Powered By Osteons

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XIII

2012-01-27T15:02:00.002-05:00

Not a lot of new stuff this past fortnight, continuing what seems to be a trend. From here on out, then, I'll plan to put up the carnival once a month, at the end of each month... unless news reports pick up (which they may do towards the summer when loads of people are in the field excavating).

Amphorae from Trieste
(via ArchaeoRivista)

ArchaeoRivista has two short posts on random Roman tombs discovered at Truccazzano and Trieste. The former are simply reported as "probably Roman," but without proper dating until further study is carried out. The latter include two adults and one child. It's not clear to me what time period the Trieste skeletons are from, but archaeologists also found over 100 amphorae post-dating the 1st century AD.

This neat little game I found is Greek rather than Roman, but it's an interactive webpage from the British Museum in which you attempt to diagnose Thucydides' disease based on descriptions of his symptoms and the medical knowledge of the time. See if you can better understand the 430-426 BC plague of Athens!

If you happen to be in Milan between February 23 and March 4, you can see the exhibit Cranioscopia, curated by Alberto Zanchetta, which looks like it's in conjunction with Zanchetta's forthcoming book "Frenologia della Vanitas: il Teschio nelle Arti Visive." (Very nifty book cover!) Seems like the exhibit involves books on skeletal anatomy from a variety of time periods.

Skeletal remains of at least two individuals have been uncovered at a construction site in Milton Keynes (England). Archaeologists say that the bones are older than 70 years and therefore not of forensic interest. The burial style, though, is similar to what they're calling "kist" burials (which I guess is British for "cist"?) dating to the 5th century (Late Roman) found at Wolverton in the 1980s. The picture (below) shows that the burial is quite disturbed, with ribs up near the skull. An adult mandible (with what looks like antemortem loss of the lower right molars) is evident, and it looks like the little pile of bones could be subadult (or they could be faunal - hard to tell from the tiny, blurry picture).

Possible Roman bones at Milton Keynes (via BBC)

Bones - Season 7, Episode 6 (Review)

2012-01-22T22:51:00.002-05:00

Well, folks, I seem to have completely missed the fact that Bones was new last Thursday. (And by "last" I mean the 12th.) It was the first new episode since early December, was supposed to air in mid-December, but was bumped to mid-January. And the show is on hiatus again (it's a disjointed season because of Emily Deschanel's real-life pregnancy). So, apologies for the oversight. Here's your surely long-awaited review...

The Crack in the Code

Episode Summary

At the Washington Monument, a skull and spinal column are found at the base of a statue of Abraham Lincoln, on whom the words "Where is the rest of me?" are scrawled in human blood. Based on blowfly eggs in the eye orbits, Hodgins puts time of death at 2 days prior. Brennan notices something odd about the vertebral column: the vertebrae are out of order, yet all the associated ligaments have been reattached with a kind of string made out of human guts. The killer is clearly leaving a message: one for the public and one for the Jeffersonian team.

Back at the lab, Brennan notes that the small skull and nuchal crest indicate the victim was a Caucasian female, and the incompletely erupted wisdom teeth put her in her early 20s. Serological analysis shows that the blood at the scene, in addition to the victim's, comes from five other people, so Saroyan rushes a DNA analysis of it.

Booth finds videotape from the monument, but the killer used a laser pointer to wipe out the video. Sweets thinks the killer is highly intelligent and very good at killing people. They bring in Sam Sacks, a night janitor who has a raging nicotine addiction and history of crime. He didn't do it, but he knows where the blind spot on the camera is (which never seems to come into play again).

Wendell and Hodgins try to figure out the code in the rearranged vertebrae, which start off with C1, T9, C2, C5, T1 (which has both transverse processes removed), T7, C4 (with the right transverse process removed), but they get nowhere, even though Hodgins' grandfather was a codebreaker under Admiral Nimitz. Angela gets no hit in the missing persons database from the facial reconstruction, but Saroyan finds out that all five blood samples are from FBI field agents in the DC office.

Booth checks out the officers, but they are all alive and had all donated blood two weeks prior at an FBI blood drive. He and Miss Julian get harassed by Ezra Krane, a reporter at the Washington Standard, who seems to know more than he should about the case. After re-canvassing the scene, Booth finds a homemade laser pointer made out of an off-brand Altoids tin, a diode from an old DVD player, and a switch from a toaster.

Brennan decides to run a strontium isotope analysis on the victim and finds that she was from Denmark. Wendell finds a particulate embedded in the anterior portion of the T4 vertebra, as well as hairline fractures on the neural arches and pitting on the vertebral body, which he and Brennan think are consistent with a high velocity injury.

