Abstract
The Windover mortuary pond dates to the Early Archaic period (6,800-5,200 years ago) and constitutes one of the earliest archaeological sites with intact and well-preserved human remains in North America. Unlike many prehistoric egalitarian hunter-gatherers, the Windover people did not practice a sex-based division of labor, rather they shared the load. We explore how mobility and subsistence, as reconstructed from archaeological data, influenced the morphology of hand and foot bones of this population. Using length-width ratios to account for trait size and taking the natural log of the ratio to account for sexual dimorphism, we analyzed 10 variables (4 carpal and 6 tarsal. We identified differences in the rear-and midfoot regions that suggest the Windover occupation was engaging in heavy impact mobility. In particular, females exhibit greater variation and higher mean averages than males for size of shock-absorbing bones. We identified sex-based differences in carpal bones, with females exhibiting greater variation and higher mean ratios in most variables compared to males. Despite widespread behavioural evidence on contemporary populations for human lateralization for hands and feet, we found no evidence of either handedness or footedness in Windover. The lack evidence for footedness was expected due its minimal impact on walking gait but the lack of evidence for handedness is surprising given that modern ethnographic studies have shown strong handedness in hunter-gatherers during tool and goods manufacture. If the archaeological evidence for a shared division of labor is true, we have potentially uncovered evidence for a heavier activity load in females.