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Faculty Advisor

Gabriela González Avilés

Abstract

Female human second metacarpal (mc2) bones from a medieval cemetery at Wharram Percy, England, were studied using high-energy Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) at beamline 1-ID of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. The age-at-death of 33 samples was determined from molar wear and classified into 3 groups:  18-30, 30-50, and 50+ years old.  Rietveld refinements of the WAXS data were performed to obtain lattice parameters of the hexagonal carbonated apatite phase (cAp). Individual fittings for cAp peaks 00.2, 00.4, and 31.0 were performed to obtain their widths and correlate them to collagen retention. For the three samples described in this paper (one from each age group), the “a” lattice parameter decreased systematically with age-at-death (a 0.014 Å decrease from the young to the older age group), while the peak width did not show a consistent trend.  The results of the remaining 30 samples will allow us to do a statistical analysis to determine if these observations apply to the full set of bones.

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