Reflections of manual labor in the hand entheses of early industrial women workers with extensively documented life histories

Abstract

Objectives: Sex-based occupational variability constitutes a fundamental component of human behavior and a major focus of research focusing on biocultural evolution. However, the reliability of reconstructing physical activity in past women is often compromised by the lack of female skeletal collections with adequately documented lifetime occupations, domestic living conditions, medical records, and socioeconomic status. Here, we attempt to reconstruct habitual manual activity in a skeletal sample of early industrial women with uniquely archived life histories. Materials and Methods: We rely on the application of our “Validated Entheses-based Reconstruction of Activity” method on the hand skeletons of 38 extensively documented individuals from the Basel-Spitalfriedhof collection. Our comparisons also include 40 documented males from the same collection. Results: As expected, we found evidence of increased entheseal variability among women sharing the same unspecialized occupation (maids and factory workers). Moreover, certain entheseal patterns were almost exclusive to the men involved in occupations not associated with the female sex (mainly construction workers). Importantly, all six women known to have practiced more specific occupational activities (e.g., seamstresses) showed distinctive entheseal patterns, seemingly associated with more demanding physical practices. This within-sex variation was not correlated with differences in biological age, estimated body size, socioeconomic status, relatedness, or the presence of reported children. Discussion: Our findings directly reflect the rich historical sources on the working lives of low-status women in early industrial Basel. These results highlight the high potential value of our documented sample as a reference basis for reconstructing the division of labor in bioarchaeological contexts.