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Bones - Season 7, Episode 13 (Review)

2012-05-14T23:42:00.001-04:00

The Past in the Present

Episode Summary

The season finale refocuses on Christopher Pillant, a brilliant but sociopathic computer hacker from Episode 6. Pillant had been under house arrest and devoid of the internet because of previous charges of wire and computer fraud. He is also a suspect in two unsolved murders, so Booth, Brennan, and Miss Julian testify at his parole hearing to keep him at least contained in his house. As the hearing closes, Booth and Brennan each get a call about a murder in the woods - and their ringtones have been changed to howling wolves.

In the wildlife refuge, a couple whose GPS led them astray found a body. Brennan notes that the victim is male and that the lack of billowing on his auricular surface indicates he's in his late 30s. Hodgins estimates the man has been dead for two days because of the presence of Mycetophilidae eggs. The healed fracture Brennan notices in the man's left humerus is significant - it transects the medial epicondyle at the trochlea, and she recognizes the man as Ethan Sawyer, a friend from graduate school whose arm Brennan set when he broke it on a ski trip. (Sure, she's not a medical doctor, but her name is Bones, after all. She can do more than set bones on a table. Oh wait, no, she can't.) Brennan immediately suspects Pillant, as she had enlisted Ethan's help with the Pillant case, even though Ethan was committed to the high security ward of a mental hospital for being delusional schizophrenic.

At this point, Brennan should take herself off the case because of her close connection to the victim, and also because she'd compromised the Pillant case by taking counsel from an outside source - and a crazy one at that. But she doesn't. Wendell examines the body and finds tooth marks on the zygomatic from five or six different wolves. Saroyan notes hemorrhagic staining around 50% of the bite marks, which meant that Ethan was still technically alive when the wolves started eating him.

In a strange bit of editing, we return from commercial unsure of where Booth and Brennan are or what they're watching. Seems they're watching some sort of interview with Ethan Sawyer, and he's talking about needing to kill the demon, and it's explained that the demon is Christine. So in 15 seconds of confused exposition, suddenly Brennan has a motive for murdering Ethan, a motive on which the entire rest of the trumped-up case against her seems to hang. Due to a computer glitch, Ethan was transferred to a less secure area of the mental facility and walked away. Brennan had seen him a couple weeks before, and he had given her an old math textbook as a gift.

Angela checks the video surveillance from the mental hospital, and the tape has been doctored to make it look like Brennan was visiting Ethan the night he died. There's apparently no paper record of visitors to the secure ward of a mental hospital - sign in sheet, photocopies of ID, wardens' recollections - just time-stamped security footage. Angela asks Brennan if she has an alibi for that night, but she claims she doesn't. As in, Brennan never says what she was doing - was she at work? At home nursing her infant? Eating dinner with Booth? Seriously, someone must have seen her that night.

Wendell finds the tip of a needle in the C7 vertebra. Saroyan extracts it, and Hodgins finds a trace of an anesthesia called curare that was used in the 1940s. It's not made anymore, so you'd have to distill it yourself, from Chondrodendron tomentosum. Hodgins has some of the plants, but Brennan had asked him for it because she was studying a tribe in western Colombia that used it to poison their darts. You know, in the copious spare time she has while being the best forensic anthropologist in the country and a new mom.

At this point, Brennan is preposterously still on the case. She finds a series of cut marks on Ethan's skeleton. Booth meanwhile claims that all evidence for the case goes through him. He gets a mysterious phone call seemingly from Brennan, saying she was being held by Pillant. Booth breaks down the door and beats up Pillant, who calls the police by taking off his ankle monitor. And finally Miss Julian removes both Brennan and Booth from the case, turning it over to Lt. Flynn, FBI Special Agent in Charge of Creepy Stares. Angela, Wendell, and Saroyan look more closely at the cut marks, which cross minor arteries. The killer severed them to entice the wolves with the scent of blood while Ethan was alive but immobilized. Saroyan concludes that since Pillant has no training in circulatory anatomy, he couldn't have done this. Because she's forgotten how he disassembled and reassembled a human body in episode 6. And that even a moderately intelligent person can read a book on the topic.

Booth's harassment of Pillant gets him paroled, apparently. He makes a bomb and plants it in Booth and Brennan's house, in place of their usual alarm clock. Flynn questions Sweets about his profile of Ethan's killer, and he is forced to admit it fits both Pillant and Brennan. Sweets is now off the case too.

Angela hacks into Pillant's email, credit card records, and library account and discovers through the latter that he checked out over 80 books in the past month. Flynn gets a warrant to search Brennan's car and house, but can only do the car because of an error in the warrant for the house. Hairs in the trunk match Ethan's. Miss Julian is going to arrest Brennan but is giving her a few hours before doing so, to let her get her affairs in order. Brennan remembers the quote Ethan wrote in the book he gave her: "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, 'Let Newton be,' and all was light." (Alexander Pope) Booth sends Hodgins and Saroyan to Ethan's room at the mental hospital, where they find a triangle of secret code written in Ethan's saliva on the wall, revealed through black light. Angela has an a-ha moment after talking to Brennan, who's at Christine's christening with Booth and Max. She hypothesizes that Pillant was uploading viruses through the RFID codes in the library books. When the books were scanned, the viruses deployed into the system and eventually got to the internet.

Angela tells Miss Julian about this, but she's also off the case, since Pillant managed to wire money to her from Brennan's account. After the christening, Booth goes to get the car, but Brennan hops into the one Max brings her. She decides to make a run for it rather than being arrested for Ethan's murder. Because that's what any normal, rational scientist would do: run from the law, rather than trust in her colleagues to solve the case. And we're supposed to believe it because of the sad-eyed baby in the back seat.

Aw, sad-eyed baby is soooooo sad. The pathos. It hurts my ovaries.

Comments

Forensic

Loss of billowing is one of the characteristics of the auricular surface we use to assess age. But using the auricular surface requires looking at multiple features of it, not just billowing. And there are better ways to estimate age - auricular surface is not going to narrow the age range down to "late 30s."
Why does Brennan think she's a medical doctor who can set a break? Especially a very uncommon break to the elbow, a joint that requires good range-of-motion?
In one of the music video montages (seriously, why were there so many, when the rest of the plot was so rushed?), Brennan is looking at the skeleton on the light table, and the humeri are reversed (or maybe just upside down? Hard to tell).
Nice callback to Angela's fancy taphonomy-remover program, previously used in episode 9 (which was by far my favorite episode of the season to hate on).

I asked a Geek about the computer stuff...

Can someone remotely switch ring tones? Yes, quite feasible if it's a smart phone, especially an Android phone. Random bit of scariness: If someone hacks your Gmail password, they can install programs, read your email, and do other nasty stuff to your Android phone. So maybe change your password now, mmm 'k?
Could viruses be embedded in RFID stickers? Maybe, but this is getting closer to the fractal nonsense from episode 6. These RFID stickers are generally static, so you're just reading a number, not actual computer code. But if you've written your library system especially badly, it could work, as through SQL-injection attack. Still pretty unlikely.

Plot

Why would Pillant be up for parole if he was a suspect in two unsolved murders? Seriously, no one's checking in on him for any reason? And how does harassment from an FBI officer give him immediate parole? Why does Saroyan completely underestimate him if he's a crazy genius?
Why are we just now meeting Ethan Sawyer, and why does he just happen to be a crazy person committed to a mental asylum whose odd fracture Brennan fixed because they were besties in grad school? Oh, right, because it's convenient for the plot. And by convenient, I mean convoluted.
Why did it take so long to remove Brennan, Booth, and Sweets from the case?
Why didn't the mental hospital have any other records of visitors to the super-secure ward?
Why doesn't Brennan have an alibi for the night Ethan was killed?
Angela is suddenly a better computer hacker than Pillant? "Irony," explains Angela. "Convenient plot point," say I.
Why are Saroyan and Hodgins looking for a triangle? I have no idea where that came from. At least they found it.
Why is no one else at the christening? Those don't usually happen at a completely empty church.
Why would Brennan want to run? It's not like she's minutes away from getting the electric chair. She'd probably post a giant bond and be put under house arrest or surveillance or something. Isn't the evidence against her all circumstantial, or at least evidence that can easily be planted?
Finally, why does Booth's hair get lighter every episode? And why is Ryan O'Neal obsessed with that Members Only jacket?

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - D+. No mystery here. Brennan ID'ed the victim at the scene. And seemed to know who killed him. Immediately.

Forensic Solution - B-. Auricular surface billowing isn't great, but theoretically a fracture could be distinct enough to ID someone. Immediately?

Drama - C- (plot) / A- (drama). So if you read all my comments under plot points, you'll see that this was a wonky, messy, underdeveloped plot. Every new thing out of anyone's mouth in the second half strained credulity, and I had to just accept it and move on to the next contrived plot point. But ignoring all the plot holes, the hour of television was suitably dramatic - there was a fight scene, a kissing scene, a rogue FBI agent scene, loads of people freaking out, and a not-without-my-baby final voyage into the sunset. Plus, a literal ticking time bomb, set to go off some time in August, I guess. I have to ding the drama grade, though. The Bones writers generally handle the serialized serial killers quite well - Gormogon, Gravedigger, Broadsky - but they missed an opportunity this season to put Pillant in another episode or two, which made everything really rushed in the finale.

Welp, that's it, folks! Join me in the fall for the season premiere and resolution of the cliffhangers from tonight's episode.

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Gay Caveman II: Electric Boogaloo

2012-05-09T14:03:00.000-04:00

Remember last year around this time, when the Daily Mail published a story on the first "gay caveman" found in the Czech Republic? And then how the international news media jumped on it like a snake swallowing a kid goat whole? [ Daily Mail / Telegraph ]

Remember how a number of anthropologists got really angry about the interpretation of the find, the ignorance of the news media about human sexuality and gender, and the ridiculously loaded language that was being bandied about as if the labels of today can be accurately read in the archaeological past? [ Me - Gay Caveman! ZOMFG! / John Hawks - The "gay caveman" / Rosemary Joyce - "Gay caveman": Wrecking a perfectly good story ]

Remember how CNN and LiveScience interviewed us to "debunk" the sensationalized story after Jezebel and Salon mocked the general cluelessness of the news media and gullibility of the public? [ CNN / LiveScience / Jezebel / Salon ]

Well, the Gay Caveman is back! The Daily Mail reports today on "The only gay in the Stone Age village." Czech archaeologists who uncovered this anomalous burial last year have now found the remains of the village associated with the burials, near Prague. The longhouses and their associated artifacts (e.g., pottery) date to 2900-2500 BC.

Helpfully, the Daily Mail uses quotes and language from a year ago, from before anthropologists descended on this story and - horror of horrors! - complicated and muddled the media's crisp interpretation of the anomalous burial. At least, I'm guessing the Daily Mail is using old quotes, because I hope Vesinova did not reiterate this year the ridiculous claim that "he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transvestite."

The site is quite an interesting one, and the pictures are great. I can't understand why the Daily Mail continues to bait us, though. To reiterate:

2900 BC is not "caveman" times.
There is no archaeological evidence whatsoever of this individual's sexual orientation.

*sigh*

At least this story continues to give me interesting stuff to discuss with my students.

Not gay. Not a caveman.

Bones - Season 7, Episode 12 (Review)

2012-05-08T23:22:00.001-04:00

The Suit on the Set

Episode Summary

Brennan, Booth, and Christine have traveled to LA to be on the set of Bone of Contention, a full-length movie being made from Brennan's book of the same name. The stars, Cherie Redfern and Blaine Conway, are playing the fictionalized Brennan and Booth - Dr. Kathy Reichs (true to the name-flipping conceit of Bones) and Andy Lister (rather than Andrew Ryan, the love interest in Reichs' Brennan books). The set is awash in fancy, blinking things and is emblazoned with WISK, the Washington Institute for Science and Technology.

Brennan is initially upset at the revisions to her screenplay, but she and Booth settle in to watch the filming. When Redfern as Reichs says something along the lines of, "The victim has penetrating trauma to the chest bones followed by a massive cardiacal eruption. I could extract the medial epicondyle..." then breaks open the chest cavity, Brennan loses it and complains about the mistakes in the science and dialogue. Mandy Oh, the VP of production, insists they have a consultant on staff to keep the science on track, but Brennan quickly finds out it's Doug Philmore, the Canadian forensic podiatrist from S06E17 (one of the better episodes from last season). Philmore is doing his best, but he is also chagrined that the director, Jocko Kent, doesn't care about the science.

As a new body is being swapped in for the one Redfern broke, a stench pervades the air. Brennan and Booth quickly realize it's a real body, then get permission (from the VP of production and head of security, because no need to call the LAPD, folks!) to solve the murder mystery. The victim was a man in his mid 40s, and based on the state of decomposition, he had been dead around 90-120 hours. According to Philmore, the set is a fully functioning laboratory because it would cost the same as a prop lab... because all movies have a prop budget of tens of millions of dollars in equipment and supplies?

The profusion of perimortem bone damage to the victim's arms and torso, along with the skull damage, suggest he was attacked in some manner. The jagged edge of the costal margin of the left 7th rib suggests his cause of death was a punctured aorta. The actor playing the Hodgins character inserts himself into the investigation, since he has a doctorate in botany and microbiology from UC Berkeley. Foliage on the victim's shoe is Laurus nobilis (bay laurel), common in California. Brennan lets Dr. Barry Summers consult and run tests on Hodgins' behalf.

Angela's facial reconstruction is quickly identified by Summers as Hansen Stephens, the head of the studio. His head has traces of brass and foliage on it, suggesting he was killed with or near a sprinkler. Booth questions pretty much everyone: Stephens' assistant, Mandy Oh, Blaine Conway, and Liam Toynen (the screenwriter). They didn't do it, even though Mandy's car had some foliage in the bumper and she's a racist troll.

Two shards of aluminosilicate, or fragments of a cell phone screen, are found embedded in the metacarpals by Dr. Philmore. Angela goes to the data backup service again and finds texts Stephens sent to Cherie, whom he was sleeping with. But she was also sleeping with Jocko and Fernando, the junior groundskeeper (also a movie producer in Mexico). Philmore's reconstruction of the footprints from the scene suggests that Stephens was running from someone or something. Based on the pattern of injuries on Stephens' bones, Angela narrows down the kind of vehicle that hit him to something with a small turning radius.

Brennan and Booth are hanging out outside Cherie's trailer, where there is a giant bush shaped like an elephant, when they realize the elephant's trunk has been repaired since Stephens' death. The golf cart of the groundskeeper, Valerie Rodgers, matches the small turning radius, and she confesses immediately to running down Stephens, who was unrepentant that he mauled her prized pachyderm topiary.

And it turns out that Dr. Summers was in a movie with Dr. Saroyan years ago called Invasion of the Mothersuckers, making her the female Blacula.

Forensic and Plot Comments

Brennan didn't note how she determined the victim was male or in his 40s. Boo. Plus, the plot was so self-aware that there was not much to make fun of this week...
I don't buy in any way that it's just as expensive to make a fake lab as set up a real lab. Mass specs are not cheap, my friend.
I do buy that someone with a doctorate in botany would be in the movies. PSA: Students - academia does not pay well. At all.
For all its snazziness, Philmore's footprint replicator thing didn't do much - it was dismissed by Brennan off-screen.
How did Rodgers get the body to the prop room? Why didn't she quit her job and leave after she killed someone, rather than returning to the scene of the crime for a couple of days? I guess she is supposed to be psychotic or something.

Dialogue

"Learn how one tibia can topple an Empire!" I have got to steal that for the title of my next conference paper on pathology in the Roman Empire.
Dr. Summers noting that acting, his first love, won out, "kind of like a methicillin-resistant staph infection."
Conway/Lister's belt buckle says Kooky. Cute.
Jocko: "I thought it was a film shooting. I'm not used to real things."
Saroyan, Sweets, Angela, and Hodgins get blown up while picnicing at the Washington Monument in the trailer for Bone of Contention. Awesome.
The whole Saroyan storyline was silly, but I actually met my husband during a screening of Blacula, so I'll allow it.
Loved all the little bits of meta-commentary...

Brennan complained that they changed the name of the Jeffersonian to WISK. (I've always thought it was weird that they changed the name of the Smithsonian to the Jeffersonian. Then again, the Smithsonian was named after a rich Brit who never set foot in the US. Jeffersonian is a much better name.)
Liam Toynen: "Stephens paid me buckets to write crap" like this movie.
Brennan, to Philmore: "I'm glad that your foray into another pseudo-profession like film consulting hasn't dulled your scientific acumen."

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. Vague handwaving about facial reconstruction identified the victim. Most of the clues to his killing were interesting, but it was infuriating that they all came sequentially (which is necessary for the plot of the show) when most of them would come at once in a real investigation (e.g., finding two phones, finding the cell phone in the metacarpals).

Forensic Solution - B+. There were a lot of interesting techniques being used. If you can suspend disbelief about the presence of a fully-functioning lab on a movie set, then the majority of the forensic work was quite good.

Drama - B-. There weren't a lot of stakes to the killing of Stephens. I could have done with fewer red herrings, but the point was that there were plenty of people who could have and would have killed the guy. No one would believe that Booth would move to LA. And the Saroyan storyline was just episode filler.

