Sharon DeWitte

I am a biological anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina with expertise in paleodemography, paleoepidemiology, and bioarchaeology. My primary research interest is infectious disease in the past, particularly how factors such as sex, socioeconomic status, migration, developmental stress, and diet affected risks of mortality from disease, how disease shaped population dynamics, and how host and environmental factors affect disease patterns. Using skeletal samples, I examine medieval mortality crises (famine and plague), including the mortality patterns, the demographic and health consequences, and the context of the emergence of the Black Death c. 1347-1351.