Sweets and Booth go through Miss Julian's records of high-IQ people the FBI has arrested and zero in on Christopher Pillant, a socially-marginalized computer geek who once took down the Senate's website and the Department of Defense's network. He was put on house arrest after multiple charges of wire and computer fraud. Pillant's house, though, has no computers save an old one with vacuum tubes, and he's on house arrest. His ankle monitor pings the company every 38 seconds. Pillant calls himself a "hacktivist" and insists he broke into the DoD network in order to expose the lack of security in their system and that the company that set up the network got the contract through corrupt, shady dealings.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Hodgins and Angela finally figure out the code in the vertebrae. By reducing the vertebrae to numbers (and then reversing the string, I guess?), they get 20166 (571) 418-5247 3117 C 353 5291 - which is a zip code, phone number, address of the Justice Department on C street, room number, and pass code. When Booth and Sweets check out the location, they find the rest of the victim's body in addition to a box of files about the FBI's CI (confidential informants).

The bones from the Justice Department show pitting and microfractures to the posterior of the ribs and the sternum - basically, damage to the front and the back. Hodgins notes that the particulate had camphor residue on it, which may have been from fireworks, but his experiment with Wendell - in which they load a wetsuit with meat - backfires. Booth meanwhile tracks down Sophia Berman, head of IT at a local hospital, whose father committed suicide in front of her because he was defrauded by Daniel Kassudo, one of the FBI's CIs. She puts Booth and Sweets back on the trail of Ezra Krane, the reporter.

Brennan's contacting of the Danish embassy yields a hit for a missing person: Inger Johannsen, who was housesitting in the area. Booth and Sweets check out the house and find the jacuzzi full of blood and offal, with the words "This Won't Stop" written on the side of the pool. Based on the remains in the jacuzzi, the murder occurred Sunday night. Miss Julian tells Booth to bring in Ezra Krane for questioning, and he has no alibis for the time of the murder or the placement of the remains in the monument.

Angela decides to scan Inger's bones to find out more about cause of death. After scanning the images, her computer program computes trajectories of the projectile consistent with a gunshot, but not with a bullet. Soon, Angela's computer notes "System Failure", and a bunch of stuff catches fire. The weapon, Hodgins finds out, is similar to a bang stick, which divers use to ward off sharks. Angela's computer, on the other hand, was brought down by malware that shut off all the fans, causing her computer to overheat and catch fire. Since Angela hadn't downloaded anything to her computer, only uploaded it, she thinks that the virus may have been in the bones somehow. Wendell didn't find any computer chips, but Brennan brushes the edge of the ribs with edicol dye and notices a fractal pattern etched into them. The Jeffersonian team goes back to suspecting Pillant, a computer genius who doesn't need a computer to bring down $1 million worth of computers.

Booth and Saroyan are called to the scene of another murder: a victim hanging upside down from a flag pole. Powder burns at the base of the skull are consistent with a bang stick. The victim's wallet IDs him as Ezra Krane, and he's been dead under 4 hours. Booth instructs that the body be brought to the Jeffersonian, but the coroner's van with Metro PD escort was diverted to the Medical Examiner's Office, where the body was supposed to be transferred to DC Memorial Hospital, where there were records waiting noting the autopsy was complete and infectious tissue was found. Once autopsies are complete and there's infectious tissue, Saroyan explains, the body is cremated. So Wendell gets stuck sifting through cremains for clues, while Hodgins finds out from a swab at the scene that there was thallium dioxide in the skull wound, likely from an old vacuum tube.

Booth and Sweets bring Pillant in to the FBI for questioning. He admits to the murder and notes that his fractal bone program was not a virus but a worm. There's no evidence, though, tying Pillant to the crime - his ankle monitor shows that he was at home at all times. The episode ends with Pillant back at home, clearly planning his next move - that seems to involve Booth and Brennan - and our heroes finding a skeleton of a house formerly owned by a criminal.

Bad Things - So Many Bad Things - Wrong with This Episode

So, the forensics this week weren't horribly bad, but the police work was terrible and the computer parts hysterical. Let's start with forensics...

How does one reattach all the vertebral ligaments in a dead body?
The size of the skull and the nuchal crest alone cannot give anyone an ancestry estimation of Caucasian.
Sr isotopes are not some magic bone-GPS device. They cannot tell you that someone came specifically from Denmark.
As usual, the radius and ulna are switched from standard anatomical position in the lab.

The police work is... odd.

A person confesses to a murder, and the FBI can't do anything to him? Not even, like, make a cop watch his house for when he escapes?
Most annoyingly, Pillant is billed as an evil computer genius. And yet thinks that no jury would believe he could get around his ankle monitor? Seriously? The ankle monitor is his only alibi. Freaking House got around his ankle monitor in one of the first episodes of the season, and he's just an evil doctor genius.

And for the computer part, I spoke with my very own resident computer genius (otherwise known as my husband), who laughed at the following ridiculous bits:

A fractal etched into bone sounds pretty snazzy, but this would not harm any computer in existence. There is no way that a picture of something could magically form a virus or worm and harm a computer (unless the picture itself, that is, the .jpg file or whatever, was corrupted). But Angela's taking a picture/scan of bones could not infect her computer.
Computers don't catch fire if they overheat. A processor might catch fire, but microprocessors are very, very small and make very, very little fires for a second or two before melting. There's no way Angela's computer would have been set ablaze (even if the whole fractal-in-bone thing were plausible).
He did like the idea of MacGyvering a laser pointer and suggested the Bones writers used the first google hit for "homemade laser pointer." I want to know why Pillant couldn't just, you know, order a laser pointer from Amazon. I think felons can still have laser pointers.
And he pointed out that the best way of getting around an ankle monitor is to have it affixed to your prosthetic leg. :)
Also, I learned that "hacktivist" is a real word.

