The shape of childhood: a morphometric growth study of the Anglo-Saxon to Post-Medieval Period

Abstract

Growth is a heavily studied field in juvenile bioarchaeological studies. The question of shape or developmental trajectories, however, has only recently been investigated as methodological advances such as geometric morphometrics (GM) have become more available. This thesis applied GM to archaeological juveniles and explored how biological processes affect bone shape during ontogeny to answer ‘what is bone shape and what do shape trajectories tell us?’ The application of GM allows for a novel analysis of developmental trajectories as whole bone morphology is analysed and visualised in a three-dimensional space. To determine if long bone plasticity is influenced by archaeological site and time period, 178 juveniles of Anglo-Saxon to Post-Medieval foetal to 12 year old long bones were examined; they formed a comprehensive dataset to integrate GM with traditional bioarchaeological methodologies of growth and development.

The objective of this thesis was to develop a reproducible methodology that captures the torsion, curvature, and whole bone growth and development of the juvenile femora, tibiae, and humeri. This was accomplished through two validation studies; the first aimed to determine if GM can be used on cylindrically shaped long bones. Here, the methodological applicability of 3D GM on juvenile long bones examined linear measurements, 3D GM with landmark and semi-landmarks, and automated 3D GM. The second aimed to assess if different scanning methods, inducing laser, photogrammetry, and structured light scanning affect geometric morphometric analyses of bone shape.

This thesis contributes new insights on the applicability and importance of geometric morphometric approaches to the study of human juvenile long bones. The principal findings were that long bone shape is statistically significant by site and period from foetal to 5 years old and that shape is not a linear progression of increasingly larger shapes but rather fluctuations in the changes of shape. It was also found that the developmental trajectories had different potential in the extent of shape that could be achieved for each age group, and that trajectories could change as a result of developmental pathways such as nutritional or environmental stress that occurred during growth.

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ORCID for Joanna Sofaer: orcid.org/0000-0001-6328-8636

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