Entomology History in a Coffin: Insects from Colonial Coastal Maryland

Insects have lived on Earth for 480 million years, and most live in  ecosystems that  meet their wide range of needs and preferences, including areas of human habitation and burial. Insects can be a valuable analysis tool in paleoecology and archaeology, and when the two are combined, the science can be called archaeoentomology.

Michael Monzon, a PhD student at Purdue University, conducted an archeoentomologic analysis of Philip Calvert’s coffin, a landowner from the first permanent English colony in Maryland, who was buried at Historic St. Mary’s City in 1683. While some insects are assumed to have intruded the coffin space after burial, the surface-dwelling insects from Calvert’s coffin provide a snapshot of the insect fauna living at the time. These insects’ preferences and needs are used as proxies for the different ecosystems or resources they represent. For example, the common furniture beetle, Anobium punctatum, is native to Europe and its occurrence in Cavert’s coffin represents an early documentation of its invasion into North America.

This study was paired with a survey of the modern insects at Historic St. Mary’s City to help understand changes to the ecosystem since the Colonial period. The rich insect assemblage found in Calvert’s coffin provides a rare window into the arthropod life encountered by Maryland agrarian societies before modern agriculture.

Michael A. Monzon studies fly–microbe ecology and paleoentomology in the forensic entomology lab at Purdue. He is from coastal New Jersey and received his BS and MD from Rutgers University. During his master’s program, he spent a year studying environmental archaeology at Umeå University through a Fulbright fellowship and was a New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium Coastal Health fellow.