Catherine Loretta McCormack

The environments in which people live play a significant role in health, including infectious disease risks. Although more difficult to study in ancient populations, advancements in paleogenomics methodologies now allow for the reconstruction of pathogens from Ancestral populations across long time scales, with the opportunity to greatly improve our knowledge about the lived experience of past populations and shape how we understand infectious disease evolution in the present. In this vein, this project will assess the presence of infectious diseases in Ancestors buried at the Maya site of Chactemal across two periods of the site’s lengthy chronology: the Early Classic period (300 – 500 CE) and the Late Postclassic period (1300 – 1530 CE). Archaeological data from this site shows significant changes in social structure and increases in population size, trade, and migration between the study periods corresponding to broader patterns of ecological change in Mesoamerica. As a part of a larger community-engaged project on the population history of Chactemal. This study will sequence genetic material collected from dental powder sampled from thirteen Ancestors across these two periods and use computational methods to identify and analyze pathogen genomes, informing understandings of how social change impacted infectious disease in this population.