Meta-Commentary - A-. I said last week that I was excited about the possibilities this episode held for reflecting on itself. And I was not disappointed. Brennan bitched about the poor science in the movie, which is a fictionalization of her book, which was a fictionalization of her work, which is a fictionalization of Kathy Reichs' work. Her catty remark to Philmore about consulting was pretty delicious. If only they'd mocked how quickly forensic work gets done on TV, they'd have gotten a full A from me.

Is that a lumbar vertebra, or are you just happy to see me?

2012-05-03T12:06:00.001-04:00

I was mindlessly watching TV at the gym the other day, and suddenly I realized: "Wait, that's a human lumbar vertebra!"

Still from a Capital One commercial

It made me wonder why they chose a lumbar vertebra for the commercial. I mean, doesn't trophy-taking usually involve either something big and personal, like a head, or something small and easily removed, like a finger? Maybe the prop people just wanted something that was easy to dangle from a necklace? But why not one of the cervical verts in that case?

Then I realized I was thinking way too much for 5:30 in the morning.

Recipe for a Roman Diet

2012-05-02T14:04:00.001-04:00

Humans evolved to be omnivores. We'll eat anything we can get our hands on - fruit, vegetables, beans, grains, meat - and we've invented innumerable ways to cultivate and refine those basic ingredients, particularly in the last 10,000 years or so since the agricultural revolution.

But diet in the past was limited, primarily by geography but also by social class or culture. Before the New World was discovered, Italian food had no tomatoes. Before the industrialization of food production, many items we think of as dirt cheap today, like salt, were too expensive for the poor to purchase. If you didn't live on the coast, you probably weren't eating seafood.

When we talk about ancient diets, then, we're looking primarily at commonalities - what the average person was eating - while at the same time understanding that omnivores make for a dietarily heterogeneous population. There is no singular "American" diet, but we can agree that most of us likely consume a large amount of corn-based products, which are cheap and ubiquitous in the form of corn syrup, tortilla chips, popcorn, etc. This reliance on corn, a crop native to the New World, means that the average American diet differs from the average European, African, or Asian diet. Biochemically, we can see this difference in carbon isotopes, and we can show that their value increased following the transition to maize agriculture in the Americas (see, for example, Tykot 2006). My carbon isotope value is almost certainly higher than that of most contemporary Europeans.

Roman-era Mosaic

Similarly, there is no singular "Roman" diet, particularly in the Empire when goods were moving around at astounding rates, although researchers agree that a heck of a lot of wheat was consumed by all social classes and that olives and olive oil contributed a number of calories and fat to most people's diets. Ancient historical sources also seem to agree that no one really liked barley and that millet was only consumed in times of struggle, as both of these grains make inferior bread compared to wheat (Garnsey 1988). Yet dried millet tended to keep longer than other grains, making it good for storage along with dry legumes like chickpeas, lupin beans, and lentils, the latter another food that was most often consumed in times of shortage.

Ordinary Romans - that is, small farmers, peasants, and rural slaves who made up the majority of the ancient Italian population - likely got a large chunk of their diet from their non-cash crops like millet, legumes, and turnips, at least based on what writers such as Columella, Strabo, and Galen tell us (Garnsey 1988). Their daily diet would have been a far cry from the exotic foodstuffs found at elite banquets. But, as Horace writes, "Ieiunus raro stomachus volgaria temnit" (Satires II, 2, xxxviii). A hungry stomach rarely scorns plain food.

In order to find out what kinds of plain food the ancient Italians were eating, bioarchaeologists are starting to perform carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of skeletons (e.g., Prowse et al. 2004, Prowse et al. 2005, Craig et al. 2009, Rutgers et al. 2009, Killgrove 2010). Biochemical analysis isn't perfect, as it only yields a very macro-view of the diet. That is, the carbon isotope ratio can provide information about the kinds of plants and grains consumed, and the nitrogen isotope ratio can provide information on the relative amount of legumes and fish consumed. But depending on the rate of bone turnover, which can be different in different people because of age or disease status, the C and N isotopes represent an average of the last perhaps 5-10 years of a person's diet. With that in mind, here's what the skeletons are telling us about what people were eating in the Roman suburbs and down along the coast during the Empire:

(Click to embiggen)

The carbon axis shows that the people living in the Roman suburbs and along the coast were eating mostly wheat and barley (C3 foods, which have lower carbon isotope values) rather than millet (C4 food, which has a much higher carbon isotope value, starting around -13.0 permil). But their carbon values are higher than a purely C3-based diet, so those could be affected by marine resources and/or consumption of animals that were foddered on millet. The nitrogen axis shows that most people were eating a terrestrial, fairly omnivorous diet, with the coastal population of Velia eating a surprisingly little amount of fish. The pure vegetarians would be at the low end of the N axis, and the pure pescatarians would be at the high end (along with breastfeeding infants).

So what is the recipe for a Roman diet? Well, it's a little bit of everything, really. But you wouldn't know that from reading the half dozen or so cookbooks that contemporary authors have written to approximate Roman cuisine. For example, my copy of A Taste of Ancient Rome, while it has much to recommend it, has just two recipes that include lentils and none that include millet.

In his Historia Naturalis, Pliny notes that Campania in particular is full of millet and that peasants often mixed bean-meal (lomentum) with millet flour. Since cooking and chemistry are two sides of the same coin, I decided to remedy this omission by creating an historically-accurate dish that a Roman peasant might have eaten but also one that would show up isotopically in the skeleton (if eaten in large enough quantities).

Roman Millet and Lentil Salad*

Simmer 1/2 cup of lentils in 1 cup of water for 20 minutes, or until soft. Separately, simmer 1/2 cup of millet in 1 cup of water for 15 minutes. Put aside to cool.
Mince 1/2 cup of onion, 1/4 cup of parsley, 2 tablespoons of fresh mint, and 1 clove of garlic. Add to grains.
In a separate bowl, mix 1/4 cup of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar, and 1 teaspoon salt. Pour over the salad and toss well.
Top with freshly cracked pepper.

* See alternative recipe in the comments.

Mmmmm, tastes like high carbon and low nitrogen!

I served myself up a bunch of this salad for lunch, and I garnished it with some other Roman staples to make it a balanced meal: a bit of cheese, olives, and dried apricots. It's delicious. Kind of like tahbouli, which coincidentally is my go-to dish on 90-degree weeks like this in North Carolina.

On Monday, I'll be serving this to my friend Sarah Bond's Roman history class at Washington & Lee, while I tell them about the information skeletons can give us that histories can't. Let's hope the students like it (and that it helps them remember something about isotopes and ancient diets)!

Bonam appetitionem!

Bioarchaeology of Roman Seafood Consumption (Powered by Osteons, 5/31/11)
Weaning and Freshwater Fish Consumption in Roman Britain (Powered by Osteons, 8/12/11)
Foreign Women in Rome: the Isotopic Evidence (Powered by Osteons, 9/15/11)
The Millet Eaters of the Roman Empire (Powered by Osteons, 10/4/11)
Mapping Parasites in Ancient Italy (Powered by Osteons, 10/11/11)

References

Craig, O., Biazzo, M., O'Connell, T., Garnsey, P., Martinez-Labarga, C., Lelli, R., Salvadei, L., Tartaglia, G., Nava, A., Renò, L., Fiammenghi, A., Rickards, O., & Bondioli, L. (2009). Stable isotopic evidence for diet at the Imperial Roman coastal site of Velia (1st and 2nd Centuries AD) in Southern Italy American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139 (4), 572-583 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21021

Garnsey P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World. Cambridge University Press.

Giacosa I.G. 1992. A Taste of Ancient Rome. University of Chicago Press.

Killgrove K. 2010. Migration and mobility in Imperial Rome. PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Prowse, T., Schwarcz, H., Saunders, S., Macchiarelli, R., & Bondioli, L. (2005). Isotopic evidence for age-related variation in diet from Isola Sacra, Italy American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128 (1), 2-13 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20094

Prowse, T., Schwarcz, H., Saunders, S., Macchiarelli, R., & Bondioli, L. (2004). Isotopic paleodiet studies of skeletons from the Imperial Roman-age cemetery of Isola Sacra, Rome, Italy Journal of Archaeological Science, 31 (3), 259-272 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2003.08.008

Rutgers, L., van Strydonck, M., Boudin, M., & van der Linde, C. (2009). Stable isotope data from the early Christian catacombs of ancient Rome: new insights into the dietary habits of Rome's early Christians Journal of Archaeological Science, 36 (5), 1127-1134 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2008.12.015

R. Tykot (2006). Isotope Analyses and the Histories of Maize Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize, 131-142 DOI: 10.1016/B978-012369364-8/50262-X

Bones - Season 7, Episode 11 (Review)

2012-04-30T23:01:00.001-04:00

The Family in the Feud

Episode Summary

A yokel is out hunting for truffles, but the giant pig finds a dead body whose eyes emit a scary red glow. The Jeffersonian is dispatched to the scene, and Brennan guesses that the person was a Caucasian male based on the large and projecting mastoid process, broad chin, and high nasal root, and from the porosity of the ulna, she guesses the man was about 80 years old at death. Hodgins identifies the weird glow as the result of railroad worms in the eye orbits; they can glow green or red to scare off predators. Although Brennan infers that the man was killed by penetrating trauma that caused a lot of blood, none of the highly trained FBI agents bothers to look for a bullet near the body.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Brennan and Saroyan disagree on the man's age at death. Brennan is still insisting 80 because of the porosity (indicative of osteoporosis and aging), but Saroyan thinks 40 because of the robusticity of muscle attachments. Both stick to their assessments, even though porosity is a crappy way to tell age from bone (as it could be affected by disease) and robusticity is a crappy way to tell age as well (as the person could have been unusually fit or weak). Brennan doubles down on stupidity, insisting that carbon dating the bone will give her the most accurate result. Fortunately, the man had six toes (polydactyly), so he was easy to identify based on hospital records (I think?) as Tug Babcock. Neither the polydactyly nor the surprisingly robust frame is ever mentioned again. Daisy finds that Tug was shot from the left side at a range of about 15 feet, and the bullet nicked the fourth lumbar vertebra before inexplicably shattering the right half of the pelvis.

The immediate suspects, based on the Babcocks' assertions, are the Mobleys, who have had a long-standing feud with them. Actually, there are only two Mobleys, it seems, some older dude and a young girl stereotypically named Sue Bob. Another suspect is Dennis Timmonds, who had a contract to dig for copper on Tug's land after he died. Mobley is initially ruled out, since the casing and bullet (which Angela had to go out with a metal detector to find embedded in a tree) aren't a match for his gun, and Timmonds is dispatched quickly too.

Daisy reconstructs the shattered right pelvis and finds a 2mm bore hole with little remodeling, likely from a bone biopsy done just days prior to Tug's death. Saroyan runs some tests and finds out that Tug was suffering from osteogenic chondrosarcoma. At stage 4, it was widely metastatic, and he had just weeks to live.

Brennan takes the bullet and casing home, as Daisy and Angela found bone dust not matching the victim's in it. She can't figure out why there is "tunneling" in the bone, and Hodgins thinks it looks archaeological, so she sends it off to be carbon dated. It comes back within hours, during a smoothie-klatch among the women of the Jeffersonian, as being 120 years old. Bone dust was packed into the ammunition - bone dust from Stonewall Mobley, the great-great-great-grandfather of the current Mobley guy. He commissioned the bullets from what I presume is a large stash of Stonewall's bones that have been lying around for over a century. Mobley admits to having the bullets, but they were taken by Claire Babcock when she came to destroy the half of his house that was encroaching on the Babcocks' land. Since Claire was Tug's lawyer, she stood to lose a lot of money if the feud ever stopped. They search her house and find the bullets and her gun, which she insists she can't shoot. Brennan suggests she'd have an injury from the recoil, and she does, but it's only circumstantial. Hodgins gets a warrant to test Claire's clothes for truffle spores, and he finds them, placing her at the scene in the right time-frame. She confesses.

In the B plot, Hodgins and Daisy work together to figure out why the truffles he collected taste like ass. Turns out, a nearby stream is contaminated by all sorts of nasty heavy metals and has been since the 1800s. And yet people trolled the area for truffles that tasted like ass for over a century? The Mobley-Babcock feud didn't start because one had poisoned the other - they had accidentally poisoned themselves by drinking tainted water.

In the C plot, Christine was kicked out of the Jeffersonian's daycare purely so Ryan O'Neal would have something to do. Brennan gives her father chance after chance not to screw up, but he keeps doing so. In spite of her expressed desire to get Christine a nanny and have one-on-one tutoring in the Montessori or Waldorf styles, she goes with her deadbeat felon of a father. 'cause blood is thicker than heavy metal-riddled water. (I have to say, though, a multilingual, multicultural song time is not too much to ask.)

Forensic Comments

As usual, the assessment of sex could use a few more markers than just the mastoid (which is larger in males). I'm not sure what "broad chin" means; not specific enough.
A high nasal root is one of the features of the skull that can suggest European ancestry. But I'd been pretty happy that Bones hadn't gotten into the whole "race" debate this season.
Railroad worms are usually found in orchards, not forests with truffles.
As noted, porosity of bone - of one bone, no less - is a terrible way to estimate age-at-death. Sure, our bone density tends to decrease with age, but any number of things could make bone more or less porous.
If the cancer was so widespread that Tug's pelvis could shatter, someone should have seen evidence of the cancer in the bones, not just the hole from the biopsy needle.
Dear Bones Writers: First, carbon-dating tells you how old a bone is in chronological time, not how old the person was at death. Second, you can't carbon date forensic remains; they are too recent. In sum, carbon dating tells you when a person died (provided it was 50+ years ago) but not the age at which the person died. Having Brennan assert she could tell the man's age with accuracy is just dumb, dumb, beyond dumb. At least the bone dust in the bullet could actually be carbon dated.
Why wasn't the polydactyly mentioned again? In a plot about a family feud, you'd think there would be a big reveal about this genetic trait - Tug Babcock had it, and Sue Bob Mobley had it too - gaaassssp, they are related! Way to squander an awesome sixth toe on the victim's ID.
Booth tells Brennan to stay back at Mobley's house because "I don't want Christine to lose both parents." Yeah, so, you'd think the FBI would have rules against parents being partners because of exactly this scenario.
Brennan just looks through bone dust at home with her super powerful microscope while waiting for Max. Like ya do, 'cause chain of custody isn't a biggie and there's no way she'd compromise evidence in a murder trial.
Oh, I forgot to rag on the accents. They were horrific. Actually worse than the fake accent of the intern... I don't have the energy to look up his name. Anyway, if you're going to make people do "hick" accents, at least make them all do the same "hick" accent. Those were all over the place.
So why do people hunt for truffles on land that's poisonous and makes truffles taste horrible? Who buys those truffles?
Why doesn't Brennan's front door have a peep hole? Why does she just unlock and open it without asking who's there?

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. I was excited about the weird worms and the polydactyly, but the writers disappointed me by dropping the ball on the latter.

Forensic Solution - D. Taking off a lot of points here because of the ridiculous Brennan/Saroyan fight in which they both came off looking like idiots who should take a remedial osteology course.

Drama - C. Again, I was excited to think that there was going to be a big twist related to the feud, but there wasn't. The Brennan-Max subplot lined up nicely with the inter-family feud, but I still found it hard to believe. And I still think Brennan and Booth kissing looks weird.

Next Week: Bones gets all meta as Brennan's book (whose protagonist, you may recall, is conveniently named Kathy Reichs) is made into a TV show. I'm actually looking forward to this, in a weird way.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XVI

2012-04-30T13:54:00.000-04:00

A surprising dearth of Roman bioarchaeology news this past month...

News and Analyses

New tombs at Alexandria (credit)

13 April - Greek and Byzantine-era tomb discoveries in Alexandria prompt construction freeze. A bit further afield, but an interesting report on some newly found rock-cut tombs, including one dating to the Greco-Roman era. Sounds like there are skeletal remains too, which is quite interesting.

14 April - Ancient burial urns uncovered at St. Albans King Harry Park site. This article covers the five cremation urns from Verlamion (Roman Verulamium). I'd previously posted the BBC article about CT scanning of the urns. There may be more Roman burials at the site.

16 April - The 'pushy parent' syndrome in ancient Rome. Mary Beard writes about the lives of Roman kids (from tombstones) for this BBC piece. (And if you're in the UK, you can watch her new series, Meet the Romans, online here.)

Dr. Belcastro in her lab (credit)

22 April - La Repubblica has a nice piece on Maria Giovanna Belcastro, a well-known Italian bioarchaeologist. Even if you don't read Italian, click through to this slideshow, which has some awesome pictures of random pathological specimens. Also great? All the skeletons are laid out correctly. (Kind of unfortunate for my "Who needs an osteologist?" series. ;-)

28 April - And in more Belcastro news, it seems the remains of St. Deodata, a Christian martyr of the 4th century AD, were found - the front of a skull is marked "Corpus Sanctae Deodatae." Belcastro found in the reliquary the remains of a woman age 36-39, along with bones from two adolescents. I couldn't find much on this saint - anyone have any clue who she was?

