Burial Patterning and Biological Distance at the Black Earth Site (11 - Sa - 87): Implications for Understanding Cemetery Development During the late Middle Archaic MEADOW L. CAMPBELL 1 and RYAN M. CAMPBELL 2 1 Basic Science Department, Logan University; 2 Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University Carbondale INTRODUCTION The use of cemeteries by Archaic period hunter gatherers across the southeastern United States is well documented, with several large cemeteries suggesting sites were occupied over long periods of time through either multiseasonal or year round occupations (Jefferies, 2013). Despite the extensive documentation of these Archaic sites, we still understand very little about how these groups organized and maintained their cemeteries. It remains unclear if burial grounds were planned ritual spaces with kin groups returning to the same plots to bury their dead. This study investigates the relationship between burial proximity and biological kinship in one late Middle Archaic cemetery from the Black Earth Site (11-Sa-87) in southern Illinois. The large cemetery presents a unique opportunity to explore how early populations in this region interacted with the landscape to construct these ritual spaces. RESULTS To illustrate the relative geographic distance between the burials we developed XY plots based on the data from QGIS (Figures 5, 7). Similarly, multidimensional scaling (MDS) outputs were developed from Mahalanobis D matrices to illustrate the relative biodistance between burials (Figures 6, 8). Within each plot, we highlighted a few geographically proximate burials to illustrate how well they cluster in the MDS outputs. The Mantel test comparing biological and geographical pairwise distance matrices found no significant correlation between the position of a burial and biological kinship based on dental metrics (R=0.08085; p=0.16) (Table 1). Similarly, no significant correlation was found for the same matrices using craniometrics (R=-0.03917; p=0.6309) (Table 2). These consistent results indicate that individuals buried near each other do not exhibit the greatest degree of phenotypic similarity. DISCUSSION Many factors influence burial placement (gender, status, kinship, religion, deeds, manner of death, etc.). If people inhabited the Black Earth Site continually, one might expect to find a pattern to burial location that reinforced ties to place and kin. Here, metric analysis of cranial and dental remains of the semi-sedentary hunter- gatherers of the Black Earth Site support the conclusion that spatial position within the cemetery was not based on kinship. In other words, phenotypically similar individuals were not necessarily buried closer to one another. Though the site contains a multitude of artifacts and burials spanning thousands of years, Black Earth was not continually occupied throughout the year, and perhaps was not successively occupied each year (Jefferies and Butler, 1982). It is quite possible that the choice of burial location was opportunistic and unrelated to kinship. It is important to note that at this site, the areas of occupation, graves, and the midden, all overlap. Finally, many years (perhaps multiple generations) may separate any two individuals within this sample. Temporal separation between internments may be a factor in the pattern we observed in the cemetery. CONCLUSION Our results indicate that no significant correlation exists between biological distance and burial proximity. While recognizing the limitations inherent in attempting to identify kin groups using skeletal data, we suggest the results are consistent with what would be expected at a site that was seasonally occupied without the maintenance of formal cemetery boundaries. WORKS CITED Bondioli, L., Corruccini, R. S., & Macchiarelli, R. (1986). Familial segregation in the Iron Age community of Alfedena, Abruzzo, Italy, based on osteodental trait analysis. Am J of Phys Anthropol, 71(4), 393-400. Corruccini, R. S., & Shimada, I. (2002). Dental relatedness corresponding to mortuary patterning at Huaca Loro, Peru. Am J of Phys Anthropol, 117(2), 113-121. Hammer, Ø., Harper, D. A. T., & Ryan, P. D. (2001). Paleontological statistics software: package for education and data analysis. Palaeontologia Electronica, (4). Jefferies, R. W. (2013). The archaeology of Carrier Mills: 10,000 years in the Saline Valley of Illinois. SIU Press. Jefferies, R. W., & Butler, B. M. (1982). The Carrier Mills archaeological project: human adaptation in the Saline Valley, Illinois. Research Paper No. 33. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Miller, M. (1981). The Role of Postcranial Nonmetric Traits in Carrier Mills, Illinois Burials. MA Thesis. Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Owsley, D. W., & Jantz, R. L. (1978). Intracemetery morphological variation in Arikara crania from the Sully site (39SL4), Sully County, South Dakota. Plains Anthropologist, 23(80), 139-148. Stojanowski, C. M. (2005). Biological structure of the San Pedro y San Pablo de Patale mission cemetery. Southeastern Archaeology, 165-179. Stojanowski, C. M., & Hubbard, A. R. (2017). Sensitivity of dental phenotypic data for the identification of biological relatives. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 27(5), 813-827. Stojanowski, C. M., & Schillaci, M. A. (2006). Phenotypic approaches for understanding patterns of intracemetery biological variation. Am J of Phys Anthropol, 131(S43), 49-88. Figure 5. XY plot of geographic distance between burials with teeth Figure 6. Multidimensional scaling output for Mahalanobis D from odontometric data M ANTEL TEST Permutation N: 9999 Correlation R: 0.08085 p (uncorr; onetailed): 0.16 Figure 7. XY plot of geographic distance between burials with complete crania Figure 8. Multidimensional scaling output for Mahalanobis D from craniometric data Table 1. Mantel results comparing Mahalanobis D (odontometric) and Geographic distance Table 2. Mantel results comparing Mahalanobis D (craniometric) and Geographic distance M ANTEL TEST Permutation N: 9999 Correlation R: -0.03917 p (uncorr; onetailed): 0.6309 MATERIALS The Black Earth Site (11-Sa-87) is located within the Carrier Mills Archaeological District in southern Illinois, along the South Fork of the Saline River in Saline County (Figure 1). The multicomponent site includes a substantial late Middle Archaic assemblage of local and extra-local materials, a large, black midden across more than half of the site, and a significant cemetery (Jefferies and Butler, 1982). Archaeological excavations in the late 1970s were divided between three distinct middens (Areas A, B, and C) (Figure 2), with radiocarbon analysis of materials from the western portion of the Black Earth Site (Area A) yielding dates as early as the late Middle Archaic period (~3,955 BC) (Miller, 1981). The skeletal remains used in the present analysis represent adult individuals from Area A of the Black Earth Site. Fourteen standard craniometric and ten odontometric variables were collected from the best-preserved individuals within the site (see handout for measurements). Sample sizes for cranial data consisted of 26 males and 11 females; samples from the dental data comprised 29 males and 23 females. Figure 1. Location of the Black Earth Site (11-Sa-87) along the Saline River in southern Illinois Figure 2. Three areas within 11-Sa-87. the Black Earth Site (Adapted from Jeffries, 2013: Figure 1-2) METHODS In order to identify possible kin groups within the cemetery we chose to utilize a multivariate measure of biological distance, the Mahalanobis D statistic, as a relative measure of similarity between individuals within the sample. This research follows in the footsteps of many small scale, intracemetery biological distance studies (e.g., Bondioli et al., 1986; Corruccini and Shimada, 2002; Owsley and Jantz, 1978; Stojanowski, 2005). While identifying biological kin through skeletal traits presents challenges, recent work has verified the utility of biodistance as a methodology for identifying related individuals (Stojanowski and Hubbard, 2017; Stojanowski and Schillaci, 2006). Geographic distance between individuals at the site was calculated by georeferencing the original burial map in QGIS (v. 2.18.13) and placing points on the skulls of each individual in the cemetery (Figures 3, 4). We then used the coordinate data of each point to create a pairwise distance matrix containing the Euclidian distance between every individual in the cemetery. The Mantel test was employed to compare Mahalanobis D pairwise distances to the geographic distance matrix. We ran separate analyses for cranial and dental datasets to see if the pattern was consistent. All statistical analyses were conducted using PAST (Hammer et al., 2001). Figure 3. Burial points captured in QGIS2.18.13 Figure 4. Close-up of QGIS data capture process