The population showed signs of treponemal disease—non-venereal syphilis—a fact she shared selectively with new acquaintances, deploying it as a kind of personality test.
Pepper’s research is based on my own experience as an undergraduate as part of a research program funded by the NSF. Like Pepper, my research involved a collection of archaic-period human skeletal remains from Kentucky that showed signs of treponemal disease (endemic syphilis). We believed the remains had come from a seasonal burial site, because the bones had gnaw marks on them, indicating they’d been buried shallowly and animals had gotten to them, and because there were cut marks near the joints, indicating the bodies had been disarticulated before being moved to a more permanent burial site.
My own research was on general indicators of the population’s health—if you stop growing as a child due to illness or famine, often there’s a record of that in your bones or teeth—but we didn’t find anything statistically significant in our sample of the population. I did, however, as part of the same research program, work on a statistics project in which our subject was “Responses to Public Flatulence,” in which my classmates and I planted someone with a fart machine in various stores and recorded people’s responses to their “flatulence.” We did, in fact, find a statistically significant difference in the way people responded to female versus male flatulence.
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