4 April - York Minster tantalises archaeologists with hints of Saxon church. Apparently a ton of bones have been found at York Minster, used to backfill a Medieval trench. They may date as early as the 5th century (just post-Roman) or as late as the 8th century (just pre-Viking). Much more research on the bones is expected.

13 April - Roman and Iron Age finds at (Cambridge Theological) college. Some Roman-era artifacts, including a copper ring, ceramic tiles, and animal bones, have been found near Cambridge during recent construction.

Articles

Nutritional and disease stress of juveniles from the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt (IJOA vol. 22). Sandra Wheeler investigates over 200 skeletons of subadults (fetal to 15 years old) from the Romano-Byzantine cemetery of Kellis 2 and finds that children's health got better in Roman times.

Exhibits and Conferences

11-12 April - I was at the PPA and AAPA conferences, and I presented a poster at each. Palaeopathology and Urban Decline at Gabii, and Differential Diagnosis of an Unusual Lower Leg Pathology in an Imperial Roman.
18 April - A short piece in Italian on the museum of paleontology at Rome's La Sapienza highlights some of the faunal remains that are on display. (I liked the title of the article - Nani, scheletri e impronte - which translates as "Dwarves, skeletons, and footprints.")
18 April - The 4th Osteology Symposium was held in Rimini from April 18-21.

Videos

Beth Harris and Steven Zucker talk about the Medea Sarcophagus (140-150 AD) at the Altes Museum in Berlin.
Brian Rose talks about Atlantis in this hour-long video from the Penn Museum.

Fake News (Satire)

Romans to Outsource Crucifixion Service

That's all, folks! Join me here next month for another roundup... or join PbO now on Facebook for all the latest bioarchaeology news.

Bones - Season 7, Episode 10 (Review)

2012-04-23T23:18:00.000-04:00

The Warrior in the Wuss

Episode Summary

A couple guys playing hooky from work stumble over - or rather, into - a headless body. Brennan and Booth arrive, with Hodgins, to scope the scene. Brennan notes that the person was male based on the heart-shaped pelvic inlet, Hodgins estimates time of death as three days prior based on blowfly larvae, and Booth falls down a hill and finds the head in a puddle.

At the Jeffersonian, Saroyan finds that the stomach and pyloric sphincter are intact, which will allow her to figure out the last things he ate. Brennan estimates the man's age at death as 26 to 36 years old based on the pulp cavity depth of the maxillary central incisor. She and Clark note a perimortem wound on the man's right ischial spine, consistent with a stabbing injury that may have severed the external iliac artery. Angela's facial reconstruction and vital stats don't get a hit in the missing persons database, but Clark notes the man's height may be exaggerated. He found markers on the man's right distal interphalangeal (DIP) joints and calcaneus that make him think the man wore lifts or heels. With an exaggerated height of 5'8" (rather than the man's real height, 5'5"), Angela gets a hit - Tony Cole.

Cole's wife notes that Tony's colleague at Spark & Steel, Karl Singler, often made fun of Tony's short stature. Clark examines the cleaned bones and finds the tip of a weapon that was at least 7" long embedded in Tony's ischium. Booth and Bones decide to go check Karl out - they find him with a van full of metal implements, many of which fit the description of the murder weapon.

At the FBI, Sweets tells Booth that a recent police report was filed against Tony. He tried to start a fight with his son's karate teacher, and the son called 911. They question Danny, the son, about it, and he admits to picking a fight with Blake, the sensei's kid. Meanwhile, Saroyan notes points of compromised periosteum over the pelvis and lower extremities that indicate bruising with highly localized points of impact. All of these lead Booth and Brennan to question the sensei.

But the style of karate being practiced is shodokan aikido, or "empty hand" (no weapons). Brennan still wants to measure the sensei's hands and feet to see if they match Cole's bruises. Using Angela's technology, they determine that the person who caused the bruising was smaller than the sensei, possibly a kid. Saroyan finds lots of peanuts in Cole's stomach, and Hodgins rehydrates and dissects a mezcal worm he found. Because of the small but precise bruises, Brennan and Booth return to the karate studio and question Blake, the daughter of the sensei. She admits to beating up Cole, after he got irate when she defended herself against Danny's attack, and she has proof of it - her friend videotaped it and uploaded it to "WeTube."

Clark once again reexamines the ischial spine. Scratching on the bone makes it look like Cole was stabbed from the front, then the weapon was pulled out the back, an unlikely scenario. Hodgins traces the contents of the mezcal worm to a specific distillery in Mexico, which makes Maguey del Sol. Only three bars in the D.C. area are licensed to sell it, and one is on Cole's normal work route: Cantina Carreras. Booth and Brennan talk to the owner, who admitted to giving Cole the liquor. Cole had had a bad day, as the video of him getting beaten up by Blake had just gone viral. Sweets and Angela attempt to track the hits to the video, and they determine that the source of the virality was likely Karl Singler. He spread it to all of Cole's customers, hoping they'd defect to him. It seems Cole found out about this, confronted Karl, and Karl kill him with the curved fishing blade on his multi-tooled knife.

The B plot this episode involves Hodgins' buying more equipment than the Jeffersonian can afford. He is instructed to return at least some of it by Saroyan, his boss, but he ignores her. He uses each piece of equipment to help solve the case, then uses the equipment at the end of the episode to distill alcohol and make guacamole.

In the C plot, Parker is back from England(?) and meets his new baby sister for the first time. Although he seems happy, he starts sneaking out of the house and then destroys some of his possessions. Brennan and Booth finally confront him, and it turns out he's made a mobile for Christine.

Forensic Comments

I don't understand how Hodgins can buy things without Saroyan's approval, much less against her wishes. Someone has to sign those requisition forms and get budgetary approval for spiffy gadgets that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. And would the Jeffersonian really not let Hodgins buy his own equipment, since he's independently wealthy? I don't see why that would be a conflict of interest, if he "donated" it to his lab.
A heart-shaped pelvic inlet is a very quick, very imprecise method of estimating sex of a skeleton. (The idea being that males tend to have a more curved sacrum than females do, since we don't want the tip of our coccyx to poke our babies on the way out.) As usual, it annoys me that they never revisit their sex/age estimation in the lab with multiple methods.
Estimating age based on pulp cavity depth is not a commonly used method in bioarchaeology, since our skeletons are long-dead, but there seems to be recent research on the method in the world of forensics.
I know that, according to the dictionary, ischial is indeed pronounced IS-key-al. But I have always heard ISH-ee-al, the Anglicized pronunciation. Votes as to how wrong I am about this?
I'd never heard the phrases "pump bump" or "mallet toe" before and had to look them up. The former is actually Haglund's deformity, or bursitis at the calcaneus that could theoretically lead to some minor bony changes. And the latter is another name for hammer toe, which affects the proximal interphalangeal joints (PIPs) of the feet, not the DIPs as Clark noted.

Dialogue and Plot Comments

What was Parker doing in England? (Serious question. Don't feel like looking it up.) And how old is he? (I can't remember that either.) Why isn't he in school?
Brennan thinks that a fun family activity would be trawling their property looking for carrion and then rearticulating the skeletons. I actually agree.
Way too much time was devoted to the worm autopsy. In fact, a lot of this episode felt padded.
Brennan and Booth frequently go back home during the day, even though their infant is in daycare? And Parker acts all strange for a full day, including leaving the house without their knowledge or permission, yet neither one of them thinks to talk to him until the following day?
Booth refers to Brennan as "Bones" when talking to Parker. Brennan calls herself "Temperance" when talking to Parker. Thankfully, Parker also calls her "Temperance." It's definitely a pet peeve of mine that Booth and Brennan refer to one another by last names, even in private.
Hey, look, there are at least 7 other people who work at the Jeffersonian! And they don't get to talk to the main characters, even at a party. One of these days, someone needs to write a web series for them, like a modernized Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (oh, the sheer number of possible puns is making my head spin...).
The theme of the episode made me think of today's Sociological Images post on bias against short men, and then I was annoyed at the title - there was no indication Cole was a "wuss" (a very emasculating term), just that he was short and had been bullied for it.

What I Like about Bones (Clothing Edition)

Since many of you think I'm too negative, I will say that I loved Angela's dress. And I mean LOVE. If anyone recognizes it and can tell me where to buy it, I will give you 1,000 internets and my undying gratitude.
I liked that Brennan's outfits were quite conducive to nursing in this episode, even if nothing has been said about her nursing her infant since the one episode that mentioned it.
Seems to me Saroyan has gotten too thin recently. But I loved her outfits too - the floral-print dress and the top-and-skirt combo at the makeshift fiesta were both awesome.

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - B. It took a bunch of different methods to finally ID the victim. Although I would have preferred for them to use more accurate (and multiple) methods, the mystery about the weapon was decent.

Forensic Solution - B-. I wasn't all that excited about Hodgins' newfangled equipment that helped solve the case. But it did help solve the case.

Drama - C-. The murder mystery was slightly more involved than most episodes, but the Parker story line was lame (and telegraphed from a mile away).

Next week: Christine gets kicked out of the Jeffersonian's daycare? Could be interesting, or could be lame.

Felix dies natalis, Roma!

2012-04-21T10:12:00.002-04:00

Today is the anniversary of the founding of Rome - in other words, Rome's birthday.

April 21 is sacred to the the goddess Pales, and Rome therefore celebrated the Palilia or Parilia, an agricultural/pastoral festival. Although this festival probably pre-dates the founding of Rome, the ethos of what it meant to be "Roman" was so wrapped up in landowning and farming that it's likely the date was specifically repurposed for the birthday of Rome.

The year of Rome's "birth" is also uncertain; during the Empire, Varro suggested 753 BC but the Fasti Capitolini say 752 BC. So I'd say that this is Rome's 2,765th birthday, but others would disagree.

Back in 2007, I was in Rome for her birthday, along with my husband (who snapped these pictures and video) and former student Lara. The start of the parade looks (and sounds) like this:

And here's a slideshow of some of the awesome costumes on display:

So, in honor of Rome's birthday, maybe you should go make a cake. Perhaps a cheesecake or a honey cake?

Bones - Season 7, Episode 9 (Review)

2012-04-16T23:42:00.002-04:00

The Don't in the 'Do

Episode Summary

A bunch of birds, heads covered in new blue goo (gooey gooey), fly erratically around a congregation that is hoping to build a new church on a garbage dump, then immediately die. One was clutching a piece of skull with an eye still in it.

Apparently, this is the FBI's jurisdiction, so they start flagging the birds and find the decomposing skeleton. Hodgins estimates time of death at around two weeks prior. Brennan notes from the advanced fusion of the sacrum that the victim was male, around 30 years old, and about 185cm tall. Because of course you can get all that information from one highly variable bone. He also has no hair, so you know that'll be important by the second or third act.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Brennan and Vizidi get to work on isolating the scavenger marks from any marks that could lead them to figure out cause of death, Hodgins tries to identify the blue stuff, and Saroyan tests the tongue for drugs. Almost immediately, Angela gets a hit on her facial reconstruction - Santiago Valmont, an in-demand hairstylist who was sleeping with numerous clients in exchange for money to buy drugs. The list of suspects ranges from the women whom Santiago was sleeping with to the people he worked with - namely, the salon owner, a fellow stylist named Kevin, and the shampoo boy, Theo.

After Vizidi and Angela digitally remove all the scavenger marks, Brennan notices micro-incisions on the frontal bone, which she concludes was scalping. Booth and Sweets take a joy ride in the latter's Toyota Product Placement with Entune technolosnooooooze to question the owner of the store outside of which Santiago got a parking ticket before his death. The owner, Purab, absconds with a bag of hair, but Booth tackles him, then he and Sweets fondle crotchless panties. (Srsly.)

Hodgins decides that the bag o' hair needs to be separated, and since no one else works at the Jeffersonian, Saroyan and Vizidi have to do it. He brings them wool carders from the Colonial England diorama because a) he doesn't understand how to treat museum artifacts, and b) he doesn't understand what a wool carder actually does. Brennan meanwhile actually looks at the skeleton and sees fracturing to the L4 and L5 vertebrae; these injuries are never discussed again. The big bag o' hair represents 25 different individuals, all removed postmortem. Santiago's hair isn't in there.

Turns out that Purab was the natural hair supplier for both Kevin and Santiago, whose weaves were legen-waitforit-dary. He got the hair from his uncle, a mortician, before the bodies were cremated. Kevin is looking pretty guilty at this point, since he was dealing drugs to Santiago and had bought two gallons of antifreeze for his car, which appears to be the accelerant that was used to torch the body. But Vizidi finds a superficial incision at the inferior margin on the anterior aspect of the body of the hyoid, 2mm superior to the attachment of the sternohyoid muscle.

Based on the location of the sharp trauma, Brennan has an a-ha moment in the spa with Angela, realizing that Santiago was getting his hair washed when his throat was sliced open. This leads Booth and Brennan to Theo, the only person Santiago trusted with his long, glorious, Fabioesque mane. Theo just wanted his own chair in the salon, but Santiago laughed at him. In a particularly unnecessary twist, Theo has kept Santiago's hair and scalp on a mannequin. Oddly, Brennan does not anthropologize the hell out of this instance of trophy-taking.

In the B plot, Brennan complains that her pre-baby clothes don't fit her. Of course they won't, since she's only 6-8 weeks postpartum and still nursing, but whatever. Booth and Sweets pick out lingerie. Angela convinces her to go to the spa.

And in the C plot, Vizidi gets an article accepted to the fictional Journal of Forensic Anthropology. There is absolutely nothing factual about this plot, as the writers clearly have no idea how academic publishing works and didn't even bother to do a little research or ask one of their forensic consultants for some ideas. But more on that in the...

Forensic Comments

It's not clear how an eyeball could have survived dousing with antifreeze, being lit on fire, and thrown into a trash dump with all manner of scavengers running around. Eyeballs are pretty tasty, I imagine.
Advanced fusion of the sacrum tells you nothing. Not sex, not age, and certainly not stature. There is a significant amount of variability in the timing of fusion of sacral elements; some often don't fuse, and this is normal.
Unclear why the tongue is protected from contamination, according to Saroyan. It's an opening into the body. The openings are the most contaminated parts of a body, right?
I've seen half a dozen scalping cases, and they don't look like the micro-incisions that Brennan identifies on the skull. They look like this. Then again, I haven't seen contemporary scalpings. But I do know that the few tiny marks left on the bone wouldn't be sufficient to take the entire scalp plus hair off, in order to be displayed on a mannequin. You'd need to make additional cuts to the temporals and occipital, since the scalp doesn't just peel right off in one big chunk like cheap nail polish.
The hairline fracturing of L4 and L5 is mentioned and then never dealt with. What caused them?
And finally, this is NOT how academic publishing works:

Vizidi gets galley proofs for his Journal of Forensic Anthropology article. (Galley proofs are electronic, not printed.)
He's not allowed to tell anyone about the article acceptance until the journal comes out. (Articles are published online after peer-review as early view. In some journals, articles are published even before copyediting, or immediately after acceptance. No one is ever surprised by the contents of a published journal volume.)
Vizidi excitedly shows Hodgins a footnote citing one of his papers. Hodgins is excited. (Most anthro journals don't use footnotes, they use parenthetical references. The footnote to Hodgins is incomplete. And if Hodgins is as much a bad-ass as he claims, another citation to his work wouldn't even make a dent in his h-index.)
Brennan reveals that she was one of the peer reviewers. (Advisors and other supervisors generally don't review their students' papers unless there's a really good reason to do so. Brennan's reviewing it would be considered a conflict of interest by most journal editors.)
In the end, Vizidi's paper is not published. (Journals don't retract papers except in the case of data mismanagement or other ethical violations.)
Instead of Vizidi's paper, the Journal of Forensic Anthropology plans to run a puff piece on Selena Gomez on a fossil hunt. (Peer-reviewed journals don't run "puff" pieces. And even if they did, an article on a fossil hunt is completely inappropriate for a forensic journal. But now my life's goal is to get AJPA to publish pictures of me and The Biebs riding a dinosaur at the Creation Museum.)
Brennan thinks that Vizidi is too immature to understand what "being published" means. (Anthropology graduate students routinely come out of school with 3 or more publications these days. Vizidi is pretty far behind if this is his first article. Also, "being published" means just that - you've told other people about something you did, and a few people agreed with you that it was neato keen. It's not the end all be all.)
Oh, right, and Vizidi's awesome article? "New Methodologies for Osteometric Analysis in Human Remains." (Because what we need is another article to tell us how to measure the length of a bone?) His follow-up? The hilariously non-specific, "Advances in Forensic Odontology."