Dialogue

I always like conspiracy-theory-Hodgins. This episode: the Vatican, John Wilkes Booth, and Admiral Nimitz.
Brennan: "When the Dani of New Guinea defeated the Umumi(?) tribesmen, the Dani valued the huts of their vanquished enemies as a symbol of their mightiness."
Brennan: "I don't know anyone smarter than I am." (And yet she then talks about "primitive hunters" - I know some ANTH 101 students smarter than that, Brennan.)
Sweets: "You did it, but you couldn't have done it. That's quantum indeterminacy." (Husband: It is not. It's not even a proper paradox, although it's closer to a paradox than to quantum indeterminacy.)
Pillant: "Trying to make the system secure, we make it more complex; but the more complex we made it, the more insecure we really are."

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - A. I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for serial killers, especially the "clever" ones. This episode was chock full of interesting tidbits, and everyone had something to do. Sure, the writers threw many more red herrings than necessary, but I'll allow it.

Forensic Solution - B-. Points deducted for handwaving about Sr isotopes and Caucasian ancestry.

Drama - B+. There was too much going on most of the time for any drama to kick in, until the end when it's revealed that Pillant is setting his sights on Booth and Brennan next. But points were taken off here because the FBI is being stupid for not monitoring Pillant, so it's their own fault if Booth gets in trouble.

Let's hope the rest of the season includes more of this evil-genius-computer-hacktivist. I'd love to mock some more ridiculous computer nonsense. In the meantime, you'll find me in the bioarchaeology lab, carving a Mandelbrot into a manubrium.

Lead Poisoning in Rome - The Skeletal Evidence

2012-01-20T21:15:00.002-05:00

A friend alerted me to today's IO9 post, "The First Artificial Sweetener Poisoned Lots of Romans." It's a (very) brief look at some of the uses of lead (Pb) in the Roman world, including the hoary hypothesis that rampant lead poisoning led to the downfall of Rome - you know, along with gonorrhea, Christianity, slavery, and the kitchen sink.

Roman Lead Artifacts (clockwise from top left) -
curse tablet, shot, pipe, ingots, jewelry

The fact the Romans loved their lead isn't in question. We have plenty of textual and archaeological sources that inform us of the use of lead - as cosmetics, ballistics, sarcophagi, pipes, jewelry, curse tablets, utensils and cooking pots, and, of course sapa and defrutum (wine boiled down in lead pots) - but what almost all stories about the use of lead in ancient Rome miss is the osteological evidence.

But let's start with some contemporary medical knowledge. Metabolic disorders can be caused by a lack of nutrients - a lack of vitamin C gives you scurvy, and a lack of vitamin D gives you rickets - but they can also be caused by an abundance of something, like too much fluoride, too much mercury, too much arsenic, or too much lead.

Lead is a heavy metal, one that isn't needed by the human body, unlike vitamins C or D. This element is found in the environment naturally, so we do expect to find some amount of lead in the skeleton of every person, ancient or modern. But, because of the physical properties of lead - it can be made into hard, sharp things - people have been using it for millennia and thus have been exposed to heavy metal toxicity for millennia as well. The dangers of lead actually weren't well known until the second half of the 20th century, which was when lead was taken out of things like paint and gasoline.

The main problem with lead - the reason that it's toxic - is that it interferes with normal enzyme reactions within the human body. Lead can actually mimic other metals that are essential to biological functioning. But since lead doesn't work the same way as those metals, the enzymatic reactions that depend on things like calcium, iron, and zinc are disrupted. The most damaging enzymatic reaction that lead affects is the production of hemoglobin, or red blood cell production, which can cause anemia. So doctors in modern times often find anemia in a person with lead poisoning. Lead is also particularly problematic because it stays in the body for a very long time once it's absorbed, inhaled, or ingested. Most of it gets deposited in the bones and teeth. Lead can be removed from the body, excreted through the kidneys and urine, but it's a very slow process without modern chelation therapy.

Map of Imperial Rome and Suburbs

In modern society, lead poisoning is diagnosed through a blood test to determine the level of lead in the body. We don't have blood in ancient remains, of course, so we have to investigate lead through the levels we can measure in bone and enamel. As far as I know, the first and only study to actually measure levels of lead in skeletons from Rome is the one that involved my samples from the two cemeteries of Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco (1st-3rd c AD).* The analysis was led by Janet Montgomery, now at Durham University, and also involved around 200 samples from Britain from the Neolithic to the Late Medieval periods (see below, Montgomery et al. 2010).

