Osteometric scoring of adult residual rickets skeletal plasticity in two archaeological populations from southeastern England: Relationship to sunshine and calcium deficits and demographic stress

An osteometric scoring technique is developed for the quantification of rickets deformational effects persisting in the healed adult skeleton. Termed RR‐15 scoring (for residual rickets estimate, based on 15 main diagnostic osteometric traits), the method is first validated for sunshine deficit, and is then tested in a comparison of three climatically distinct archaeological populations from southeastern England. Two well‐dated cemetery series were sampled: the Saint Bride's Church columbarium collection (SBC) from London at the time of the Industrial Revolution, for which the sex, age, and calender year at death of each individual are known; and the early Anglo‐Saxons from Abingdon, near Oxford (AAS). Estimates of insolation in the past were developed indirectly by reference to δ 18 O mass spectrometer analyses of dated layers of the Greenland ice sheet. In SBC and AAS, the RR‐15 score varies primarily as a direct function of computed sunshine deficit, but is also incremented by deficits of bioavailable calcium in their reconstructed diets, and by demographic stress in AAS, the inferred result of a high birth rate. The amounts of interglobular dentine present in the permanent first and third molar crowns of SBC and AAS have been shown to correlate similarly with sunshine and calcium deficits. The relatively high RR‐15 score obtained in a small sample of northwestern European neanderthals lends quantitative support to the bioenvironmental hypothesis that sunshine‐deficit rickets accounts for much of their paranormal gross morphology.