Dialogue and Plot Comments

"Krishna has been depicted as having blue skin, but he died in 3012 BCE, so decomposition would be a little more advanced." - Brennan's attempt at a joke.
"See what else you missed in your quest for notoriety." - Brennan, putting Vizidi in his place. (I laughed at this, but only because I could totally imagine my advisor saying it to me...)
"Tanga. That's a sea port in northern Tanzania." - Brennan, on lingerie. (It worries me that this is exactly the same thing I thought when tanga became popular as a style of underwear.)
What has Brennan been wearing that she's just now realizing she doesn't have the same body she did before she got pregnant? At least Angela finally told her to just buy some damn clothes and quit whining already.
The writers are clearly checking off some sort of post-partum list, never to return to the issues again. Episode 1 post-baby - nursing. Check, dealt with that. Episode 2 post-baby - body dysmorphism. Check, dealt with that. I know, I know, it's a procedural. But I had hoped for more, especially since Emily Deschanel is clearly still post-partum in these episodes. It's nice to see an actress with a real post-baby body and not a cover-of-People-in-a-swimsuit-post-baby-crash-diet body.
Why does Brennan still call the father of her child and domestic partner by his last name? Please make the move to first names, people.
And finally... screw you, Toyota. I don't want to buy one of your randomly accelerating cars.

Ratings
Forensic Mystery - D. I hate episodes when the facial reconstruction that we've never seen gets a "hit" in a magical database and IDs the victim. Makes for boring television.

Forensic Solution - D. Really, the sacrum told you age, sex, and stature, Brennan? Why not race? Hair color? Favorite death metal band? I was most interested in Vizidi's program to remove scavenging marks, but it didn't help find cause of death. And I'm not convinced that a teeny nick to the hyoid could be seen, let alone that a cause of death could hang on it.

Drama - D-. There was no drama in this episode. Like, really, none. Did you care about the victim at all? About the killer? About Sweets' car? Booth's cliched confusion about lingerie? Brennan's trumped-up body issues? I didn't think so.

What a fun episode to hate on. Next week: fishing puns!

Bones - Season 7, Episode 8 (Review)

2012-04-15T00:25:00.002-04:00

I was traveling and out of town much of the week at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the Palaeopathology Association conferences, talking to real anthropologists about real dead people. So I had little time for Bones. Next week, my snark will be on time, I promise...

The Bump in the Road

Episode Summary

Although it's only been one week in real time, this episode of Bones takes place 6 weeks after the birth of the Brennan-Booth baby, Christine. Apparently the Jeffersonian has a really crappy maternity leave policy because Brennan is going back to work already. (And the baby is at least 3 months old, but that's what TV-babies look like.) Booth tells Brennan it'll be ok - the baby will be nearby at the Jeffersonian's on-site daycare if she needs her. Which, yeah, they'll be seeing one another, like, every 2 hours.

Anyway, a family on a road trip hits what they think is a dead animal. It's a person. The Jeffersonian team is on site to scrape up the victim with spatulas. From the small femoral head diameter, Brennan thinks the victim was female. The victim's head was also separated from her body.

Back at the lab, Finn Abernathy (whose fake southern accent has gotten better over the hiatus) notes abrasions on the bones that look like the victim was dragged down the road. Based on the maximum length of her fibula, she was between 154-161 cm tall. Taking into account her gracile frame and small muscle markers, Finn estimates her weight at 54 kilograms. Hodgins and Finn identify diesel and truck-grade lubricant on the victim, suggesting she was dragged by a semi.

Over at the FBI, Special Agent Shaw is back. She discovers that the victim was dragged over a weigh station by a truck and traces the vehicle to Fields Market. The driver was Alan Bates (incidentally, the name of a kid I grew up with), who didn't kill her and didn't even know he'd dragged her. Booth and Brennan visit him, and the victim's head is still in his undercarriage. Speaking of undercarriage, he wears hot pink panties.

The Jeffersonian staff keeps working on an ID. Angela and Hodgins find papers stuffed in the victim's bra. Using Angela's video spectral comparator (fancy!), they realize they're coupons. Hodgins reasons that the pollen the woman inhaled before death could lead to her ID, so they blow out the nasal cavity, making it the episode's biggest gross-out moment (heck, the season's biggest gross-out moment). Remarkably, Hodgins traces the pollen to the American chestnut, and the nearest farm is in Hagerstown, Maryland. Apparently the victim's husband owns it.

The husband notes that his wife, Barb, was an extreme couponer. She had gone to Fields Market in Frederick, MD, to do some shopping and didn't come back. Booth and Brennan head to the grocery store, where the manager, Chad, and the carpal-tunnel-having cashier, Crystal, are prime suspects. Once Angela finds that Barb was trading evil emails with someone named DealDiva, Booth and Brennan track her down. But DealDiva, Rhonda, has an air-tight alibi for the night, provided by receipts from her couponing binge. Her metal coupon box fits the shape of the wound on the victim's frontal bone. However, Brennan finds a chip of aluminum in the skull, so it's not the box.

The victim's husband was also stepping out on her, but he didn't kill her, and a quick check of his tools confirms there is no murder weapon among them. Hodgins, Brennan, and Finn then note a small puncture wound to the victim's skull, with what turns out to be purple ink in it. Brennan remembers that the grocery store manager, Chad, was using a purple pen to mark expired coupons and was writing on an aluminum clipboard. He confesses to hitting Barb, but notes that she ran away. However, since she hid under the truck, and then accidentally got her hair caught in the gears, and was dragged to her death, he is to blame.

Also, Finn dates Michelle. Saroyan forbids it. Finn dumps Michelle. She cries to Saroyan. Finn comes back and refuses to break up with Michelle. In sloppy parallel structure, Brennan gets Christine to sleep but refuses to put her in her crib because she misses her so much.

Forensic Comments

Diameter of the femoral head is a quick-and-dirty way to estimate sex, especially if the remains are incomplete or fragmented, but it's not the most accurate. It's always weird that Brennan never revisits her estimate after the team reconstructs the skull or gets more fragments of pelvis into the lab.
Maximum length of the fibula is just about the worst measurement on which to estimate stature (some would argue that the tibia is worse). I get that the remains were fragmented, but even an arm bone would be more accurate than the fibula.
Estimating weight is dicey. It's even less accurate than estimating stature. And to come up with a precise 54 kilos - which just happened to be within 3 pounds of the victim's real weight - is unrealistic.
Why didn't they ever estimate the victim's age?
Making the "dead head" sneeze seemed excessive and unnecessary. They could just open up her nasal passages with a scalpel. It was impressively gross, though. I'll give them that.
Why doesn't the Jeffersonian ever run tests in parallel? I mean, they brought in Hodgins to swab the victim's skull fracture at least 3 separate times. Why didn't anyone notice the puncture wound and purple ink when they were finding the aluminum and the v-shaped notch? They would have solved the case much faster if they'd been paying attention.

Plot Comments

The writers are a bit confused about how to handle a nursing mom (as are the wardrobe people, it seems). The way they wrote the opening scene, I assumed that Brennan wasn't nursing, since it sounded like she wouldn't see her daughter all day, when in reality, at 6 weeks, she'll be nursing that kid every 2 hours or so. Angela also asks Brennan why she doesn't miss her kid more - a kid she gets a picture of every half hour and whom she sees every 2-3 hours. There were some shots of Brennan holding the baby in a nursing-like position, but the baby was always asleep. So kudos for talking about nursing, but the director could have done more to make it clear that Brennan is nursing. Which is where the wardrobe people come in - that really ugly calf-length dress Brennan was wearing at the end of the episode? Yeah, not nursing-friendly. She was wearing a button-down in at least one scene, though.
Finn's accent is better. I still hate the character. I also hate the shoehorning in of the whirlwind romance between Finn and Michelle.
Saving 10 cents on three tapiocas is a crappy coupon. Actually, do they even make 10-cent coupons anymore? That seems like a shockingly small amount of money.
Wait, is it true that the grocery store manager could be tried for murder? I get that he shouldn't have assaulted the woman, but hiding out underneath a semi seems pretty stupid. Would he be getting charged with felony assault? I'm unclear on the police work/law here.
Angela's kid was born when Brennan found out she was pregnant, so he's close to a year old. Kids that age are at least crawling if not cruising around, not content to gurgle and coo in a file drawer.
Soooooo, Brennan is obsessed with getting organic baby wipes for her kid, but she picks up Huggies? I am the least crunchy-granola person I know, and even I used cloth diapers for my kid. Maybe it's supposed to be a daycare thing...
I am kind of interested in next week, since the writers may address Brennan's concerns about post-baby body... even though I'm not convinced the character would give a crap and, as an anthropologist, she'll know very well that she shouldn't expect to be anywhere near her pre-baby weight/figure for months, especially while nursing. Perhaps we'll get some addressing of post-partum depression in there, though? Anyway, the post-partum period is being written better than the pregnancy and awful, awful delivery episode. We never got any of this with the Angelodgins baby.

Quotable Quotes

"Crystal's been working here since before carrot was a juice." (I found this clever, to be honest.)
"Even the Norse warriors were crossdressers." (Maybe true, maybe not.)

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. It took a while to ID the body, which meant the team had to use some actual forensic work. But the mystery was solved in a clunky fashion, and we got no information about the victim that would lead us to care even a tiny bit about her.

Forensic Solution - B. Although some of their methods were odd (making the head sneeze) and their results lucky, for the most part it was solid forensic work. Strange that they never estimated the victim's age, though.

Drama - C-. Too much screen time for interpersonal relationships (Finn-Michelle-Saroyan; Booth-Brennan-Christine; Booth-Shaw) meant not a lot of time could be devoted to the CotW (corpse of the week).

Palaeopathology and Urban Decline at Imperial Gabii (Italy)

2012-04-12T06:00:00.000-04:00

As I noted yesterday, I'm at the AAPA conference in Portland. Here's the poster I'm presenting today, which details the recent work I've been doing at Gabii.

(For those of you at the conference, I'm chairing Session 2, the poster session in human osteology/bioarchaeology, at the Plaza Level of the hotel. My poster is number 65, and I'll be hanging out with it from 10:30-11 and 2:30-3pm. Stop by and say hi!)

Palaeopathology and Urban Decline at Imperial Gabii (Italy)

Top - Map of Sites
Bottom - Gabine Plain

Background: Urbanism in Latium

The ancient city of Gabii emerged in the late first millennium BC during a wave of urban explosion that also saw the rise of Rome just 12 miles away (Becker et al. 2009). Gabii grew to one of the largest cities in the area by virtue of its geographic location at the intersection of several important roadways. Rumored to be the place where Romulus and Remus were educated, Gabii was a cultural icon for centuries. By the late Republican period (1st century BC), literary references to Gabii concerned its depopulation and insignificance in civic life.

Little archaeological investigation was undertaken at Gabii until 2007. One of the surprising finds was a makeshift Imperial-era necropolis. Since Roman cemeteries were traditionally located outside the walls of a city (Cicero de Legibus ii, 23, 58; Toynbee 1971), one of the salient features of the collapse of Gabii as an urban center is the reuse of the city as a necropolis. The question remains: Who was buried at Gabii?

Gabii Cemetery

Top - Map of Area B
Bottom - Excavated Burial
(courtesy the Gabii Project)

Area B at Gabii corresponds to a domestic structure dating to the mid-Republican period, followed in the early Imperial period by burials that were likely purposefully made within the abandoned structure. The sequence of burials in Area B has not been fully refined, but carbon dating of bones from three graves suggests the burial program began in the late 1st/early 2nd century AD and continued through at least the 3rd century AD (Becker 2011).

Most of the burials in Area B are aligned roughly east-west, but others, like Tomb 8 (the “lead burrito”), are more north-south in orientation. Skeletons were interred in simple pits, in amphorae, and in cappuccina-style graves, consistent with burial forms found in other Rome-area necropoleis (Musco et al. 2008; Buccellato et al. 2008). However, three burials contained lead sheeting, a practice not well-attested in Roman graves. The lead burials are not included in this presentation, as they will be studied further this summer.

The total number of Imperial-period skeletons from Area B is 23 – 5 subadults under the age of two, 7 females, 8 males, and 3 adults of indeterminate sex.

Pathological Conditions

Gabii can be directly compared with three other cemeteries in use during the 1st-3rd centuries AD: Casal Bertone, Castellaccio Europarco, and Vallerano (Killgrove 2010; Cucina et al. 2006). Demographic data show that the Gabine burial population is quite different, however, with no subadults between 2-18 years of age. None of the five children examined had evidence of cribra orbitalia, compared to much higher crude prevalence rates at the other sites. Of the adults from Gabii, 14 presented teeth or jaws for analysis. The Gabine population had worse dental health in terms of true prevalence rates of caries, calculus, abscesses, and antemortem tooth loss (AMTL) than did the other three populations. In comparing these frequencies using Fisher’s exact test, Gabii is statistically different (p≤.01) than Casal Bertone and Vallerano in caries, abscesses, and AMTL, and different than Castellaccio Europarco in the latter two conditions. Gabii is similar to Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco in frequency of degenerative joint disease: 67%, 76%, and 63% CPR, respectively.

Dental Disease at Gabii

Interpretation

The urban area of Rome boasted a very heterogeneous population during the Imperial period owing particularly to the importation of slaves from other areas of the Empire (Killgrove 2010). Attempts to characterize the skeletal health of this disparate population, however, are only just beginning, and most reports do not list methods or individual-level data. Based on the information available to date, the Gabii skeletal series is different than those from other cemeteries near Rome in terms of demographics and frequencies of dental disease.

Osteological investigation of the Gabine population suggests a burial program biased towards adults and young children, and palaeopathological investigation suggests consumption of different foodstuffs and/or more physical stress compared with other groups from the same area and time period. It is currently unclear whether these differences can be directly related to the collapse of the city of Gabii.

Analysis of this site and the skeletons is ongoing. Future research will involve biochemical testing to investigate the diet and the geographical and biological backgrounds of the Gabines.

Download the Poster as PDF

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Gabii Project, an international archaeological initiative whose goal is to investigate the history of the ancient urban center. Thanks are extended to Nic Terrenato (Project Director), Jeffrey Becker (Managing Director), and Marcello Mogetta (Vice Field Director) for access to the skeletons, permission to use the cemetery map and burial photograph, and for information on the chronology of the burials.

References

Becker, J., Mogetta, M., & Terrenato, N. (2009). A New Plan for an Ancient Italian City: Gabii Revealed American Journal of Archaeology, 113 (4), 629-642 DOI: 10.3764/aja.113.4.629

Becker, J. 2011. Gabi. FASTI Online.

Buccellato, A. et al. 2008. La site et la necropole de Castellaccio. Les Dossiers d'Archeologie 330:14-9.

Cucina, A., Vargiu, R., Mancinelli, D., Ricci, R., Santandrea, E., Catalano, P., & Coppa, A. (2006). The necropolis of Vallerano (Rome, 2nd–3rd century AD): an anthropological perspective on the ancient Romans in theSuburbium International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 16 (2), 104-117 DOI: 10.1002/oa.808

Killgrove, K. 2010. Migration and mobility in Imperial Rome. PhD Dissertation, UNC Chapel Hill.

Musco, S. et al. 2008. Le complexe archeologique de Casal Bertone. Les Dossiers d'Archeologie 330:32-9.

Toynbee, J. 1971. Death and Burial in the Roman World. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Differential Diagnosis of an Unusual Lower Leg Pathology in an Imperial Roman

2012-04-11T06:00:00.000-04:00

This week, I'm in Portland, Oregon, at the annual meetings of the Paleopathology Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. So in this post, I'm presenting my PPA poster. After you read it, feel free to weigh in on the diagnosis using the poll and/or the comments.

(For those of you at the conference, I'm poster number 48 and will be hanging out, answering questions and chatting, from about 3-4pm in the Pavillion Ballroom West. Please stop by to say hi!)

Differential Diagnosis of an Unusual Lower Leg Pathology in an Imperial Roman

Background and Context

A suite of skeletal pathologies was discovered on the remains of an older adult male from Imperial Rome.

Location of Casal Bertone cemetery
Map by K. Killgrove (2012)

The cemetery of Casal Bertone dates to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD and was situated in a periurban area just outside the city walls of Rome. The burial program included a large necropolis with simple inhumations in pits and a cappuccina as well as an above-ground mausoleum with niches for single and multiple burial. Archaeologically associated with the cemetery are a large villa, a network of plumbing, and a 1,000-square-meter building with almost 100 tubs each one meter in diameter, likely a fullery for cleaning cloth (Musco et al. 2008).

Individual F10A (Male, 50+) was buried in a niche in the mausoleum, suggesting higher social status than those in the necropolis and/or membership in a funeral guild. No grave goods were found associated with him, however. Over 75% of the skeleton was recovered from the burial.

Skeletal Pathologies

Top - L tibia; both fibulae
Middle - L navicular, cuboid, calcaneus
Bottom - L metatarsals, R metatarsals
Photographs by K. Killgrove (2007)

F10A had a number of pathological conditions. He lost most of his teeth antemortem. Significant arthritic changes (porosity, lipping, osteophytes) were noted in his TMJ, shoulder, elbow, hip, and knee joints, as well as in the thoracic and lumbar spine. No rhinomaxillary changes were seen.