One of the charts from that article is below. The Romans are there in the middle. What you can see is that there are fairly low levels of lead in the earlier periods in Britain (Neolithic to Iron Age) and in the post-fall of the Roman Empire (5th-7th c AD). So what do those numbers mean on a scale of Normal to Lead Poisoned? Well, the modern recommendation by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control is that children should not have more than 1 mg/kg of lead in their bones (or 10 ug/dL measured in blood). Back to the chart, and no one in the Neolithic is getting poisoned. By the Iron Age, some people are above that level. The Imperial period is pretty special - we've got people with lead levels up to 30 mg/kg, which is 30 times higher than modern recommendations! In fact, this level is three times higher than the level the WHO considers "very severe lead poisoning."

Lead Concentrations from Britain and Rome
(Montgomery et al. 2010, Figure 11.2)

The chart below shows my Roman samples separate from the British samples. These are all median human lead concentrations. You can see a spike in the British samples during the Roman period, but the Romans themselves are so much higher, at least until the Medieval period, when people started working with lead again.

Median Lead Concentrations in Britain and Rome
(Montgomery et al. 2010, Figure 11.3)

It's not yet clear what the data mean, though, other than that some people likely had lead poisoning and others didn't. The sample size is fairly small, and more importantly, I don't know where people were living. That is, if the people buried at Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco were living in an industrial area or were metalworkers, then they were more at risk for high levels of lead than were people not living in those areas and not doing those jobs. What is clear, though, is that lead poisoning is not something you'd want to have. People with very severe lead poisoning tend to have major neurological changes - brain swelling leading to seizures and headaches, aggressive behavior, loss of short-term memory, and slurred speech - and a host of other problems, like anemia and constipation.

Did lead poisoning cause the fall of the Roman Empire? Probably not. Yes, there was increased lead production in the Roman Empire, which we know from histories, ecological sources (like ice cores from Greenland and peat bogs in Europe), artifacts, and now skeletons. But the data - few as they are - simply don't support a conclusion of high lead concentration in the entire population. More research of this sort is needed, of course, to examine the potential effects that anthropogenic lead had on the population of Rome and the Empire. Fortunately, more will be forthcoming from Gabii as I start biochemical analyses of those skeletons this year, so stay tuned!

Notes:

* Aufderheide and colleagues (cited below) did test 20 skeletons from Italy, including a few from the greater Rome area. However, this was not an in-depth study, in that the skeletons were from various places. They further note that they could not control for lead diagenesis, which may (or may not) have thrown off their measurements. Twenty years later, the technology for identifying lead concentration in skeletons is greatly improved. Aufderheide and colleagues found that skeletons from the Roman period (by which they mean the Imperial period) had much higher lead levels than in the previous centuries, which is consistent with our study and the understanding that lead working increased in this time period.

Further Reading:

The Bones of Martyrs? by Kristina Killgrove, Past Horizons, 5/25/11
Lead Poisoning and Rome by James Grout, Encyclopaedia Romana
Saturnine Gout among Roman Aristocrats: Did Lead Poisoning Contribute to the Fall of the Empire? by Jerome Nriagu, New England Journal of Medicine, 3/17/83
The Myth of Lead Poisoning among the Romans: an Essay Review, by John Scarborough, Journal of the History of Medicine, 1984
"Line on the left, one cross each:" the Bioarchaeology of Crucifixion by Kristina Killgrove, Powered by Osteons, 11/4/11

References:

A. Aufderheide, G. Rapp, L. Wittmers, J. Wallgren, R. Macchiarelli, G. Fornaciari, F. Mallegni, & R. Corruccini (1992). Lead exposure in Italy: 800 BC-700 AD. International Journal of Anthropology, 7 (2), 9-15 DOI: 10.1007/BF02444992.

J. Montgomery, J. Evans, S. Chenery, V. Pashley, & K. Killgrove (2010). 'Gleaming, white, and deadly': using lead to track human exposure and geographic origins in the Roman period in Britain. Roman Diasporas, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Suppl 78, 199-226.

C. Roberts and K. Manchester. 2007. The Archaeology of Disease. Cornell University Press.

T. Waldron. 2009. Palaeopathology. Cambridge University Press.

A Brief History of Bioarchaeological Ethics - Part I: America

2012-01-19T20:30:00.000-05:00

Given that the subject matter of many biological anthropologists is the human skeleton, it is not surprising that ethical concerns have arisen over the years about bioarchaeological research in particular. Images of bioarchaeologists as graverobbers, bent on the desecration of places of eternal rest, are not uncommon, and laws concerning the treatment of human skeletons have only arisen in the past few decades. As part of my Human Osteology and Bioarchaeology courses, I usually give a lecture that summarizes the history of bioarchaeological practice and ethics in the United States. It's long been a goal of mine to learn more about the ethics of skeletal research around the world, so Part I and Part II will cover places that I have worked - America and Italy, respectively - with plans to learn more and write more about other countries this spring.

In the beginning...

