Biogenic lead levels in human skeletal remains from the cemetery of the British Royal Navy hospital (1793-1822CE) at English Harbour, Antigua West Indies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though lead has been known to be a cause of human poisoning since ancient times, it \nwas a widely used metal. The relationship between ancestry or age and lead exposure in the Colonial period of Antigua, West Indies was explored by comparing the lead levels in bone samples from individuals of two different ancestries, African and European, from a cemetery associated with a British Royal Navy hospital (1793-1822CE) at English Harbour in Antigua, West Indies. The non-segregated nature of this cemetery is believed to have been unique for the period, and allowed for more direct comparisons between ancestral groups in this study. Cortical samples from the fibular diaphysis of 24 male individuals were analyzed for lead by ICP-MS. \nThe mean lead levels were found to be 74.3?51.8ppm for the African population, and \n87.7?78.6ppm for the European population. No significant difference was found between the mean lead levels of the two ancestries. Furthermore, no discernible pattern in lead levels was found in relation to the individuals? ages. The biogenic origin of the lead was confirmed by scanning the bone samples using synchrotron radiation X-ray fluorescence imaging (SR-XFI). Visible evidence of incorporation of lead into the microstructures of bone indicated that lead uptake likely occurred during the individuals? lifetimes. These results are in contrast to previously published studies comparing lead levels of individuals from similar and contemporaneous populations. The outcomes of this research suggest naval personnel of both African and European ancestry at English Harbour in Antigua, West Indies had very similar experiences with regards to lead exposure. Their exposure to the toxic metal was not consistent over time, however, as steady exposure would likely have resulted in a positive correlation of lead level with individual age. This study assists in addressing historical questions regarding both the prevalence of lead poisoning in the British Royal Navy during the Colonial period and lead?s potential involvement in the deaths of naval personnel.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".