The bones of his legs present pathologies inconsistent with solely age-related changes:

L tibia – remodeled periostitis of the postero-medial aspect of the shaft; posterior aspect thickened, with spicules of bone; no evidence of cloacae; tibia is heavier than normal; periostitis and osteophyte formation at fibular notch
R/L fibulae – osteophyte formation on lateral aspect of proximal ends; periostitis on shafts; remodelling of distal ends
Tarsals – osteophytes and porosity of L calcaneus, L navicular, and L cuboid (at the MT4/5 articulation)
Metatarsals – resorption of proximal end and destruction of head of L MT5; resorption and porosity at proximal end of two other L MTs; distal end of R MT1 significantly resorbed; resorptive foci in distal R MT5; additional resorptive changes in two other MTs, both proximally and distally

Differential Diagnosis

Several possible diseases could have caused lytic lesions to the feet and legs of F10A (Ortner 2003).

Leprosy – Erosive changes in the feet, particularly the tapering of the metatarsal heads, are similar to those seen in leprosy. The classic rhinomaxillary changes associated with leprosy were not seen in the skull, although F10A was missing most of his teeth. Leprosy is unlikely but cannot be ruled out.
Sarcoidosis – Granulomatous bone lesions also occur in the phalanges with sarcoidosis, but the metatarsals are less often affected. F10A has only a few phalanges, but the distribution of lesions does not suggest a diagnosis of sarcoidosis.
Rheumatoid Arthritis – Lytic lesions are common in RA, which often affects the skeleton symmetrically, especially the hands. F10A’s foot lesions are symmetrical and erosive, but tarsal and metatarsal joints are not commonly involved in RA. Still, RA or another erosive arthropathy cannot be ruled out (Killgrove 2010).
Mycetoma – Multiple lytic foci characterize the skeletal involvement in this infection. Most often affected are the metatarsal, tarsal, and ankle joints, but the tibia and fibula can also become infected. The widespread, almost bubbly lytic lesions of F10A’s feet strongly suggest mycetoma.

Mycetoma

Saltus fullonicus
Relief from the Museo della Civilta
Romana, taken by K. Killgrove (2007)

Mycetoma (or Madura foot) is a longstanding, progressive infection often found in populations that go barefoot and engage in agricultural work. It is endemic to the region between 15°S and 30°N latitude but has also been reported in southern Italy and Greece (Plehn 1928). Migration during the Roman Empire, including importation of slaves, means that pathogens were not necessarily confined to one location.

The Roman fullery involved large tubs of caustic liquid, in which fullers would stamp cloth while barefoot–a task called the saltus fullonicus–which suggests a possible link between lower leg pathology and occupation. Yet mycetoma is difficult to diagnose in ancient remains. A possible case from 4th century AD Israel (Hershkovitz et al. 1992) was later found to have leprosy (Spigelman & Donoghue 2001). No such testing has been done on F10A to date.

Osteological data, archaeological context, and geographic location suggest a diagnosis of mycetoma for individual F10A, but it is difficult to conclusively rule out leprosy and rheumatoid arthritis.

Time for a poll!

Download PDF of Poster

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the NSF (BCS-0622452). Thanks are extended to the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma for access to the skeleton.

References

Hershkovitz, I., Speirs, M., Katznelson, A., & Arensburg, B. (1992). Unusual pathological condition in the lower extremities of a skeleton from ancient Israel American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 88 (1), 23-26 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330880103

Killgrove, K. 2010. Migration and mobility in Imperial Rome. PhD dissertation, UNC Chapel Hill.

Musco, S. et al. 2008. Le complexe archeologique de Casal Bertone. Les Dossiers d'Archeologie 330:32-9.

Ortner, D. 2003. Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains. Academic Press.

Plehn, A. 1928. Madurafuss. In Kolle & von Wasserman, eds., Handbuch der Pathogen Mikrooganismen, pp. 113-132.

Spigelman M, & Donoghue HD (2001). Brief communication: unusual pathological condition in the lower extremities of a skeleton from ancient Israel. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 114 (1), 92-3 PMID: 11150055

Spring, Skeletons, and Easter

2012-04-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

It's Eastertime, so I thought I'd highlight some pieces I wrote recently. Read them when you're too stuffed with chocolate to do anything else (or when your kids have their inevitable sugar crash and conk out on the couch)...

For Good Friday, check out the Bioarchaeology of Crucifixion. Made infamous because of the martyrdom of Jesus, this manner of death was practiced for centuries, but there is only one known example to be found in archaeology. I address the scant evidence and the reasons that we haven't found more.

And on Sunday, check out The Curious Case of Easter Eggs. Although it has suggested rebirth for millennia and has been associated with various religious and cultural traditions, the egg became a very potent religious symbol with the rise of Christianity. I explore the origin of the tradition of Easter eggs, including the still unclear practice of burying eggs with children in early Christian Rome, and the urban myth that eggs only stand on end at the equinox.

The kind of eggs that were always on display at
my Grandma's at Easter (credit)

Bones - Season 7, Episode 7 (Review)

2012-04-02T23:35:00.003-04:00

Welcome back, everyone! Season 7 of Bones has returned following Emily Deschanel's real-life maternity leave. She's noticeably fake-pregnant in this episode, and the birth scene is utterly cringe-worthy. Let's get to it!

The Prisoner in the Pipe

Episode Summary

So there's this kid who looks to be at least 5 who won't poop in the potty without a kitten and an ice cream truck or something. She lifts the lid and - bam! - is surprised by some floating body parts. Cue staggered screaming from her father.

Meanwhile, Booth and Brennan are taking a tour of a local hospital. Because you wait until your due date to do that.

At the kid's house, Brennan identifies an entire sphenoid and half a maxilla, but there's no mention of the hilarious toe floater from the first scene. The Jeffersonian team figures that all the bones are from one person, since there's no duplication (MNI = 1). From the maxillary sinus, Brennan assesses the skeleton as male. She also notices a lens implant in the eye, which Saroyan excises and Angela traces to Rob Lazebnik, a man in Jamestown prison for perpetrating a Ponzi scheme.

Brennan and Booth investigate a murder at a prison (credit: FOX)

The Jeffersonian team attempt to figure out what caused Lazebnik's death. The ocular fluid has a negative tox screen. A fragment of the right 9th rib has striations consistent with a stab wound, but Brennan can't conclude from just this one bone that the man was stabbed. Hodgins sends a robot into the sewer, and he and Daisy find more pieces of the dead man. Daisy notices some remodeling of fractures to the manubrium, the left clavicle, and two upper ribs. These breaks occurred more than a year ago, around the time Lazebnik entered prison. Angela reconstructs the skeleton, and Daisy notes a nick on the anterior portion of the first lumbar vertebra. This suggests a stabbing, if a 3.75" object went through a doubled-over Lazebnik and slit his inferior vena cava. The body was likely dismembered using acid, as Daisy finds micropitting on the bones. They also realize that Lazebnik was killed in prison and dumped into the sewer, which sends Booth and Brennan to Jamestown to see what they can find out.

B&B meet with one guard and the warden. Both are creepy, but not killers. Because of the micropitting, they suspect that Lazebnik was dismembered with hydrochloric acid, which is being used in the mailbox-making facility on the prison grounds. They talk to the head of the operation (whose name I didn't catch), but even though his parents were swindled out of money by Lazebnik, he didn't kill him. They also find the shiv that likely killed him. Brennan starts having contractions, but Angela finds another clue: from the paper that made up the shiv, she reconstructs a recipe from a prison cookbook. Brennan takes a crappy cell-phone picture of fingerprints she got by dusting the cookbook with cocoa, and Angela runs them through the Jamestown database: Hayes Jackson, who works in the kitchen and befriended Lazebnik, eventually killed him. Because Hodgins found prison-grade rubber in the bones, Brennan chases Jackson asking to see his shoes, because four weeks after a murder, there would still be tiny bone fragments in them. She goes into labor in the middle of a prison fight.

This being TV, Brennan is going to give birth immediately. She can't make it 10 miles to the hospital. So Booth pulls over at a swanky B&B, but the proprietor turns them away. He relents and lets them use the stable. Cue ridiculous and utterly unnecessary Christian overtones. Brennan pushes, and Booth delivers the baby. They gaze at the baby, not bothering to warm her up or nurse her.

It's unclear if they go to the hospital, since Brennan is wearing the exact same clothes, but the Jeffersonian team is waiting for them at home. In the dark. Because they're unafraid of an FBI agent shooting them. It's actually kind of endearing that they put up a banner with Welcome Stapes. They name the baby Christine, after Brennan's mother (and, you know, after Jesus himself, because of course an anthropologist who thinks religion is stupid would name her baby that).

Forensic Comments

The opening scene had me laughing out loud. The toe was somehow connected to a... metatarsal? I dunno, but it certainly wasn't a proximal first foot phalanx. Then the toe disappeared when Brennan went through an inventory of pieces.
And, hey, can an entire sphenoid fit through a toilet drain? I had a frog come up through mine once. So I actually feel for the poor little poo-shy girl. It's been two years, and I still turn the light on if I get up in the middle of the night. But the frog was tiny. Sphenoids are huge. And funny-shaped.
Why didn't Saroyan have a strainer to get the eye out of the toilet? That's just piss-poor planning (pun alert!).
Brennan was really reaching for a sex estimation: maxillary sinus? Wouldn't, I dunno, tooth size be better than that? I know that those sinuses can work almost as fingerprints, but sex estimation from the maxillary sinus is only like 70% accurate.
I wouldn't let anyone put rose water on bones. Especially not in a murder investigation. I don't care if it's "inert." Poor judgment, Miss Wick.
The ends of the clavicle are medial (towards the midline) and lateral (towards the arm), not "distal" as Daisy said.
Why did Lazebnik, clearly a white-collar criminal, go to a maximum security prison?
Cocoa powder? And a crappy cell phone picture? Really? That would stand up in a court of law? (And those prints would even be there after 4 weeks? Along with the teeny bone fragments in Jackson's shoes?)

Dialogue and Drama

I hate TV baby-birthing scenes. They seem to all be written by men who have never attended an actual birth. Anyway, many of my complaints can be summed up with this link to Angela's birthing episode.
But really, Brennan's labor was way too fast (car baby!). She didn't warm the baby up afterward. She didn't immediately put the baby to her breast. These are things you learn in birthing class. And, well, as an anthropologist. At least they smeared the 3-month-old newborn stand-in with jelly. (Guesses at to whether it was Deschanel's real baby, Henry?)
I simply cannot get over the manger-birth scene and the fact Brennan named her baby after Jesus, immediately following her complaints about baptism, religion, and mythologies. Do the writers hate Brennan? Because they're writing her as compromising more and more of her principles every episode.
Let's talk about the characters' appearances back from hiatus... Deschanel's hair is sooooo shiny. I remember when my hair was that shiny thanks to prenatal vitamins. And is it me, or did John Francis Daley gain some weight?

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C-. So, they got the victim's name from his corneal implant. And they knew he was stabbed pretty early on. There wasn't much mystery here.

Forensic Solution - B-. Most of the forensic work didn't stretch the imagination too much. The cocoa fingerprints were suspicious, though.

Drama - D. Manger. 'nuff said.

I am vaguely interested to see what happens next week. Angela and Hodgins' baby was featured for, like, two episodes (but didn't even make an appearance at the B&B baby homecoming in this one!), but this baby is the product of the two main characters, so I'm curious how the writers will handle it.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XV

2012-04-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

All your Roman(ish)-skeleton-goings-on from the month of March. I might have to start posting every other week again now that the weather is nice and excavations have picked back up...

Excavations and Finds

Female skeleton, Roccaforzata
(credit)

8 March - Around 700 skeletons have been found in Vicenza, Italy, thought to be the remains of soldiers who died during the Napoleonic period.
8 March - Excavations and reconstructions at the Gallic village at Acy-Romance (near Rheims, France) suggest sophisticated burial practices and the possibility of human sacrifice.
8 March - CT scanning was undertaken on an Iron Age bog body (c. 100 AD) found in England. It revealed the man, who was in his 20s or 30s at death, was almost certainly strangled.
10 March - Early Imperial-period skeletal remains (1st-2nd century AD) were found near the Pyramid of Cestius in Rome. ANSA.it has a lot of neat photos, and La Repubblica covers it too.
12 March - The skeleton of a woman was found at Roccaforzata, Italy, dating perhaps to the fourth century BC.

Imperial-period skeleton found in Rome (credit)

14 March - CT scans were also done of five Roman-era burial urns from what used to be Verulamium in England.
15 March - At least 60 Roman-period graves have been found in excavations in Ljubljana, Slovenia, attesting to its history as a colony in the 1st-4th centuries AD.
15 March - Discovery of the skeleton of a teenage girl with a gold cross suggests she was one of Britain's earliest Christians (dating to roughly 650 AD). The find was covered all over the place, and Rosemary Joyce has an interesting take on the media hype.

Early Christian burial from England (credit)

18 March - Some Roman remains, including skeletons, were found at Arla (UK), suspected to be the last occupants of the settlement.
19 March - Bettina Arnold talks about her decade-long project on Iron Age Germany, including the "beer and bling" necessary to climb the social ladder.
24 March - Some ustrina (cremation burials) have come to light in Piacenza, Italy, dating to the 1st century BC. The cremated bones will be analyzed by osteologists, and this report notes that dietary information will be recovered (I guess from incompletely burned bones?). Could be interesting - there aren't as many examples of cremation from the Roman world as there are of inhumation.
25 March - In a follow-up to last month's story on the skeleton in the Etruscan well, archaeologists have reconstructed the pottery found in the well along with him. Analysis of the skeleton is underway, and it's expected it will be on display by the summer.
28 March - The Etruscan necropolis of Vulci was opened, revealing dozens of burials. Excavation and analysis is expected to get underway shortly.
30 March - A Hellenistic- to Roman-era cemetery was found recently in Thessaloniki, Greece, during construction of a new metro station. 75 graves have been found, only about half of them have been studied. Many of the grave goods date to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD.

Discussions and News

4 March - Slate talks to Alain Touwaide, the director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions at the Smithsonian, about medicine in antiquity, with a lot of discussion of the Hippocratic corpus and the Greco-Roman healing tradition.
28 March - Turkey is demanding the return of a Roman sarcophagus (2nd century BC) which was taken illegally from the province of Antalya and found by customs officers in Geneva.
29 March - Fun little post at BrainPicker on ancient Romans' beliefs about animals, drawn from the writing of Aelian, including such gems as: "Cranes have some sort of power which arouses women and causes them to dispense sexual favors."

Museum Exhibits and Conferences

6 March - Mildenhall Museum (UK) will be displaying the burial of a warrior and his horse, dating to about 500 AD (late Roman / early Anglo-Saxon). The graveyard where he was found contains over 400 additional burials.
24 March - The 300 or so skeletons recovered from Herculaneum in the 1980s will be returned to the site, and about 150 of them will be displayed starting in April. This is very cool news; if I'm in Italy this summer, I want to head down and check them out (also, I've been to Pompeii but never to Herculaneum). Some of the earliest work in Roman bioarch was done on the Herculaneum collection by Sara Bisel, including very early trace element analysis.

Skeletons from Herculaneum (79 AD) (credit)

28 March - In April, the archaeological superintendency of Liguria will be hosting a conference on the "Long History of Life and Mankind in Liguria." They will also reopen the Museo delle Grotte in Toirano, with a Roman skeleton going on display. (See below for my complaint about the skeleton.)
28 March - Also in April, there will be an osteology symposium in Rimini.

Publications

9 March - Possible twin burial from from the German Iron Age, by S. Flohr in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
26 March - Evidence of leprosy in child burials from Imperial Rome (2nd-3rd century AD), by M. Rubini and colleagues, in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. I cover the article here as Leprosy in an Imperial Roman Child.
27 March - A summary of strontium and oxygen isotope variation in archaeological human tooth enamel excavated from Britain, by J. Evans and colleagues, in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry. This article has a lot of good information about oxygen isotope variation in the Roman Empire.

Blog Posts and Articles

Infant burial with egg, from the
Vatican necropolis (credit)

6 March - Katy Meyers covers Rebecca Redfern's recent work on assessing the effects of Romanization on health in Romano-Britain.
13 March - I write about childbirth and C-sections in bioarchaeology, with special reference to the Roman lex Caesarea.
20 March - I also write about the history of Easter eggs - which come into Christianity through burial and which are sometimes found in Roman graves.
28 March - And I complain about the incorrect anatomical arrangement of the skeleton that will be displayed at the Museo delle Grotte (see above).

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Leprosy in an Imperial Roman Child

2012-03-29T14:39:00.002-04:00

There's an interesting article that's just been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology on possible leprosy in a 4- to 5-year-old child from the Imperial-era Roman suburbium. It's by Mauro Rubini and Paola Zaio (who previously published evidence of a leper warrior from Italy), Mark Spigelman and Helen Donoghue (who have published on aDNA evidence of leprosy), and Yilmaz Erdal (who seems to have provided the sample from Turkey) -- "Palaeopathological and molecular study on two cases of ancient childhood leprosy from the Roman and Byzantine Empires."

The gist of the article is that evidence of leprosy in children is quite rare in the palaeopathological literature, possibly because the characteristic bony changes seen in the disease - rhinomaxillary syndrome or facies leprosa - are more often identified as pathological in adults, whose skulls have fully formed. So the authors are presenting information on two subadults with bone changes to the skull - one from Imperial-period Italy and one from Byzantine-era (8th-9th century AD) Turkey.

