Tracing Diseases of Contact at the End of Human Mobility

This proposes a new integrated method identifying the effects of major transitions in human lifeways on the prevalence of communicable disease. Specifically, it will look at the shifts in disease burden associated with the advent of sedentary, dense and animal-managing populations over the transition from the Epipalaeolithic to the Neolithic period in Central Anatolia at high enough resolution to identify daily records of childhood growth and sub-annual signatures of mobility. This work takes up the theoretical challenge first posed fifty years ago that sedentism and reliance on agriculture are responsible for the Neolithic increase in disease and the ‘First Epidemiological Transition’. It asks: • Is there variation in the experience of childhood health as evidenced by growth disruptions in enamel linked to febrile events between non-sedentary, semi-sedentary, and sedentary groups in Central Anatolia? o Variation in prevalence, timing, duration, and effect of growth-disrupting health events? • How does the experience of growth disruption in childhood correlate to sedentism and animal management? o Variation in isotopic signatures of mobility? o Variation in archaeological record of settlement? • How do we ‘read’ these at landscape level in Central Anatolia? o What is an accurate model of population density and mobility in the long neolithic?