor people in the middle of the city. You would put them on the edge of the city and that's where it was. And there are historical documents that suggest that people were living in willing poverty nearby as well as the cherry office or the alms office actually owned the land right up until the 1800s. So those are the pieces of evidence we're drawing on to conclude poor house. So why did I get involved in this research? There were sort of two questions that I pursued. The top one I was looking at whether or not isotope values can be affected by pathology because if they can be that's a big deal. Turns out not so much unless you are directly sampling lesions which we don't like to do anyway because the lesions are the coolest things to look at. So if you avoid the lesions you're more likely to get a representative sample. I also wanted to look at this segment of society so it's not often we can take a population and say we know for sure that this is a minority population within this larger society. So what can we learn about the medieval poor by looking at these individuals? And we know there are norms around taking care of people in the medieval period. So here is a frequency of the kinds of pathology that were observed in this population. So in my sample of 111 you can see the most prevalent disease there is dental pathology, so curious lesions, painful but not necessary terminal, and then followed by degenerative joint disease, so non-vertible joint disease. So basically saying these people are aging but not necessarily showing, there's no signs of lots of trauma. Trauma is pretty low. There is one congenital disease so top right there, craniocynostosis. There are more individuals with craniocynostosis in this population than we would expect in a regular population, but we don't know for sure because of the different ways that this presents, whether or not it had a cognitive impact on these individuals. So we can't say for sure how disabling that particular instance is. So there are a few other pictures there of the kinds of pathology that we were looking at in this population. So moving on to paleo diet, I wanted to interpret the dietary practices of all of this group of individuals using stable isotope analysis. So there was more stable isotope expertise in the room than I expected from the titles. So bear with me, think you are what you eat. So if you are a heavy protein eater, if you are a vegan, I'm going to know that. If you give me your pinky finger, I can tell you without asking. So I looked at both carbon and nitrogen data. The carbon, what is the biggest difference we're looking for in medieval populations? It's the difference between C3 plants and C4 plants. C3 plants are most plants and vegetables, fruits. C4 plants, the two big ones of course are millet and sugarcane. We would not expect much sugarcane consumption in this population at this time. Millet was a socially inferior food. So that's why it's interesting because if we see it in this population, we have another line of evidence that this was a really poor segment of society. For nitrogen isotope data, we're looking at protein source. So are you eating mostly terrestrial? Are you relying on freshwater or marine water fish? How carnivorous is your diet? I would like to explain my isotope graph. So you have carbon values on the x-axis, nitrogen on the y-axis. So as the individuals move up that y-axis, you're getting more protein in the diet. As you're moving down the x-axis, you're getting more C4 plant foods in the diet. So this is just example data. Can you find this individual? See if you can find that person on this graph. So you can read isotope data. So the first number is carbon, the second number is nitrogen. That individual is up there. How many people got it? A couple. Yeah, it's excellent. If we were going to interpret this data, this example data, we would notice that there are two distinct populations. Often isotope data is not this pretty. So what are my actual results like? This is the Regensburg data. So you can see there's 111 circles up there. The human average is the blue dot in the middle. The funnel samples are also mapped on this graph. And what we know right away from looking at this is if those human circles were overlaid on top of my funnel data, we would know everyone in Regensburg was a vegetarian. They're not eating meat. But because they're much higher, we know that they're eating terrestrial animals, or at least some kind of protein like milk or eggs. I have a pig and a cat, the square and the X there. And humans are much higher than that. I'm not saying that they were eating cats. That's not that at all. But we know that from this visual, that these individuals were eating a diet that's even more than a terrestrial carnivore. So we're thinking that this means there's freshwater fish in this diet. We don't even have any fish bone samples to map on here to confirm that. But because it is higher, I suspect there's at least some freshwater fish. This is what it looks like when you break it down by age and sex. So if you look at the very top, you can see that the infants, the youngest people in this population, are the red cross at the top, so much higher at one trophic level above the parent population. Why is that? Breastfeeding, right there, carnivorous little animals, those babies consuming their mother's tissues, so they're one step higher. Another thing to notice, and I know the data is really tight, that tells us that there isn't a lot of variation in this population, but you can notice that my males of both ages are virtually identical in their diet. The women of the two different age groups differ by about half per male. And my juveniles between 5 and 20 years are the lowest in protein consumption in this graph. So we can come back to that. I did a quick regional comparison just with data from the literature to see how different Regensburg was from other nearby contemporaneous populations. So we see that we have basically very similar carbon values here and a little bit of variation in nitrogen, but nothing hugely different. So coming back to those norms, we have to think about what were the rules around food during this period. So for the German poor, they were considered able to handle a coarser diet. And I put coarser in quotations, but coarser meant things like beef, millet, oats, cabbage, chestnuts, beans, and turnips. Not necessarily coarse foods, in my opinion, all the time. Animal proteins across the board were considered appropriate pretty much for all classes. So things that we would expect in the final evidence we have match up here. Again, we still don't know for sure how much would have been milk eggs versus actual access to terrestrial meats. I have millet highlighted there because when we did some isotopic modeling with this data, we found that there was probably, maybe about 25 to 30% of this population probably consumed a little bit of millet. You can't really read that from the data that I showed you, but it's there when you do some of that cluster modeling. So of course, staffs and laws would have been in effect. How well people adhere to them is another question. Everyone has agency, but the thought that there is fresh water fish in the diet that perhaps these individuals were sticking to a more strict diet. It is a surprise that we see no marine fish in the diet because at this time there was bigger trade in cod and consumption of marine fish, but it's not here. It's not at Regensburg. And the last thing I wanted to touch on was whether or not foods would be appropriate based on age and sex of an individual. So that's really difficult to know if you're a woman, if you're a man, if you're older or younger, certain foods might be taboo for you, or if you're unhealthy, certain foods might be more appropriate. We can't do any fine detail analysis from isotope data on that, but I do put the question out there. We do see some of this difference between the juveniles, the younger individuals, and their parents. So the individuals between 5 and 20, they have the lowest protein consumption. Is that because they have the lowest socioeconomic status in this group, so they're just not getting access to protein like their older counterparts, or if there's something in the social rules around whether or not it's appropriate for people of this age to have the same kinds of protein? And same with the women in this group. Is there a reason why we might be seeing this little bit of difference? So just to conclude, the individuals in this group were aging and inferred, but they were not critically ill. They have unique, but similar diets to those sites in surrounding areas. There's definitely a big range in access to dietary proteins, over a 5-perma range there. No marine foods and slight trends in age and sex. We see a minor consumption in that socially inferior food, which can suggest that these poor house residents may have been from diverse backgrounds. So go back again to that question I said at the beginning, when you have a change in your socioeconomic status and your diet changes to adapt, that could be what's happening here, right? So we're actually seeing the diet from before they made it to the poor house. They may have only been in the poor house for a short period of time. Children perhaps, or elderly who lived a longer time, may have had more time in the poor house, but it could be a reflection of that diet before they fell on hard times. Thank you.