Skeletons from Martellona
(credit)

The ancient Roman child comes from the necropolis of Martellona, a site that was located along the via Tiburtina, quite close to Tivoli in the Roman suburbium. Rubini reports that there are over 400 excavated graves and that the cemetery was in use from the 6th century BC through the 4th century AD. For the most part, burials were in cappuccina style, and "the site shows an economy substantially agricultural and very poor." The child in question dates to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD according to grave goods (two nearby burials were carbon dated to 193 AD +/- 25 years), and all that remains of the skeleton are the cranium, mandible, left clavicle, and first and second left ribs. Unlike the Byzantine cemetery, where two males and one female in addition to the infant showed pathognomonic characteristics of leprosy, the Roman cemetery did not present any other evidence of leprosy in the population.

Bony changes in the skull of the Roman child are considerable. There is erosive activity in the maxilla, including resorption of the area where the right central and lateral incisors would have been, and erosive activity and remodelling of the anterior nasal spine, the inferior portion of the nasal aperture, and both inferior nasal conchae. The forehead slopes backward, and there is pitting and a cloaca in the hard palate. The Byzantine child, on the other hand, has no signs of leprous lesions other than porosity of the occipital and parietals endocranially.

In their differential, the authors rule out lupus, actinomycosis, mucormycosis, sarcoidosis, treponemal disease, and noma. For the Roman child, the authors conclude that:

Fig. 4 from Rubini et al. 2012

Important osteological changes are present in the rhinomaxillary region. The resorption of the anterior nasal spine, the enlargement and rounding of the piriform aperture and erosion of the alveolar margin accompanied by the loss of the front teeth shown in our case are the classic changes seen in leprosy referred to as facies leprosa. [...] Furthermore, the perforation of the hard palate is present. This last change is strongly pathognomonic in leprosy diagnosis. An initial examination of the Martellona sample for M. leprae DNA in the Jerusalem laboratory was unsuccessful (data not shown).

So, the bony evidence in the Roman child is suggestive of the leprous changes we normally see in adults, but the DNA test was negative. In the Byzantine child, there were no lesions indicative of leprosy, but a DNA test was positive for M. leprae. That's odd.

The findings in this study are interesting, but there are several questions that I would have raised had I reviewed this article:

What is the context of the Roman child? There are no published data from Martellona, either osteologically or archaeologically, even though it was excavated over a decade ago according to this brief mention of the cemetery. I'd never heard of the cemetery until today (which isn't surprising, since there is a considerable amount of Italian bioarchaeological literature published in ways that are hard to find in a web or library search in this country), but there are also no citations to this cemetery anywhere in the article.

Why was the Byzantine child tested for leprosy? I suspect that the association with other leprous individuals in the cemetery and the curious porosity on the endocranial surface of the skeleton led researchers to suspect leprosy. But this is not specifically remarked on in the paper. It does seem that the three adults with pathognomonic lesions were subject to DNA testing and at least one was positive for M. leprae. The case for the presence of leprosy in the Byzantine population as a whole is much stronger than the case for leprosy in the Roman population, although little is mentioned about the Byzantine population in the article.

How do we know that facies leprosa is the same in subadults as in adults? The authors note that "Today there are no literature or hospital reports on children under 4-5 years with lepromatous leprosy that show such an involvement of the bones, even in underdeveloped countries where the medical control is difficult." They further note that "studies on leprosy sufferers in the absence of drug therapy show changes in the rhinomaxillary skeletal region only after about 7-10 years from the likely date of infection. Therefore, this is the most likely reason why today children under 14 years of age with leprosy do not show significant changes in the facial bones." The Roman child has significant bony changes to the face, suggesting advanced leprosy -- so the child would have to have been infected very young, even in utero -- and still the time-frame is off. Of course, it's possible that leprosy (or this particular form) was more aggressive than it is today, but now we're just guessing.

I'm disappointed that the Roman skeleton did not provide DNA evidence of leprosy because, as the authors note, "the case of Martellona is the first case in Italy (and possibly the world) of a child under 5 years of age with a clear rhinomaxillary syndrome." And so I'm skeptical about Rubini and colleagues' conclusions with respect to the Roman child because:

The skeleton is incomplete. After all, it was just a head. Who knows what lesions may have been on the postcranial skeleton and how those lesions may have affected a differential diagnosis?

There is a complete lack of contextual information about the population. Did other skeletons have evidence of leprosy? Tuberculosis? Other conditions considered in the differential?

There is no DNA evidence of M. leprae.

The Byzantine case is a bit more straightforward, though, leading the authors to write:

The case from Kovuklukaya displays no pathognomonic bone changes for leprosy but the palaeopathology is consistent with a chronic inflammatory response and specific PCR is positive for M. leprae DNA. We believe that this is the youngest individual in the world known to have had leprosy in the past. In sum, this study suggests that skeletal changes on young children must be analyzed in detail and aDNA analysis should be applied on subadult individuals, especially those who have non-specific infectious lesions, who are in populations with adult individuals with pathognomonic lesions of leprosy.

This conclusion is very interesting, and I think Rubini and colleagues are right to suggest that, with the current availability of biochemical analysis, testing subadults in a population with known evidence of leprosy is a key path forward in understanding the prevalence of the disease in the past. I'm not convinced yet that this Roman child had leprosy -- the differential didn't sell me on that diagnosis -- but I'm also not an expert on the disease.

I hope to hear more about the Martellona cemetery, particularly what sorts of pathologies other individuals in the population suffered from, in the future. It could be a very interesting comparison site to the Imperial-era cemeteries that have been published from the Roman suburbium.

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References

Rubini, M., Erdal, Y., Spigelman, M., Zaio, P., & Donoghue, H. (2012). Paleopathological and Molecular Study on two Cases of Ancient Childhood Leprosy from the Roman and Byzantine Empires International Journal of Osteoarchaeology DOI: 10.1002/oa.2242

Rubini, M., & Zaio, P. (2011). Warriors from the East. Skeletal evidence of warfare from a Lombard-Avar cemetery in Central Italy (Campochiaro, Molise, 6th–8th Century AD) Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (7), 1551-1559 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.020

Spigelman M, & Donoghue HD (2001). Brief communication: unusual pathological condition in the lower extremities of a skeleton from ancient Israel. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 114 (1), 92-3 PMID: 11150055

Further Reading
Thanks to Jeff Becker and Mitch Fraas, who pointed me at these two brief reports on the necropolis at Martellona: Di Sante, S., Presen, G., 2002. Guidonia: nota di scavo in località Martellona. Notiziario Archeologico (Associazione Nomentana di Storia e Archeologia), Annali 2002, pp. 88–101. Moscetti, E., ed. 2003. Guidonia Montecelio Localita Martellona (don Uva). Necropoli. Notiziario Archeologico (Associazione Nomentana di Storia e Archeologia), Annali 2003, pp. 152-4.

Who needs an osteologist?

2012-03-28T09:41:00.000-04:00

One of the stocks-in-trade over here at Powered by Osteons is featuring photographs of skeletons laid out incorrectly. Since this isn't just a one-off event, I'm going to rechristen the series with the rhetorical question, "Who needs an osteologist?"

Some may say that I'm being needlessly picky. But one of my pet peeves is presenting incorrect information to the public. Even if an osteologist can't be found, a medical doctor should remember enough of her training to consult on the layout of a skeleton. If a doctor cannot be found, there are anatomy books that can work much like the picture on the box of a puzzle yet to be put together. And if an anatomy book can't be procured, well, there's the internet.

Back to today's episode, which takes place in Italy. As far as I can tell, this skeleton is going to be put on display at the Museo delle Grotte. I hope that museum staff consult an osteologist before showing this to the public:

Roman skeleton from Grotte di Toirano (credit)

I'll leave it to you to figure out what's wrong with the skeleton. Feel free to discuss in the comments! (And if you happen to come across a skeleton you want featured on "Who needs an osteologist?", drop me an email.)

For previous episodes of "Who needs an osteologist?" check out:

Speaking of Bones, it returns next week. Have you caught up on all my reviews?

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From Birth to Burial: the Curious Case of Easter Eggs

2012-03-20T01:14:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder why the humble egg is the focus of the most important Christian holiday? The egg is ubiquitous and cheap today, often the product of backyard coops managed by hipsters keen on urban farming. But this incredible, edible source of protein was, millennia ago, a potent religious symbol.

Earth and Sun at the Equinoxes (credit)

It all started with the spring or vernal equinox (which, this year, is today). During the equinox, the sun is directly over the equator, and sunlight is (basically) evenly distributed between the north and south hemispheres. Numerous cultures around the world have celebrations for the beginning of spring. For example, in Japan, today is a national holiday, Vernal Equinox Day, where families visit graves of their ancestors and hold reunions. Prior to 1948, the day was celebrated as a Shinto holiday, Koreisai, a time to pray for a successful growing season and a time to venerate the ancestors. And modern Egyptians today celebrate the national holiday of Sham el-Nessim, going on picnics and eating lettuce and onions, foods that were customarily offered to the ancient Egyptian gods for Shemu, or the start of the third Egyptian season, a holiday that dates back to around 2700 BC.

So spring is the start of a new growing season, a rebirth of crops that have been dormant through the winter and the beginning of a time of plentiful food, a time that was crucially important for the yeomen of antiquity who lived perpetually on the edge of famine. The relationship between the start of spring and the return of crops can also be seen in ancient Roman culture. The month of March was named for the Roman god Mars, who - in addition to his role as the god of war - was also a god of fertility; sacrifices for the health of one's cattle were often made to Mars Silvanus (Cato, de Agricultura LXXXIII). And it was Julius Caesar who established the date of the spring equinox in his calender reform of 45 BC, fixing it as March 25 (a date that was later changed to March 20/21 through the vagaries of leap days in the first few centuries AD).

The spring equinox has long been important in reckoning time in the political sense - from the ancient Iranian calendar, which began on the vernal equinox, to the Julian calendar. But it's also quite important in reckoning time in the religious sense. In Jewish tradition, Passover was originally intended to track the vernal equinox, although reforms in the Hebrew calendar in the fourth century AD mean the celestial event doesn't determine the date of Passover anymore. And in Christian tradition, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. In fact, our word Easter comes from an Old English word referring to the month of April, named after the pagan goddess of the dawn. (In other modern languages, Easter is called a variant of Paschal, a word that can refer to either Easter or to Passover, demonstrating the strong link between these two Judeo-Christian celebrations.) Spring is a time to celebrate - whether it's the start of the year, the season for sowing, the release of slaves from Egypt, or the resurrection of a savior, spring means starting anew.

Chocolate Eggs (credit)

But back to eggs. Most of us take for granted the association of eggs with Easter, particularly when that association involves the words Cadbury, Kinder, or Reese's. But before the egg became firmly linked to Christianity, it was a symbol of life dating back at least 2,500 years.

Our first historical records of egg symbolism in religion date to about 500 BC. In the Achaemenid period, the Iranian calendar was influenced by Zoroastrianism, and the spring equinox - the first day of their calendar year - became a holiday. Called Nowruz, this holiday is often celebrated today by decorating, sharing, and eating eggs, and may have been celebrated similarly in the past, as a carved relief from Persepolis (dating to around 500 BC) seems to depict noblemen carrying colored eggs:

Relief from Persepolis (credit: Encyclopaedia Iranica)

But it's not clear that the Persians had much of an influence on early Christianity. To see the beginnings of the egg as a Christian symbol, then, we have to look at the Roman world. In pagan times, eggs were part of the Bacchic or Dinoysian mysteries, possibly a chthonic symbol (Macrobius, Saturnalia 7.16); they could be used to cast spells and, conversely, to offer protection (Clarke 1979). A fortified castle was built in the 15th century in the Bay of Naples, but legend has it that the poet Virgil (1st c BC) buried an egg on the site for protection, hence the modern name of the structure: Castel dell'Ovo.

Hatchling (credit)

The symbolic uses of the egg varied in the Roman world, but the link between eggs and birth is fairly straightforward. The Romans had plenty of species of birds, and most people probably would have observed chickens, pigeons, or other fowl laying eggs out of which new life hatched. Roman medicine was greatly influenced by the Hippocratic treatises (c. 400 BC), which sometimes used egg-hatching as comparanda for human birth. In de Natura Pueri (29.1-3), a human baby breaking out of the confines of the womb is described in direct analogy to a chick breaking out of its shell (Hanson, 2008).

But by the early Imperial period (1st c AD), we get the association of eggs with burials. There aren't that many examples of these burials in the bioarchaeological record, though. At Colchester, York, and Winchester in Roman Britain, eggs have been found in or near cremation urns and inhumation burials (Pollexfen 1867, Wenham 1968, Clarke 1979), and eggs are sometimes depicted on Roman sarcophagi (Nilsson 1907), suggesting they were a symbol for all social classes. Eggshells are fairly thin, so archaeological excavation techniques prior to about 1980 might very well have missed additional examples of eggs in Roman burials. Two cases of burial with an egg have been found recently in Rome, though.

At the site of Castellaccio Europarco, whose skeletons I studied for my dissertation, Tomb 31 was the burial of a 3- to 4-year-old child, dating to roughly 50-175 AD. The archaeologists note that: "under the left hand of the deceased is a chicken egg, which in a funeral context is probably not only a material offering of food, but perhaps also an allusion to eschatological renaissance (rebirth). Besides the presence of the egg, the method of disposition of the child is interesting: s/he presents on his/her stomach. This position is very rare in the context of Roman cemeteries" (Buccellato et al., 2008:18-19 [translation mine]). And in the Vatican necropolis under the via Triumphalis, a child a little less than a year old was found buried with an egg. This burial dates to around the same time as the Castellaccio child, about 50-150 AD, although this child was buried facing up and had additional grave goods. Excavators write that the egg is most likely "a symbol of rebirth, a new life balancing the injustice of a premature end" (Liverani et al., 2010; 229 [translation mine]).

Figure 74 from Liverani et al. (2010)

It is possible that these two children represent early Christian burials, as the egg has been strongly wedded to the idea of rebirth since the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The egg "is an apparently animate and inert substance which carries within itself a potent principle of life, and that which has a special vital power must perforce awake or enhance the vital powers of those to whom it is offered" (Nilsson 1907, quoted in Alcock 1980: 56). This could explain the association: the dormant egg, like the tomb of Jesus, contains new life within it. The eggshell is the rock that sealed the tomb of Christ.

Historical evidence of eggs being linked to Jesus, though, is kind of uncertain. There is surprisingly little in the Bible about eggs - we get passages about eggs as food (Job 6:6) and a few passages using an egg in an analogy (Luke 11:12, Isaiah 10:14). Eastern Orthodox tradition has it that Mary Magdalene was bringing cooked eggs to Jesus' tomb; the eggs turned bright red - the color of blood - when she saw that Christ had risen. In a similar vein, another story holds that when Mary Magdalene went to Tiberius, the emperor of Rome, to tell him that Christ had risen, he insisted that "Christ has no more risen than that egg is red," after which the egg turned bright red. But these are just traditions handed down, possibly apocryphal or used to retroactively justify the tradition of dyeing and eating Easter eggs.

Mary Magdalene with
Red Egg (credit)

Dyed and Decorated Easter Eggs (credit)

Egg on End (credit)

Yet two millennia later, we're still buying up Paas dye kits and hiding delicious treats in plastic eggs to the delight of our kids (and those of us who are kids at heart). One of my fondest memories of Easter, though, was the year that I was allowed to stay up really late. I was maybe 8 or 9, and my father explained that some people believed the spring equinox meant that there were special gravitational forces on this day, which would let us do something amazing: balance an uncooked egg on its end. After many attempts (and a broken egg or two), we finally got one to stand, and I went to bed happy. The next morning, the egg was still standing, and it continued to stand for a couple days until we had to toss it out. Turns out, this business about special gravitational forces is an urban legend, but it shows that even in the 21st century, we're still linking eggs with the vernal equinox.

So, why do we gobble up anything ovoid at this time of year, from Pancake Day before Lent to chocolate eggs on Easter? Pretty simply: the egg has long been associated with rebirth and renewal, first applied to the beginning of spring and then adopted as a symbol of Christianity. The egg is a handy way of visualizing the circle of life that starts - for many plants and animals - in spring.

Happy equinox... happy Easter... and happy eating!

Childbirth and C-Sections in Bioarchaeology

2012-03-13T12:25:00.001-04:00

Basically since we started walking upright, childbirth has been difficult for women. Evolution selected for larger and larger brains in our hominin ancestors such that today our newborns have heads roughly 102% the size of the mother's pelvic inlet width (Rosenberg 1992).

Yes, you read that right. Our babies' heads are actually two percent larger than our skeletal anatomy.

Fetal head and mother's pelvic inlet width
Photo credit: Evolution-of-man.info

Obviously, we've also evolved ways to get those babies out. Biologically, towards the end of pregnancy, a hormone is released that weakens the cartilage of the pelvic joints, allowing the bones to spread; and the fetus itself goes through a complicated movement to make its way down the pelvic canal, with its skull bones eventually sliding around and overlapping to get through the pelvis. Culturally, we have another way to deliver these large babies: the so-called caesarean section.

