Investigating Diet and Disease in a Medieval German Poorhouse Population using Isotopic Analysis of Human and Faunal Tissues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates a medieval (twelfth to sixteenth century) poorhouse skeletal collection from Regensburg, Germany, by assessing diet and health. Medieval poorhouses were an early form of social care facility that offered permanent shelter to the sick and destitute. The Regensburg sample offers a chance to explore the lives of an underprivileged group in larger medieval society. Isotopic data from bone collagen, and structural carbonate are used here in combination with osteological evidence for disease to explore dietary histories and health among poorhouse residents. We sampled human (n = 111) and faunal (n = 9) bone for carbon (δ13Ccol and δ13Csc) and nitrogen (δ15Ncol) isotope analysis. Low δ13Ccol and a narrow range in carbon-isotope compositions indicate that poorhouse residents subsisted primarily on C3 plants, and protein from terrestrial and freshwater sources. However, δ15Ncol and Δ13Csc-col values suggest differential access to protein. In addition, a small subset of individuals may have incorporated famine foods like millet (a C4 resource) into their diet. Many individuals survived serious bouts of stress and disease, though most of these conditions were debilitating and not lethal. Overall, the data suggest that the backgrounds of the poorhouse residents may have been diverse, despite a shared lower-class status at the end of their lives. Die Skelettfunde eines Armenhausfriedhofs im mittelalterlichen Regensburg (FRG; 12.–16. Jhdt. A.D.) wurden bezüglich des individuellen Gesundheitszustands und der Ernährung untersucht. Mittelalterliche Armenhäuser stellen frühe soziale Einrichtungen dar, welche kranken und mittellosen Menschen dauerhaften Schutz gewährten. Die Skelettserie aus Regensburg bietet die Möglichkeit, Lebensbedingungen einer unterprivilegierten mittelalterlichen Bevölkerungsschicht zu untersuchen. Hierzu wurden paläopathologische Befunde mit stabilen Isotopenanalysen des Knochenkollagens und strukturellen Karbonats kombiniert, um Ernährungsgewohnheiten und Morbidität der Armenhausbewohner zu erschließen. 111 Menschen-und 9 Tierknochenproben wurden bezüglich stabiler Kohlenstoff- (δ13Ccol und δ13Csc) und Stickstoffisotope (δ15Ncol) untersucht. Vergleichsweise niedrige δ13Ccol und eine insgesamt geringe Variabilität der Kohlenstoffisotopien sprechen für eine mehrheitlich C3-Pflanzen basierte vegetabile Nahrungskomponente der Armenhausbewohner, wobei das Nahrungsprotein sowohl aus terrestrischen als auch aus Süßwasserquellen bezogen wurde. δ15Ncol und Δ13Csc-col belegen jedoch unterschiedlichen individuellen Zugang zu Nahrungseiweiß. Einige wenige Individuen dürften sogar auch damalige Notnahrung wie Hirse—eine C4-Pflanze—konsumiert haben. Zahlreiche Individuen haben offenkundig schwere Stress-und Krankheitsperioden überlebt, obgleich diese mehrheitlich nicht tödlich, wenngleich kräftezehrend und schwächend wirkten. Insgesamt sprechen die Befunde dafür, dass die Bewohner des Armenhauses trotz des gemeinsamen unterprivilegierten Status gegen Lebensende unterschiedliche soziale Hintergründe hatten.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".