THE BRITISH IN THE BAY: OCCUPATIONAL STRESS AND BIOLOGICAL DISPARITIES

Bioarchaeological and paleodemographic analyses conducted at St. George’s Caye have revealed diverse expressions of osteological stress among individuals interred in the island’s colonial cemetery. Dental pathologies, skeletal infections, and traumas are particularly common among a subset of individuals that also displayed evidence of significant enthesopathy development. The combination of depressed health, numerous traumas, and entheseal stress has been documented in similar frequencies in other bioarchaeological studies of working class and enslaved cemeteries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North America. Previous historic and archaeological research on St. George’s Caye has demonstrated that the island was populated by British colonists and free and enslaved people of African descent, and that the colonial population was primarily occupied with timber extraction economies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this paper we explore how patterns of demographic structure, disease, and trauma found at St. George’s Caye reflect participation in the logwood and mahogany economies in the Bay. We discuss how pathological variation within the cemetery may reflect patterns of social stratification and/or inequality that are prevalent in colonial discourses but have otherwise been absent from existing archaeological analyses at St. George’s Caye.