Up until the 20th century, childbirth was dangerous. Even today, in some less developed countries, roughly 1 maternal death occurs for every 100 live births, most of those related to obstructed labor or hemorrhage (WHO Fact Sheet 2010). If we project these figures back into the past, millions of women must have died during or just after childbirth over the last several millennia. You would think, then, that the discovery of childbirth-related burial - that is, of a woman with a fetal skeleton within her pelvis - would be common in the archaeological record. It's not.

Archaeological Evidence of Death in Childbirth

Two recent articles in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology start the exact same way, by explaining that "despite this general acceptance of the vulnerability of young females in the past, there are very few cases of pregnant woman (sic) reported from archaeological contexts" (Willis & Oxenham, In Press) and "archaeological evidence for such causes of death is scarce and therefore unlikely to reflect the high incidence of mortality during and after labour" (Cruz & Codinha 2010:491).

The examples of burials of pregnant women that tend to get cited include two from Britain (both published in the 1970s), four from Scandinavia (published in the 1970s and 1980s), three from North America (published in the 1980s), one from Australia (1980s), one from Israel (1990s), six from Spain (1990s and 2000s), one from Portugal (2010), and one from Vietnam (2011) (most of these are cited in Willis & Oxenham). Additionally, I found some unpublished reports: a skeleton from Egypt, a body from the Yorkshire Wolds in England, and a skeleton from England.

The images of these burials are impressive: even more than child skeletons, these tableaux are pathos-triggering, they're snapshots of two lives cut short because of an evolutionary trade-off.

The wide range of dates and geographical areas illustrated in the slideshow demonstrates quite clearly that death of the mother-fetus dyad is a biological consequence of being human. But what we have from archaeological excavations is still fewer than two dozen examples of possible childbirth-related deaths from all of human history.

Where are all the mother-fetus burials?

As with any bioarchaeological question, there are a number of reasons that we may or may not find evidence of practices we know to have existed in the past. Some key issues at play in recovering evidence of death in childbirth include:

Archaeological Theory and Methodology. From the dates of discovery of maternal-fetal death cited above, it's obvious that these examples weren't discovered until the 1970s. Why the 70s? It could be that the rise of feminist archaeology focused new attention on the graves of females, with archaeologists realizing the possibility that they would find maternal-fetal burials. Or it could be that the methods employed got better around this time: archaeologists began to sift dirt with smaller mesh screens and float it for small particles like seeds and fetal bones.

Death at Different Times. Although some women surely perished in the middle of childbirth, along with a fetus that was obstructed, in many cases delivery likely occurred, after which the mother, fetus, or both died. In modern medical literature, there are direct maternal deaths (complications of pregnancy, delivery, or recovery) and indirect maternal deaths (pregnancy-related death of a woman with preexisting or newly arisen health problems) recorded up to about 42 days postpartum. An infection related to delivery or severe postpartum hemorraging could easily have killed a woman in antiquity, leaving a viable newborn. Similarly, newborns can develop infections and other conditions once outside the womb, and infant mortality was high in preindustrial societies. With a difference between the time of death of the mother and child, a bioarchaeologist can't say for sure that these deaths were related to childbirth. Even finding a female skeleton with a fetal skeleton inside it is not always a clear example, as there are forensic cases of coffin birth or postmortem fetal extrusion, when the non-viable fetus is spontaneously delivered after the death of the mother.

Cultural Practices. Another condition of being human is the ability to modify and mediate our biology through culture. So the final possibility for the lack of mother-fetus burials is a specific society's cultural practices in terms of childbirth and burial. In the case of complicated childbirth (called dystocia in the medical literature), this is done through caesarean section (or C-section), a surgical procedure that dates back at least to the origins of ancient Rome.

Cultural Interventions in Childbirth

It's often assumed that the term caesarean/cesarean section comes from the manner of birth of Julius Caesar, but it seems that the Roman author Pliny may have just made this up. The written record of the surgical practice originated as the Lex Regia (royal law) with the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius (c. 700 BC), and was renamed the Lex Caesarea (imperial law) during the Empire. The law is passed down through Justinian's Digest (11.8.2) and reads:

Negat lex regia mulierem, quae praegnas mortua sit, humari, antequam partus ei excidatur: qui contra fecerit, spem animantis cum gravida peremisse videtur.

The royal law forbids burying a woman who died pregnant until her offspring has been excised from her; anyone who does otherwise is seen to have killed the hope of the offspring with the pregnant woman. [Translation mine]

Example of Roman gynaecological equipment: speculum
From the House of the Surgeon, Pompeii (1st c AD)
Photo credit: UVa Health Sciences Library

There's discussion as to whether this law was instituted for religious reasons or for the more practical reason of increasing the population of tax-paying citizens. In spite of this law, though, there isn't much historical evidence of people being born by C-section. Many articles claim the earliest attested C-section as having produced Gorgias, an orator from Sicily, in 508 BC (e.g., Boley 1991), but Gorgias wasn't actually born until 485 BC and I couldn't find a confirmatory source for this claim. Pliny, however, noted that Scipio Africanus, a celebrated Roman general in the Second Punic War, was born by C-section (Historia Naturalis VII.7); if this fact is correct, the earliest confirmation that the surgery could produce viable offspring dates to 236 BC.

This practice in the Roman world is not the same as our contemporary idea of C-section. That is, the mother was not expected to survive and, in fact, most of the C-sections in Roman times were likely carried out following the death of the mother. Until about the 1500s, when the French physician François Rousset broke with tradition and advocated performing C-sections on living women, the procedure was performed only as a last-ditch effort to save the neonate. Some women definitely survived C-sections from the 16th to 19th centuries, but it was still a risky procedure that could easily lead to complications like endometritis or other infection. Following advances in antibiotics around 1940, though, C-sections became more common because, most importantly, they were much more survivable.

Caesarean Sections and Roman Burials

Roman relief showing a birthing scene
Tomb of a Midwife (Tomb 100), Isola Sacra
Photo credit: magistrahf on Flickr

In spite of the Romans' passion for recordkeeping, there's very little evidence of C-sections. It's unclear how religiously the Lex Regia/Caesarea was followed in Roman times, which means it's unclear how often the practice of C-section occurred. Would all women have been subject to these laws? Just the elite or just citizens? How often did the section result in a viable newborn? Who performed the surgery? It probably wasn't a physician (since men didn't generally attend births), but a midwife wouldn't have been trained to do it either (Turfa 1994).

Whereas we can supplement the historical record with bioarchaeological evidence to understand Romans' knowledge of anatomy, their consumption of lead sugar, or the practice of crucifixion, this isn't possible with C-sections - the surgery is done in soft tissue only, meaning we'd have to find a mummy to get conclusive evidence of an ancient C-section.

We can make the hypothesis, though, that because of the Lex Regia/Caesarea, we should find no evidence in the Roman world of a woman buried with a fetus still inside her. This hypothesis, though, is quickly negated by two reported cases - one from Kent in the Romano-British period and one from Jerusalem in the 4th century AD. The burial from Kent hasn't been published, although there is a photograph in the slide show above.

Interestingly, the Jerusalem find was studied and reported by Joe Zias, who also analyzed the only known case of crucifixion to date. Zias and colleagues report on the find in Nature (1993) and in an edited volume (1995), but their primary goal was to disseminate information about the presence of cannabis in the tomb (and its supposed role in facilitating childbirth), so there's no picture and the information about the skeletons is severely lacking:

We found the skeletal remains of a girl (sic) aged about 14 at death in an undisturbed family burial tomb in Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem. Three bronze coins found in the tomb dating to AD 315-392 indicate that the tomb was in use during the fourth century AD. We found the skeletal remains of a full-term (40-week) fetus in the pelvic area of the girl, who was lying on her back in an extended position, apparently in the last stages of pregnancy or giving birth at the time of her death... It seems likely that the immature pelvic structure through which the full-term fetus was required to pass was the cause of death in this case, due to rupture of the cervix and eventual haemorrhage (Zias et al. 1993:215).

Both Roman-era examples involve young women, and it is quite interesting that they were already fertile. Age at menarche in the Roman world depended on health, which in turn depended on status, but it's generally accepted that menarche happened around 14-15 years old and that fertility lagged behind until 16-17, meaning for the majority of the Roman female population, first birth would not occur until at least 17-19 years of age (Hopkins 1965, Amundsen & Diers 1969). These numbers have led demographers like Tim Parkin (1992:104-5) to note that pregnancy was likely not a major contributor to premature death among Roman women. But the female pelvis doesn't reach skeletal maturity until the late teens or early 20s, so complications from the incompatibility in pelvis size versus fetal head size are not uncommon in teen pregnancies, even today (Gilbert et al. 2004).

More interesting than the young age at parturition is the fact that both of these young women were likely buried with their fetuses still inside them, in direct violation of the Lex Caesarea. So it remains unclear whether this law was ever prosecuted, or if the application of the law varied based on location (these young women were both from the provinces), social status (both young women were likely higher status), or time period. Why wasn't medical intervention, namely C-section, attempted on these young women? It's possible that further context clues from the cemeteries and associated settlements could give us more information about medical practices in these specific locales, but neither the Zias articles nor the Kent report make this information available.

Childbirth - Biological or Cultural?

Childbirth is both a biological and a cultural process. While biological variation is consistent across all human populations, the cultural processes that can facilitate childbirth are quite varied. The evidence that bioarchaeologists use to reconstruct childbirth in the past includes skeletons of mothers and their fetuses; historical records of births, deaths, and interventions; artifacts that facilitate delivery; and context clues from burials. The brief case study of death in childbirth in the Roman world further shows that history alone is insufficient to understand the process of childbirth, the complications inherent in it, and the form of burial that results. In order to develop a better understanding of childbirth through time, it's imperative that archaeologists pay close attention when excavating graves, meticulously document their findings, and publish any evidence of death in childbirth.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XIV

2012-03-03T17:47:00.000-05:00

This is a bit late, but here's your now monthly round-up of news in the world of Roman bioarchaeology (broadly defined, as usual)...

New Finds

The big story out last month was in the area of Montereggi, an Etruscan site. There is plenty of information at La Repubblica, Nove da Firenze, and Archeorivista, as well as some brief English-language coverage (The Florentine). Montereggi has been excavated for seven years, with the last phase ending in October of 2011. This past year, excavators found a human skeleton in a well. The skeleton was found on top of a number of waterproof jars that seem to have contained wine (although further testing will determine this for sure), then covered with other fragmented jars. The excavators think it was a purposeful burial (not that, for example, someone fell into the well or was thrown in), but analysis of the skeleton is ongoing at the Archaeological Superintendency of Tuscany.

The Etruscan Skeleton in the Wine Well
(credit: La Repubblica)

Another big story was on the discovery of around 90 graves that may hold the bones of early Christian martyrs near Milan. The skeletons were found near the Basilica of St. Ambrose and seem to date to the 4th-5th centuries AD, although it's uncertain because the graves are quite simple (meaning there are few artifacts that can date them). There's a nice series of photographs with the Corriere della Sera piece, and the find was also covered at Archeorivista. Sounds like some construction project is being held up for the excavation of the bodies, so I hope the archaeologists are able to recover as much as possible given the time constraints. (See also: The Bones of Martyrs?)

A Christian Martyr?
(credit: Corriere della Sera)

Archaeologists also found about 30 Lombard tombs in Cividale del Friuli (northeastern Italy, on the border with Austria). They seem to date from around the Roman period (or at least are positioned near the Roman architecture that remains). Work has been done at this site in the past, but many of these new Lombard graves were pretty intact and included a lot of interesting artifacts. One of the graves:

Lombard Grave from Cividale del Friuli
(credit: Archeorivista)

Two cremated bodies were found in Cawston (near Norfolk, UK) dating to the Roman period. Not a lot of additional information on them, though.
Did an Italian archaeologist find the tomb of St. Philip the Apostle, who was martyred in 80 AD, in Hierapolis (Turkey)? He's certainly suggesting that the Roman-style tomb was indeed that of Philip, but this is the only coverage I saw.
A Roman cemetery was discovered in Djerba, Tunisia. There are apparently over 100 graves, but no additional information has been released yet. Djerba may have been the island of the lotus-eaters referred to in the Odyssey and, in Roman times, produced a lot of murex dye. This could be a very cool site, especially if they have skeletons from those graves. I hope more information comes out soon.

Upcoming Excavations and Projects

And now for a bit of crowd-sourced archaeology... If you live in Kingsholm, Gloucester (UK), you might want to dig up your garden and see what you find - the area used to be a Roman military fort.
Excavations are resuming at the Etruscan site of Populonia this summer, including its necropolis. Should be some interesting news coming out of this dig.
A new archaeological project seeks to answer the question "What have the Romans ever done for us?" - with the "us" being the Irish. The project will tackle Late Iron Age and Roman Ireland. Previous work has already been done on human remains (including isotope analyses), but this project will find additional sites and try to figure out what it meant to be "Roman" in Ireland. This could be quite interesting, as it's likely that Roman influence in Ireland was different than Roman influence in Britain and this difference hasn't been thoroughly researched yet.

Exhibits

The Roman gladiator skeletons are on tour, spending some time in Durham (UK). If you need a reminder about who the Roman gladiators are, I covered one of the publications here ("Headless Romans of York"), but it was all over the media back in 2010: National Geographic, CNN, Telegraph.

New Analysis and New Media

A recent blog post about a uterus votive in the Wellcome collection inspired me to write about anatomical votives in antiquity.
I also wrote about the history of bioarchaeology in Italy, which was drawn in large part from my master's thesis research.
And my post on Lead Poisoning in Rome: the Skeletal Evidence was syndicated over at Past Horizons. So go check it out if you haven't already.
Just wanted to call attention to a blog by Italian anthropologist Moreno Tiziani, who also wrote a book with the same title: Professione Antropologo (Professional Bioanthropologist).

Fun Stuff

Would you have survived the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD? Take this quiz at Discovery.com and learn a little about volcanoes! (I did survive - but only barely.)
Mike Henderson at the Museum of London laid out a skeleton in proper anatomical position and was stop-motion-captured. The result is this awesome 40-second video. (A friend asked me if I could lay out a skeleton that quickly. I could do it a whole lot faster; it's just a matter of speeding up the video!)

Join me next month for more news from the world of Roman bioarchaeology!

Women Are Cute, Men Are Geniuses

2012-02-24T10:33:00.001-05:00

After looking at some pretty awesome mummies on Monday, I perused the Discovery Place gift shop. On a table at the front of the store, prominently displayed, were these tshirt-and-hat combos:

They're even specifically labeled: the band on the Genius shirt/hat reads "Men's Cap and Tee" while the band on the Cute shirt/hat reads "Women's Cap and Tee."

Really?

I'm generally ok with the pinkifying of science. If creating bath salts in a home chemistry kit means more girls and women will get into science, that's great. But this display pissed me off. Men display their intelligence (which they are rewarded for), while women display their physical appearance (which we are rewarded for, but only if we make a patriarchal bargain). Not to mention, the men's display is taller - is it because men are, on average, taller than women, or is it because women's objects / women as objects are inferior to men? Seriously, there are so many things wrong with this display.

Interestingly, I found a number of similarly styled Genius shirts in a simple web search - this one is unisex, and the copy makes it clear it's for men and women; and this one is cut for and modeled by a woman. (Not sure what to do with the Cute Genius bracelet I also found, though...)

Discovery Place is a science museum, one aimed at school-aged kids. Men = geniuses / women = cuties is absolutely the wrong message to send. Even if the gift shop is run or managed independently, I'm baffled as to why no museum staff questioned this merchandise. Perhaps, as an anthropologist with a 2.5-year-old daughter who so far loves science, I should write them a letter.

Update (2/24) - I decided to send Discovery Place an email, through their contact form. What I wrote follows, but you can also send them an email if this post or the tshirts made you mad.

To Whom It May Concern:

I'm compelled to write this email in response to a merchandise display I saw in the gift shop this week. The display had men's tshirts/caps labeled Genius and women's tshirts/caps labeled Cute. It was baffling to me that, as a self-described "preeminent science education center," Discovery Place doesn't realize that this display is communicating an old and damaging gender bias in science.

As a biological anthropologist, I greatly enjoyed the Mummies of the World exhibit. But as a woman, a scientist, and the mother of a 2.5-year-old daughter who loves science, I was chagrined at the idea that she and I can be "cute" but not "geniuses." I have blogged about both of these topics (my visit to the mummies and the gender-coded tshirts) at Powered by Osteons. Of course, I'd be happy to include your response as a coda to my "Women Are Cute, Men Are Geniuses" post.

In closing, I urge you to reconsider selling such blatantly gendered items in your gift shop, as under-representation of women in science is a real problem.

