Complicating Categories: How Historical Documents can Impact Osteological Interpretations
Introduction
Racial identifiers in US historic identified skeletal collections often simplify data into “Black” and “White”, obscuring both the heterogeneity of the sample as well as potential selection biases inherent in the collection’s creation. This study uses publicly available death certificates from 1911-1938 to establish the birthplace data of 807 white male individuals whose skeletonized remains were once housed or are currently housed within the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection (HTOC) and compares it to the birthplace data for 111,548 white males in Cuyahoga county to see if the HTOC is a representative sample of the Cleveland population. Then a case study of individual HTH 1684 is presented to show how birthplace data add much needed context to our interpretations of individual health histories.