Carter Clinton, “The Hillsborough Legacy Project: Four Centuries of Paired Genomic Analysis from Burial Soil to Living Descendants”
The Hillsborough Legacy Project at NC State utilizes non-destructive burial soil multiomics—analyzing preserved human, microbial, plant, and animal DNA—to reconstruct life histories from an 18th-century plantation burial ground in Orange County, North Carolina. By pairing ancient DNA recovered from soil in the ASHES Laboratory’s new ancient DNA cleanroom with whole-genome sequencing from 63 community descendants, the project examines genomic admixture as an observable generational process rather than a static inference. The study tests whether multi-generational recombination decouples inherited variant combinations to create unique risk profiles for complex conditions disproportionately affecting African Americans, including hypertension, stroke, chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and asthma, ultimately using soil multiomics as an evolutionary baseline to illuminate modern health disparities.
Carter Clinton, a genetic anthropologist, is an Assistant Professor at N.C. State University, where he directs the Ashes (Ancestry, Soil, Health, and Evolutionary Studies) Lab. His research integrates ancient DNA, burial soil genomics, and African diaspora population genomics to investigate ancestry, identity, and health in African American communities. His lab pioneers non-destructive metagenomic methods that recover human, microbial, plant, and pathogen DNA from burial soils without disturbing ancestral remains. Current work applies evolutionary medicine and whole-genome sequencing to identify ancestry-derived disease markers associated with complex diseases, immune gene variation, and cardiometabolic conditions leveraging temporal comparisons between pre-admixture burial soil genomes and living descendant communities to build ancestry-informed frameworks that move beyond race as a biological proxy. A National Geographic Explorer and Cosmos Scholar, he centers descendant communities as active research partners across all phases of his work.