Columbus meets the Taino

Rum Cay, Bahamas. 1492. Columbus and his men sailed the ocean blue and ran aground on an island full of people unknown to Europeans. The Arawaks took pity on their strange guests, giving them food and water. Columbus thought they were a generous people, surprisingly so considering their lack of possessions. Their language lacked a word for war. From this chance meeting, the myth of the Noble Redman was born. Shortly after Columbus' arrival, the Caribs came from the south and turned the Europeans' ideal of the peaceful Indian on its head: the Caribs were warlike, capturing women and slaughtering men. They were cannibals. It was obvious to Columbus that there were Good Indians and there were Bad Indians. This dichotomy, brought back to Spain by Columbus, allowed Ferdinand and Isabella to rationalize the beginning of the New World slave trade: the Caribs were clearly un-saveable, not potential vassals or converts to Christianity. It did not occur to anyone that the Caribs and Arawaks had different approaches to European colonization. The simplistic Good/Bad Indian dichotomy collapsed the variation in the Native peoples of the New World and overlooked the intricacies of Native American life for centuries. [1]

Colonialism, Independence, and Native Americans

Boston Tea Party (credit: Library of Congress)

Fast-forward two and a half centuries, and the American colonists had adopted the Native American as a symbol of their revolt against the British crown. Famously, in 1773, hundreds of men dressed like Indians hurled thousands of pounds of tea into Boston Harbor to protest the tea tax of George III. In 1774 and 1775, Paul Revere produced engravings that showed colonists dressed as Indians being oppressed by the British. During the Revolution, the word "American" came to be used for all inhabitants of the area, not just the Indians, producing a sense of nationhood not present before. Native Americans became a powerful totem for representing the colonists' aims of independence. Yet there wasn't independence for everyone in America. In the Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers claimed that George III "has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." In listing the outrages of the British, it was expedient to claim that George III incited Indians to make war on the colonists.

After the Revolution, George Washington encouraged people to come to America and to assimilate, and he specifically singled out the Native Americans as a group that needed to give up their traditional hunting grounds and take up farming. Thomas Jefferson also favored assimilation, as he hoped to "free" the native from his savage background - the hunter/warrior culture, the tribal form of organization, pagan religious views, and communal land ownership - so that he could participate in national prosperity. In 1808, Jefferson specifically invited Native Americans to unite with the newfound Americans as one people. Jefferson saw himself as a father-figure to the Native Americans, who were, he wrote, "in body and mind equal to the white man." He was disappointed when his "progeny" clung to their old ways.

Trail of Tears, painting by R. Lindneux

When America declared war on Great Britain in 1812, many native groups took the British side, pissing off the Americans. Of course, the idea of manifest destiny was too great for colonists to resist. Although James Monroe wanted to work with the Native Americans and have them voluntarily settle west of the Mississippi in 1824, the natives didn't want to leave their homes. The 1830 Indian Removal Act was supposedly a voluntary swap - of land in the east for land in the west - and there was no authorization of use of force. And yet the remaining Native Americans in the South were rounded up, most famously the Cherokee in 1838, and forcibly moved along the Trail of Tears, on which nearly half of the Cherokee people died. [2]

Resurrectionists and Early Skull Science

Unlike most politicians of the day, Thomas Jefferson was truly interested in the lives of the Native Americans. His Notes on the State of Virginia show how well-versed he was in their culture - he even attempted to analyze some of their languages, claiming a linguistic affiliation with Asian cultures. But TJ was more of an observer from afar - he took an etic perspective, not having met too many Native Americans in his life. And although Jefferson amassed Native paraphernalia and excavated a burial mound (quite literally in the neighborhood I grew up in), he didn't collect bodies.

Mississippian skull pulled from a mound
(from Morton's Crania Americana)

Skull collecting began with a vengeance in the 1830s with Samuel Morton. Morton wanted to teach the anatomy of race and intelligence to his students, but he didn't have a lot of skulls at his disposal and realized he needed a collection. Demand for human specimens far outweighed the legal supply - which consisted of executed criminals - and doctors began turning to bodysnatchers or, as they were delightfully known, resurrectionists to procure skeletons for them. Although 19th century resurrectionists would willingly dig up Euroamericans, it was far and away easier to dig up African Americans and Native Americans, who were often buried in graveyards for the poor. Morton managed to get some skulls from archaeological digs, but he didn't want ancient Native Americans. Eventually, as smallpox and other epidemics continued to decimate the Native population, Morton was able to buy plenty of skulls on the growing skull market. He used over 1,000 to form his so-called cranial library, which was the most comprehensive (and diverse) in the world at the time. By 1842, Morton was expounding on the character traits of the Native Americans that he found in their skulls: they were a savage people with peculiar and eccentric moral constitution. Morton's seemingly scientific, objective studies showed that whites were superior to everyone else, that blacks only flourished in servitude, and that Indians needed freedom or they would perish.

