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Human Interest

The Archeology Laboratory of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), in Amador, houses human and animal skeletal remains that have been found over several decades in different scientific excavations in Panama.

Dr. Nicole Smith-Guzmán was recently appointed curator of the Archeology Laboratory and is organizing the vast collection. Her goal is to group the materials from the same site, put their respective labels on them and digitize them with their codes.

The scientist did her postdoctoral studies at STRI and is a member of the National Research System (SNI) of the National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation (Senacyt). Her main interest is the information that bones provide about diseases.

Most of the materials are the product of excavations carried out by Dr. Richard Cooke on Cerro Juan Díaz, in the province of Los Santos. Others come from the Sierra site, which he excavated in the 1970s, and from Cerro Mangote, excavated by Charles McGimsey in the 1950s and by Anthony Ranere in 1979.

Archaeological legacy of Panama
Dr. Nicole Smith-Guzmán is a curator at the STRI Archeology Laboratory and a member of the SNI. She shows the remains of an individual found in a burial on Cerro Juan Díaz. Senacyt

There are also findings by anthropologist and archaeologist Olga Linares, from surveys conducted by Dr. Cooke in the 1980s with other colleagues in the Santa María River basin, and from a survey conducted by archaeologist Ilean Isaza in the basin. of the river La Villa.

On the ground floor is the zooarchaeology reference collection, which is used by researchers to identify the animal species that are represented in archaeological sites.

Collaboration

Smith-Guzmán mentions that he is waiting for a grant from the NSF of the United States, to carry out an interdisciplinary project together with other collaborators and advisors, including Dr. Cooke, zooarchaeologist Ashley Sharpe and archaeologist and paleoecologist Dolores Piperno, to learn more. of the diet and mobility of pre-Columbian populations, through isotope analysis.

Archaeological legacy of Panama
Sergio Castro, in the Senacyt fauna reference collection laboratory

Smith-Guzmán will record any signs of anemia or inflammation in human bones from the lab. “We are also going to see the remains of plants within the calculus of the teeth. We want to know what plants they ate and if there are wear patterns that suggest that they used their mouths to peel vegetables or to make nets.”

Also working in the laboratory are Aureliano Valencia, Dr. Cooke’s assistant and technician; Máximo Jiménez, technician in charge of the reference collection; and Alexandra Lara, Dr. Cooke’s assistant, who has worked on digitizing the archives.

There are two postdoctoral fellows, a Fullbright fellow, and interns, including Jeny Smid, from the University of Panama, who is starting her short-term research fellowship for her undergraduate thesis. Her project consists of collecting data on the metric and non-metric aspects of human teeth, mainly from Cerro Juan Díaz, to see possible biological affiliations between individuals buried together.

The size and shape of the teeth are determined by the genes and can give clues to kinship when the bones and teeth are not well preserved or it is not possible to analyze the DNA, explains Smith-Guzmán.

Later, says the scientist, they will work with the Italian team led by Dr. Alessandro Achilli, to analyze the DNA of the remains from Cerro Juan Díaz.

Bones ‘talk’

“Before I arrived in Panama in 2015, Dr. Cooke started the Venado beach project (Veracruz area), promoted by the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington, DC, which had objects from that site, but they lacked information from its context”, mentions the archaeologist.

Some of Dr. Cooke’s colleagues had analyzed objects from Playa Venado; among them, Luis Sánchez, an archaeologist from the National Museum of Costa Rica, who also worked on Cerro Juan Díaz and who had analyzed vessels and ceramics from this site, which are in the Peabody Museum of Harvard University. And Warwick Bray, emeritus archaeologist at University College London, had analyzed gold objects that are in various museums around the world.

Information about Playa Venado was scattered and Dr. Cooke tried to consolidate all the stories from the various museum archives.

Smith-Guzmán comments that, although there was a looting in Playa Venado, some of those who worked there recorded and donated to the national museum some of the things they excavated and wrote articles, which at least help to reconstruct what they did on the site and the context of some of the objects that are in the museums.

Archaeologist Samuel Lothrop, who excavated at the site in the 1950s, reported that the burials showed signs of violent deaths.

After joining the project, the archaeologist went to the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in Washington DC to review human remains from Lothrop’s excavations.

“Lothrop was not interested in collecting all the bones from each burial. He used the jaws and skulls to estimate the sex and age of individuals. Almost no individual had the entire skeleton. It is likely that, since bioarchaeology did not exist, what archaeologists could do with human bones was very limited”, adds Smith-Guzmán.

The scientist estimated basic data on the skeletons, looking for signs of disease and checking for cut marks, evidence of violence or trauma around the time of death, and through the demographics of the individuals represented in the museum. She verified if it is what would be expected for a normal cemetery, that there be remains of the entire population, or if it was only of a specific group.

In 2018 he published his findings in a joint article with Dr. Cooke in Latin American Antiquity, concluding that the evidence suggested that Lothrop’s interpretation of violence was incorrect.

The work carried out on Playa Venado was synthesized in a chapter of the catalog of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington, DC, which can be consulted in the National Library of Omar Park, and has images of artifacts that are in the Peabody Museum. It also contains chapters by other authors, such as Dr. Julia Mayo.

Diseases

In the analysis of bones from sites in Panama, the archaeologist has found possible evidence of diseases such as syphilis, cancer, and rare diseases such as osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes bones to fracture easily.

“In Cerro Mangote, what seems to be evidence of syphilis in bones has been found, but it is difficult to be 100% sure, it could also be a sign of another subspecies that causes treponematosis, chronic infection by bacteria of different subspecies associated with different diseases in humans, such as yaws, and that leave a very similar imprint on the bones”, details Dr. Smith-Guzmán.

“This year I published about a tooth from Cerro Juan Díaz, which has an abnormal shape and could be a case of congenital syphilis, but it is possible that rare diseases also cause that abnormal shape.”

Smith-Guzmán took X-rays of one of the skeletons Lothrop collected, which is in the Washington DC museum, to identify fractures. “He is a young adult, 20 to 35 years old. His cortical bone was very thin, as if he had osteoporosis. He had quite a porous skull and many fractures in all the long bones, producing a bowed shape. His humerus also had a fracture, which may indicate that it happened to him as an infant, when he was crawling.

In Panama Viejo, the archaeologist had seen bones that showed a collagen deficiency disorder, which causes bones to break like this and makes a young person look like they have osteoporosis, an almost classic example of osteogenesis imperfecta.

About cancer, the scientist explains that, usually, what can be seen in the bones are consequences of a cancer that originated in another part of the body.

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