Sincerely,
Kristina Killgrove, PhD

An Afternoon with Mummies of the World

2012-02-21T11:33:00.000-05:00

Flesh and organs are not really my thing; give me dry bones over gooshy bits any day. So I don't usually go out of my way to see mummies. If they're on display in a museum, I'll look at them, trying to catch a glimpse of the bones poking through. But at last year's Paleopathology Association meetings, I heard a talk by Heather Gill-Frerking on the challenges involved in creating a museum exhibit on mummies and in communicating information about mummies to a wider public. When it was announced that the Mummies of the World exhibit would make its way to Discovery Place in Charlotte, just two hours from me, I figured I needed to check it out, and I brought with me a few interested parties from different disciplines: a Roman historian (my good friend Sarah Bond), a computer scientist (my husband Patrick), and an anthropologist-in-training (my 2.5-year-old daughter Cecilia). We were also accompanied by Douglas Coler, the coordinator of in-house education for Discovery Place, who helpfully answered our questions about the creation of the exhibit and the mummies themselves.

The exhibit is arranged largely chronologically, starting with the oldest prepared mummies - the Chinchorro mummies from about 5000 BC found in Chile and Peru - and ending with fairly recent natural mummies of the Orlovits family from 18th century Hungary. In between, there are mummies from Egypt and Peru, as well as a bog body. Animal mummies are presented as well - naturally preserved rats from Europe, purposefully mummified birds and fish from Egypt, and a spectacular howler monkey wearing a feather skirt and headdress from Argentina.

You can see a nicely done 3-minute preview of the exhibit below:

I liked the organization of the collection very much. I've been teaching osteology, bioarchaeology, and palaeopathology for six years, and I always give at least one lecture on mummies. After explaining a bit about normal decomposition, I talk about how processes such as freezing and desiccation, as well as anaerobic environments, can preserve organic remains. And then I present some examples of mummies chronologically, with a map showing the locations around the world that have given us a variety of mummies. So it was great to, in effect, see my lecture come alive: I could have dropped my students into this exhibit, and they would have gotten all the information from my lecture in 3-D form.

One of the fascinating individuals on display was the Detmold Child, an 8-10-month old purposefully preserved infant from Peru, who has been carbon dated to 4500-4450 BC. This child had all kinds of health problems, including a heart defect and growth deficiencies:

Another interesting mummy is this man from the Atacama Desert in pre-Columbian Peru. Honestly, what intrigued me most is his braid. How does one create a braid that points in that direction? When I braid my hair, the Vs point downward, not upward as his does:

Another great thing about this exhibit is the way the mummies are displayed. Most are laid out on a very thin platform that conforms precisely to the body, making the support very unobtrusive. There aren't a lot of indications, though, about the other artifacts that might have been in the burial. Several walls of the exhibit hold shadowboxes with canopic jars, small animal mummies, and other objects that would have accompanied the dead into the afterlife. But there wasn't a lot of information about the burial styles of most of the mummies - the Atacama man above, for example, was likely wrapped up to create that tightly flexed position, but I don't remember there being an explanation to that effect. Some of the lack of information, though, may very well be related to the time period in which the mummies were found. (For example, it was the height of fashion to buy a mummy and have an unwrapping party in 19th century Europe, so many mummies are now devoid of archaeological context.)

The mummy tag on display. (Sarah took this pic of the
tag in the exhibit book.)

The artifacts that were on display, though, were quite cool. Just one Fayum portrait was loaned for this exhibit, but it was great to see it. In Roman times, many Egyptians were mummified with a painting covering the face area; whether the painting actually depicts the individual who has been mummified, though, has been in question for a while (with examples of female mummies having a male portrait, and vice versa). Most people are familiar with high-status mummies from the era of King Tut, and not as many know about the Fayum portraits of the middle and lower classes. There was also a mummy tag from Egypt - basically the equivalent of the contemporary toe tag you'd see in a morgue. Sarah was especially pleased by this and attempted to make out the Greek writing. And there was even a page from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. So the context of Egyptian mummies was much better explained than was the context of any other culture's mummies, but given the abundance of Egyptian mummies and artifacts as well as the historical records from much of that time period, this was unsurprising.

Halfway through the exhibit, my daughter came running up to me, saying, "Mama! There's a mummy with a hole in it!" and immediately took off, wending her way through the exhibit to show him to me. She wanted to know more about him (as she is currently a bit obsessed with holes and discontinuities in general), so Patrick and I explained that the hole was probably made when his internal organs were removed. Douglas confirmed that that was indeed the case. I asked if she could name any organs. "Hmmm. Intestines." "Where does your pee come from?" "My bladder!" "And where do babies grow?" "A uterus! He doesn't have a uterus. He's a boy." In addition to the mummy with a hole in him, Cecilia was quite impressed by the double exit sign close to the end of the exhibit. (When you're 2, you don't really know the difference between what's mundane and what's novel.)

While I admit that I know next to nothing about creating a museum exhibit of this size, there were a few things I would have changed or included. There was a box of animal mummies, for example, still wrapped, and the different species were listed. But without an xray or CT scan, it's often impossible to tell a small dog from a large fish. It would have been nice to see the images that let the researchers figure that information out. (Perhaps more of this kind of information was contained in the videos on display; I confess I didn't have time to watch them, as we had already lined up lunch plans.) I also wanted a bit more information on the mummies to be listed directly on the exhibit tags - in particular, at least one of the Peruvian mummies had undergone cranial vault modification, but there was no explanation for the individual's different head shape. Sarah and I overheard a group of kids wonder why little Johannes Orlovitz was buried in a dress if he was a boy, but there was no explanation for the family's 18th century dress nearby; and I overheard people asking why some mummies were laid out and some were flexed. Within a tour group, these kinds of questions can be asked and easily answered, but a bit more information about these common questions would have been useful.

The main point I took away from Heather's talk at the PPAs last year was not actually about the process of creating a museum exhibit - it was about the fact that the exhibit company had christened her a Mummyologist(tm). Yes, they actually trademarked the word. Hilariously, in the trademark paperwork, the description of the service provided is, "providing information about archaeology, anthropology and forensic science via the internet." Well, in that case, I guess I'm a Mummyologist(tm) too! Actually, maybe I can trademark Romanobioarchaeologist? At any rate, this neologism is super weird to me, since anthropologist (or biological anthropologist) is a perfectly good designation (and, honestly, since it should be Mummiologist by the rules of English). I think it does a disservice to kids to teach them this made-up word, and it undercuts to a small extent one of the points of the exhibit: to bring anthropological research to a wider public. We've seen time and time again that the public doesn't really know what anthropologists do, so I question the creation of Mummyology(tm?) and wonder what, if any, effect this will have on the perception of research on ancient humans.

After a long but happy day running around the Mummies of the World exhibit, Discovery Place, and Charlotte, my daughter curled up in bed and we went through our nightly ritual:

"Mama, I want to have a conversation."
"What do you want to talk about?"
"I want to talk about mummies."
"Did you like the mummies?"
"Yes. There was a mummy with a big hole in him."
"You're right. Why did he have a hole in him?"
"He doesn't have any organs."
"That's right. What else do you know about him?"
"He was from Egypt, on the black globe."

Discovery Place in Charlotte
(photo by Sarah Bond)

In spite of my minor critiques of the exhibit, Mummies of the World is an excellent overview of the types of preservation of organic remains. The specimens include humans and animals, range from South America to Africa to Europe, and represent high and low-status burials of men, women, and children. The chronological arrangement makes it easy to see that mummies have been created for millennia and aren't restricted to King Tut and his family. Special lighting (used to help preserve the mummies) sets the tone for the exhibit - the dimness is a bit eerie but also suggests a quiet respect for the dead, whose bodies give us a world of information about their lives and the eras in which they lived. The exhibition catalogue (which I didn't buy, but was priced in the giftshop at a very reasonable $40) is lovely and includes numerous chapters on mummies from around the world, along with additional pictures and information not presented in the exhibit, by such well-known mummy researchers as Albert Zink, Frank Ruhli, Heather Gill-Frerking, and Dario Piombino-Mascali.

Anyone near Charlotte should take the opportunity to spend some time with these mummies before they move on after April 8.

Using Votives to Visualize Reproductive Anatomy in Antiquity

2012-02-17T13:46:00.003-05:00

Shrine to Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso
in Largo Preneste (Roma) - Photo taken in
2007 by K. Killgrove.

A few blocks from my apartment in Rome was a shrine to the Madonna del Perpetuo Soccorso (Lady of Perpetual Help) in Largo Preneste. Every day in the summer of 2007, I walked or rode by it on my way to study the skeletons of the ancient Romans. This is not the home of the original Byzantine icon of the same name - although that does reside in Rome - but rather a roadside shrine, located at a busy intersection near a major public transportation stop in the outskirts of the city.

The shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help includes flowers, candles, and dozens of plaques - mostly made out of marble - giving thanks for prayers that have been answered. Some are simple: Grazie, thanks. Some are spelled out: Per grazia/e ricevuta/e, For the blessing(s) received. And some just employ the shorthand: PGR. Many include a date and a name as well.

Every time I passed this shrine, I was struck by the pathos of one plaque in particular. It reads PER GRAZIA / RICEVUTA / : SABINA / ROMA, 1972 and is unique to this shrine because it includes a drawing of a stomach:

Detail of the shrine.
Photo by K. Killgrove, 2007.

This tradition of dedicating a body part to a divine figure, however, is not unique to Roman Catholicism. In fact, the practice may date back quite a long time in Italy and in other parts of the world. In the Greek world, so-called Asklepions dedicated to the god of healing have produced treasure troves of anatomical offerings from people desperate to be cured of their bodily afflictions. And there are more than one hundred similar sanctuaries in Italy, just in the area from Etruria to Campania, dating to the 4th-1st centuries BC (Turfa 1994). These Etruscan and early Roman objects are generally terracotta and are often mold-made, meaning the creation of anatomical votives was a steady business, but others were more crudely fashioned, probably by the individuals themselves. Offerings of various forms have been found, from swaddled babies to limbs to internal organs.

There's rather a large literature on votives in the Etruscan and Roman worlds, but researchers continue to question the purpose of anatomical votives, to try to suss out the ancient understanding of anatomy through identification of body parts, and to retro-diagnose the population based on the form and abundance of anatomical votives at healing centers (e.g., Cruse 2004).

This week on the blog of the Wellcome Collection, Catherine Walker writes about an object that has been identified as a Roman clay-backed uterus (dating to around 200BC-200AD). Specifically, she notes:

This observational understanding of medicine provides an interesting perspective when looking at the votives we have in the gallery. The knowledge of what was going on inside the body was limited, so what couldn’t be observed would have been assumed. If we take the votive uterus pictured above as an example, we can see that there was little knowledge of what the organ actually looked like. Autopsies would not have been carried out at this time; there are isolated cases in third-century BCE Alexandria, but these are not the norm. The form of this votive is based on assumptions and what observation could have been made. They would have been aware of the function of the organ and could have observed childbirth, so we see that this understanding has been incorporated into the votive as the wavy lines represent contractions.

The question remains, though, should we assume a lack of knowledge on the part of the ancients, or should we question our assumption about what body part this represents? Either way, we can arrive at different interpretations of this object.

If the Etruscans and Romans really had no understanding of internal anatomy, can we safely say that this depicts what we know to be the uterus? That is, in modern anatomical knowledge, we understand the uterus and the vagina to be separate parts of a woman's reproductive anatomy. The vaginal walls are somewhat ribbed and the vagina terminates in an opening - is our assignment of the anatomical votive above to a uterus simply our assumption that reproduction was the most important gynecological problem for ancient women?

And yet the Etruscans and Romans knew a great deal about childbirth (and depicted it in ceramics), even if their understanding of the internal workings of the female reproductive system was shaky. Pretty much every woman - and probably lots of men - would have seen or attended a birth and would have been familiar with the delivery of the placenta. Could this votive object represent the placenta, which can be rather veiny and bag-like? Or perhaps it's a conflation of the uterus, placenta, and vagina? In a time before modern medicine and birth control, many women (and female domesticated animals) may have seen their own uterus if they suffered from uterine prolapse, which can look similar to the votive above (I'll let you google-image search that on your own, though).

Even among experts, the assignment of votives to specific parts of the human anatomy is problematic. In her review of the publication of the votives from Punta della Vipera, Jean Turfa (2004) writes that:

One model type, G11 (83-84, pl. 33,a) has often been identified as a bladder, but it closely resembles models found at Rome and Veii that must represent testicles; the Vipera version does have a different base or backdrop, however. Although they appear extremely stylized, sometimes described as cones or phallic markers, C.'s category G12 are, as she notes (84, pl. 33,b), intended to represent human hearts.

One category remains problematical to all of us, C.'s G10 (82-84), identified as intestines. I now am convinced that this low-relief, oval model with undulating contours and central, teardrop-shaped organ, is in fact a deflated uterus, perhaps depicted as if just emptied of its fetus and still contracting back to normal shape. As C. notes, I originally identified the type as intestines, based on an example in the British Museum, but later amended the classification. The extra organ could be a vestigial uterus as on "normal" uterus models, or it could be a bladder or other appendage. Some examples seem to show the cervix (pl. 32, e); while the path of the intestines rendered on polyvisceral plaques can be traced, the folds on these smaller plaques are simply decorative and symmetrical.

So even experts disagree about whether something represents a bladder or testicles, whether a votive is a penis or a stylized heart, and whether an object is a uterus or intestines. That's a lot of disagreement on pairs of organs that really look nothing alike. Many of these articles on anatomical votives want their explanation both ways: the Etruscans/Romans didn't understand anatomy, so they depicted what they thought it was; we are reaching for the closest analogy to our modern understanding of anatomy, with the assumption that these votives are supposed to be anatomically correct. The circular reasoning employed is a bit confusing and diminishes the attempt to understand ancient medicine and anatomy.

Figure 1 from Baggieri 1998.

The most convincing bit of evidence for assuming this anatomical votive is a uterus, though, comes from the Etruscan site of Vulci (Cruse 2004). More than 400 anatomical votives of what appear to be wombs were found - all similarly shaped, but some with an opening and some with a closed end. Intriguingly, these models were x-rayed, and in nearly all of them, a small clay sphere around 1cm in diameter was found. These objects have been interpreted as intra-uterine life, connecting the votive wombs with the problems of miscarriage and infertility (Baggieri 1998).

The Vulci votives are quite different looking than the Wellcome Collection example above, but they're also much earlier in date. With such a lengthy tradition of anatomical votives, it is possible that the slightly more natural-looking wombs of the Etruscans evolved into the more stylized, flattened womb when the votives were mass-produced in Roman times. (It's always possible that they're bladders, though, and that the spheres are, more literally, bladder stones. I'm not sure if this possibility has been investigated.)

It's easy to assume that there is an unbroken tradition in the meaning and practice of anatomical votive dedication - from the 7th century BC Etruscan wombs to the 1st century AD Roman uterus to Sabina's stomach in 20th century Rome - but it's important to question this assumption in light of the growing body of information on health, disease, and ritual in ancient Italy. I hope the June conference at the British School at Rome will yield some new information about anatomical votives in the ancient world.

References:

Baggieri, G. (1998). Etruscan wombs. The Lancet, 352 (9130) DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)60686-1.

Cruse, A. (2004). Roman Medicine. Tempus.

Turfa, J.M. (1994). Anatomical votives and Italian medical traditions. In: Murlo and the Etruscans, edited by R.D. DePuma and J.P. Small. University of Wisconsin Press.

Turfa, J.M. (2004). Review of A. Comella's Il santuario di Punta della Vipera. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.06.44.

Yeomans, S.K. (2008). Medicine in the ancient world. Biblical Archaeology Review e-feature.

Anthropo-morphizing Science

2012-02-16T10:01:00.001-05:00

In the past month, two neat projects have been started by freelance science communicators in an effort to change the public's perception of science and scientists.

#IAmScience was started by Kevin Zelnio, whose goal was to let scientists explain their personal journey into the subject. In his original post, Kevin shared the experiences that initially sidelined his pursuit of science and drew on a recent talk at Science Online (which I swear I will go to one of these years). The hashtag #IAmScience lets tweeters share their stories in 140 characters or fewer; here's mine. Or you can email him with a longer story, which will appear on the I Am Science tumblr.

This Is What a Scientist Looks Like was started by Allie Wilkinson, whose goal was to change the idea that scientists are all bespectacled, grey-bearded men in white lab coats. For Valentine's Day, Allie also solicited "Dear Science" love letters, which are all very meet-cute. Allie's site was picked up by Scientific American today ("What a Scientist Looks Like"), and I was excited to lend her the photograph of me and a little blurb about my love for science.

Only half a dozen of us have contributed to Allie's site, so currently This Is What an Anthropologist Looks Like:

(Top, L to R) - Megan McCullen (archaeologist, ethnohistorian); Josephene & Rebecca (archaeologists); Christopher Schmitt (biological anthropologist); (Bottom, L to R) - Laurie Kauffman (primatologist); Kait G. (biological anthropologist); and me (bioarchaeologist).

Both Kevin's and Allie's projects are great ways for anthropologists to contribute to fixing the public's perception of science and scientists. So if you haven't already tweeted about #IAmScience, go do it. And if you haven't sent in a picture to This Is What a Scientist Looks Like, go do it. Let's anthropo-morphize science and show the many cool things we do!

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