Bioarqueología de las infecciones: sexo y género y sus efectos en la salud en personas sepultadas en la Ciudad de México, siglos XVIII y XIX

Resumen

By the 18th and 19th centuries, Mexico City had already experienced a series of diseases that caused several deaths among its population due to epidemics, migration, poverty, poor housing conditions, overcrowding, and water and sanitation problems. Some of these low-income individuals were buried in cemeteries such as San Andrés and Santa Paula, isolated from the city to avoid contagion. Given this scenario, it is worth asking: What health problems did they face? What evidence do the sources and skeletal remains provide in this regard? And whether these provide information about the daily lives of its inhabitants, in order to identify sociocultural differences between men and women, along with biological factors, that may have impacted the expression of infectious diseases. A mixed methodology was used, using a paleoepidemiological approach to obtain prevalence rates and statistical significance tests, which were discussed with the proposal of biocultural, gender, life history, and microhistory approaches to reconstruct these experiences. The results, although not showing a very significant difference between men and women, reveal the differential risks they faced due to the social roles they played, along with biological factors linked to immunocompetence.