Program of the 94^th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists

The Spanish colonization process in Andean South America lasted well over 250 years, producing significant ecological, sociopolitical, and economic ruptures in its wake.Bioarcheologists have long been concerned with how this process ultimately affected Indigenous health.Ancient oral microbiome analyses may be used to capture otherwise invisible nuances of Indigenous morbidity in the Colonial period and provide diachronic insights into the health and dietary changes during this period of dramatic biocultural transformation.This work represents a proof-of-concept assessment for studying molecular-level analyses of human oral microbiomes from the Peruvian archaeological record from the Spanish colonial era.Dental calculus was sampled from Ancestors interred in a Spanish Colonial (1620-1750 CE) cemetery (n=5) and a pre-Colonial (1375-1532 CE) cemetery (n=2) in the Lambayeque Valley Complex in northern Peru.Extracted DNA was partially treated with uracil DNA-glycosylase, and prepared double-stranded libraries were shotgun sequenced using an Illumina HiSeq.SourceTracker analysis confirmed an ancient oral signature from six Ancestral microbiomes.Taxonomic profiling using MetaPhlAn4 identified oral commensal bacteria, such as Actinomyces, Eubacteria, and Peptostreptococcus.On its own, this work establishes the viability of metagenomic research on ancient dental calculus samples belonging to pre-and Colonial era Ancestors from the north coast of Peru.Future work using larger sample sizes will consist of inter-cemetery and broader database comparative analyses of oral microbial compositions, as well as functional analyses to probe for metabolic function to infer dietary trends in the Colonial period.