A decade later, a lawyer-turned-ethnologist named Lewis Henry Morgan published a treatise on the Iroquois in New York state after having observed them for several years. His was the first systematic attempt to collect ethnographic data on a nationwide scale. Yet in compiling and comparing his data from around the world, in 1877, Morgan famously arranged groups throughout time and space into just three categories - savages, barbarians, and civilized people - which he conceived of as a developmental ladder. The savages still used a bow and arrow, while barbarians had developed ceramic technology, and civilizations had alphabets and written history. This theory of social evolution became the backbone for late 19th century anthropology, which allowed museums and universities to classify the artifacts and skeletons they had in their collections.

Collection of skulls from around the world, c.
(Mutter Museum, Philadelphia)

These collections were created as early as the 1850s, with the founding of the Smithsonian through a grant from James Smithson, a Brit who never set foot in the New World. Seeing that there were no collections of natural history of America, Smithson and then others jumped at the chance to give money to understand America better. Not to be outdone, George Peabody endowed a museum at Harvard and at Yale. The American Museum of Natural History was established in New York in 1869. And the Field Museum in Chicago came a bit later, in 1893. All of these museums began buying up natural history collections from smaller museums, which included thousands of birds, mammals, fish, and reptiles indigenous to the Americas. However, there were still very few Native American skeletons in these collections.

Although skull collecting was a hobby of natural historians, around the end of the 19th century, it became a cottage industry, especially on the frontiers of America. It was best to have reliable documentation, including the individual's tribe, cause of death, level of intelligence (IQ), and personality traits because these data helped people like Morton correlate personality and intelligence with bony traits of the skull. Scholars like Morton and Louis Agassiz called on the American government for help; Agassiz wrote to the Secretary of War saying, "Let me have the bodies of some Indians. I should like one or two handsome fellows entire and the heads of two or three more" (quoted in Thomas 2000, p. 57). Government officials like the Surgeon General complied, ordering medical officers to collect and forward "all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable" (ibid.).

At the Sand Creek Massacre, 1875
drawing by Cheyenne artist Howling Wolf

In 1864, for example, there was tension between white settlers in Colorado and the local Cheyenne indians. A minister and Civil War hero, John Chivington, led a regiment of volunteers in November of that year to the Cheyenne villages of Black Kettle and White Antelope in Sand Creek. He told his soldiers that he wanted scalps and wanted to be wading in gore. Ignoring the American flag that flew over Black Kettle's lodge, Chivington and his men slaughtered, wounded, and mutilated hundreds of Cheyenne men, women, and children. One volunteer even castrated White Antelope, even though he had been given a peace medal by Abraham Lincoln, which he wore at all times. As Native Americans were being confined to reservations and hunted down, the bones of their dead were being systematically gathered up. Many of the Cheyenne dead were defleshed and shipped to the newly founded Army Medical Museum. [3]

Boas' Bodies

Franz Boas, c. 1915 (credit)

In the 1880s, Franz Boas immigrated from Germany. Although he's known as the father of modern American anthropology, Boas has a bit of a checkered past when it comes to body collection. As a surveyor employed by the British government in British Columbia, Boas was tasked with surveying the culture of the Native tribes there. He used this trip to build up a personal collection of Northwest Coast native skulls, which he carefully documented and sold - $5 would get you a skull, and $20 would get you a whole skeleton. Boas wasn't particularly good at finding specimens, though, and enlisted the help of better graverobbers. He found a couple of brothers who claimed to have over 75 skulls of the Cowichan tribes. Boas bought these and asked the Sutton brothers to find him more. The Cowichan found out about this deal, though, and obtained a warrant to search the Suttons' business. Boas, however, always thinking, shipped the bones under false invoices to New York. In sum, he had around 200 crania. When Boas became a professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, his skull collection came with him. It was exhibited at the World's Fair in 1893, but eventually the majority of the skulls went to the American Museum of Natural History.

Minik Wallace, in customary dress (left)
and in New York (right) (credit)

It was also quite fashionable at the end of the 19th century to collect live specimens as well, particularly Inuit (Eskimos), who were thought to be living fossils of the Ice Age, trapped in a stage of savagery. To his credit, Boas didn't think that Morgan's savagery/barbarism/civilization schema was very good and wanted to devise a better explanation of the diversity of cultures around the world. He wrote to the arctic explorer Robert Peary and asked him to bring back one specimen from Greenland the next time he was there. In 1897, Peary sailed into New York harbor with not one but six Eskimos. They became instant celebrities, and 30,000 New Yorkers paid 25 cents a piece just to see them. Boas arranged for the Inuit to live at the American Museum of Natural History for a year so that he could study them ethnographically. Not long after they arrived, though, all six Inuit contracted pneumonia. Eight months after their arrival, four were dead of tuberculosis, one made it back to Greenland, and one - an orphaned boy named Minik - remained in New York.

Minik, along with Boas and museum staff, went to Central Park in 1898 to bury Minik's father, who had succumbed to TB. The staff followed the Inuit custom of laying out the body; and yet it wasn't actually a body. They had faked it from a tree trunk. Minik's father was actually autopsied, and his bones were cleaned and stored at the AMNH. When he was 15, Minik found out about this ruse from a newspaper. He asked for the return of his father's bones, but the AMNH would not comply. Boas was asked by reporters if he faked the burial, and he fessed up to it. When pressed as to why the museum had any right to the bones, Boas replied, "Oh, that was perfectly legitimate. There was no one to bury the body, and the museum has as good a right to it as any other institution authorized to claim bodies" (quoted in Thomas 2000, p. 83).

