Kirsten Kelmelis

KIRSTEN S. KELMELIS, then a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, was awarded a grant in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Modeling Variation in Well-Being in Urban and Rural Skeletal Samples from Medieval Denmark,’ supervised by Dr. James Wood. The grantee conducted three months of data collection at the Unit of Anthropology (ADBOU) of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, University of Southern Denmark, Odense. To test the efficacy of a newly developed frailty model, the grantee collected and analyzed skeletal data from four cemetery collections (n=634), including age at death, sex, dental enamel defects, and paleopathological lesions from chronic infectious diseases (leprosy, tuberculosis, and treponematosis) and non-specific infections (periostitis, osteomyelitis, and porotic hyperostosis of the cranial vault and orbits). During data collection, the grantee completed disease prevalence analyses for leprosy and tuberculosis in a skeletal sample (n=204) from her three original cemeteries (Ole Wormsgade, Sejet, and ‘m Kloster) and the medieval town of Ribe to test if disease prevalence was related to urban development in the 13th century Denmark. The results have been submitted for publication in Anthropologischer Anzeiger. Within three months, the grantee collected data from an additional medieval cemetery and conducted preliminary analyses of disease prevalence and survivorship for the four samples. The results of these analyses will be applied to the new frailty model to test the objectives of this doctoral dissertation.