Using dental cementum increment analysis to estimate age and season of death in African Americans from an historical cemetery in Missouri

The Missouri River in Callaway County, Missouri, flooded in 1993, necessitating salvage excavations at old Shiloh Cemetery, which yielded 11 mostly complete skeletons of African American adolescents and 7 other individuals who died during the mid to late 1800s. The skeletons exhibit evidence of stress normal for the period but no indications of cause of death. The individuals' unusual age distribution and proximity to one another raise the question of how they died. It is possible these individuals died from trauma or chronic or acute disease. Among the possible causes of death is one of the epidemics that swept across Missouri during the 1800s. In this study we counted tooth cementum annulations (TCA) to verify the skeletal age-at-death estimates and conducted dental cementum increment analysis (DCIA) to determine the season of death as a first step in understanding the history of the cemetery. TCA results confirmed that the 11 African-American individuals examined were teenagers. DCIA demonstrated that all of the individuals died between April and September. The burials, therefore, represent a section of a mixed-race cemetery, which included African American teenagers who died during the same season. Future research will attempt to identify whether this burial cohort died of chronic or acute disease, possibly of an epidemic of infectious disease.