An osteobiography of a Oaxacan late adolescent female

Skeleton Sk-CV-1 is the first and only human skeleton known from controlled excavations in the Chontal region of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This approximately 17-year-old female was carefully buried in a stone cist between the 14th and 16th century CE, a time period of great transformations for which there are only a few analyzed skeletons in the State of Oaxaca. The archaeological context and historical documentation associate her with the Chontal people who still inhabit the region, and whose contemporary practices serve as ethnographic analogies for this study. In this article we present the archaeological, osteological, and stable isotope analyses of this unique skeleton, to give a first glimpse into the diseases, activities, and diet of this little known ethnic group and time period.