The remains of Minik's father were actually returned to the Greenland Eskimo - in 1992. The Eskimo didn't want the bones, though. Their tradition said that the bones of the dead are to be reviled and not venerated, that bodies should be disposed of as soon as possible and never spoken of again. [4]

The Civil Rights Movement Ignites Ethical Discussions

In the early part of the 20th century, Native Americans had little power to stop Euroamericans' desire to study their cultures, in spite of legislation like the Indian Reorganization Act, passed in 1934, which granted Indians the power to operate as tribal entities and restored many of their rights, including their land.

One of the turning points in the archaeology of Native Americans came in 1971, at an excavation in Welch, Minnesota. For five weeks, archaeologists and students toiled in the dirt, painstakingly documenting everything they found. Towards the end of the field season, a group of Native Americans showed up, representing a new protest group called the American Indian Movement. They confiscated field equipment, backfilled trenches, and burned field notebooks. They were deeply offended that archaeologists were disturbing the graves of their ancestors and would not allow more digging. The archaeologists didn't understand - they were trying to preserve Indian culture, not destroy it. They didn't think it was disrespectful to dig up Indian skeletons.

Vine Deloria, Jr. (credit)

This attack didn't come out of left field - it resulted from Native Americans' being excited by Vine Deloria's 1969 book called Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto and the Civil Rights Movement. Deloria, in no uncertain terms, questioned how anthropologists became custodians of the Native American past and how they had any claims to truth. It was the anthropologists who perpetuated myths and stereotypes about Native Americans, and Deloria noted that anthropologists felt that "the only good Indians were the dead ones."

The Indians in AIM demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the federal government and their lack of representation. They showed that, although many people thought the Noble Savage was dead and gone, Native Americans were still very much alive. The 1971 AIM protest triggered a nationwide dialogue over whether archaeologists should dig up dead Indians. In the late 18th century, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the dead have no rights, and this view has been largely carried into the 20th century, with physical anthropologists like Christy Turner (1986) writing, "no living culture, religion, interest groups, or biological population has any moral or legal right to the exclusive use or regulation of ancient human skeletons since all humans are members of a single species." Ancient human skeletons therefore belong to everyone because they are the product of unrepeatable evolutionary events.

Walter Echo-Hawk (credit)

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Native Americans became more vocal about the desecration of their lands, particularly the graves. As Walter Echo-Hawk has been famously quoted as saying, "If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, you get a PhD." Native Americans declared that their concern for the dead must override scientific objectives. Many archaeologists countered with the assumption that Deloria and others simply needed to be educated; that if they understood what archaeologists discovered about their histories, they would stop attempting to destroy scholarship and science. But it was clear that research and reburial issues raised by Deloria and others would not go away. Several museums proactively sought to cull their collections for culturally inappropriate material and return it to Native American tribes. In addition, several position statements were written in the 1980s by archaeological and historical organizations about the treatment of human skeletal remains and grave goods:

1986 - the Society of American Archaeologists put out their Statement Concerning the Treatment of Human Remains, which notes that archaeologists acknowledge and respect the diversity of beliefs about the past and material remains, but they are committed to understanding and communicating the cultural heritage of humanity. In essence, the SAA toed the line, advocating for scientific interests in human remains but also recognizing traditional cultural interests as well. The SAA, though, was opposed to indiscriminate reburial.
1988 - the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation put out a Policy Statement Regarding Treatment of Human Remains and Grave Goods, whose six principles said that human remains should be left alone unless excavation was necessary, that disinterment should be respectful, and that material should be reburied after scientific study unless it is of great scientific value.
1989 - at the World Archaeological Congress, the Vermillion Accord was adopted, which advocated respect for the remains of the dead, respect for the wishes of the dead concerning disposition, respect for the wishes of the community and relatives, but also respect for the scientific value of human remains. Disposition of remains should be decided on a case-by-case basis, with acknowledgment of the concerns of various ethnic groups.

By the mid to late 1980s, archaeologists were proactively trying to come to a resolution with Native American groups about the disposition of skeletal remains and grave goods in museum collections and on archaeological excavations. [5]

NAGPRA as a Double-Edged Sword

The first federal repatriation bill was introduced in the Senate in October of 1986, just a few months after the SAA's statement on the treatment of human remains was published. Although this bill wasn't signed into law, the 101st Congress in 1990 promulgated two bills that specifically targeted federal agencies and federally-funded museums other than the Smithsonian and contained repatriation provisions governing the excavation of Native American burials on federal and tribal lands. In the House, the Native American Grave and Burial Protection Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act were both put forward by Representative Morris Udall (D - AZ), and the Senate considered proposals from John McCain (R - AZ) and Daniel Inouye (D - HI). Ultimately, it was the latter Udall bill that passed, becoming NAGPRA when it was signed into law by George H.W. Bush in November of 1990.

NAGPRA report cover (credit)

NAGPRA covers some basic areas of concern: rather than extending special rights to Native Americans, which would violate the 14th Amendment, the law awarded equal protection of property rights already extended to other Americans. In essence, NAGPRA provided for the following: 1) consultation with Native American groups about graves on tribal lands; 2) creation of an inventory of Native American human remains and associated grave goods by all museums and universities; 3) allowance that federally recognized Native groups could request the return of these remains; and 4) a mandate for continued interaction between archaeologists and tribal representatives.

Each action taken under NAGPRA requires a choice: are the materials in question culturally affiliated or culturally unaffiliated? Does the preponderance of the evidence place the material into one category or another? This question is often difficult to answer, though, partly because of the political nature of defining Native American groups - not all tribes are federally recognized.

Since the determination of cultural affiliation is the cornerstone of NAGPRA, archaeologists are often put in the complicated position of assigning identities to the remains of the past using political definitions of the present, a problem analogous to attempting to identify "race" in the past. Cultural affiliation generally comes down to identification of a present-day group and an identifiable earlier group plus a relationship of shared identity. The present-day group is more or less easy to define: one of 565 federally-recognized tribes. The earlier group presents a problem, though. The SAA has argued that this means a social entity that is analogous to a modern tribe in terms of its composition and scale, which is easiest to demonstrate with historical remains or sometimes with oral histories. But biological remains can be used to show relationships between past and contemporary Native Americans, such as through DNA analysis. However, people who are biologically dissimilar could still have a shared group identity. In practice, linking past and present Native Americans is often done through a matrix of bio-archaeological remains - pottery, land use, burial style, bones - and oral or written histories. [6]

NAGPRA, Race, and Kennewick Man

Probably the best known case under NAGPRA is the discovery of Kennewick Man, a skeleton that came to light in 1996 when a couple teenagers found it eroding out of the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. Upon the skeleton's discovery, the county coroner was called in, but since it was just a skull, the coroner called local forensic anthropologist James Chatters to look at it.

Projectile in K-Man's os coxae
(credit: Seattle Times)

Chatters noted a number of what he called Caucasoid features, and he saw from the color of the bone that it was quite old. He figured it must have been a Euroamerican settler from hundreds of years ago. Chatters' initial forensic conclusion was that this person was male, 40-55 years old, about 5'9", and had survived a number of injuries, including an embedded projectile.

After taking CT scans of the skeleton, though, Chatters discovered that the embedded object was not a bullet or piece of shrapnel but rather a stone tool. He immediately sent a sample of the skeleton for carbon dating and was astonished to discover that Kennewick Man was in fact 9,000 years old.

Picard and Kennewick Man
(credit)

The popular press jumped on this finding: what was a white man doing in Washington state 9,000 years ago? Questions were raised over the "race" or ancestry of Kennewick Man: Do Native Americans had any claim to being the first people in America? Were Caucasians really the first people here? Because of Chatters' initial report that the skull was "Caucasoid" and because of an initial reconstruction that looked surprisingly like the British actor Patrick Stewart, flurries of theories about how Europeans colonized America 20,000 years ago came out in the media.

Chatters did the best with what he had; that is, he attempted to affiliate Kennewick Man with a contemporary population based on morphological traits of the skull. The problem with this, though, is that the population of which Kennewick Man was a part is unknown. Only about a dozen skulls exist from this time period, so our sample size is very, very small. There is no reason to think that Kennewick Man was not ancestral to modern Native American peoples, just because he doesn't look like them. Physical characteristics change through time, and skull morphology is contingent on environmental effects and the laws of evolution.

There was quick opposition to further study of Kennewick Man by Native groups. Some implied that their opposition was based on the fear that tribal sovereignty would be threatened if it were found that Kennewick Man was not the ancestor of modern Native Americans. Yet no treaty between Native groups and the U.S. has ever allowed for the provision that the tribe's ancestors were not the first people here. When Europeans arrived, they recognized the inhabitants of America as the sovereigns of the continent. Although laws and treaties governing Native American rights have changed, no one has challenged that Native Americans were here first.

Kennewick Man
(by K. Kasnot, 2004)

A 2002 ruling by Judge Jelderks noted that Kennewick Man was neither Native American nor culturally affiliated with any modern tribes. The SAA and other groups disagreed with the ruling that the skeleton was not Native American, but many archaeologists around the country celebrated the lack of cultural affiliation, which meant the skeleton did not have to be repatriated immediately. The first extensive look at Kennewick Man came in 2005, long after the Army Corps of Engineers locked them up at the Burke Museum, waiting for a resolution between Native American groups and the federal government. A team of researchers from the Smithsonian discovered that Kennewick Man was about 5'9", muscular, and right-handed, possibly from spear fishing and hunting. His joints showed that he had extensive arthritis; a fractured rib had healed, a depression fracture on his forehead and left parietal had healed, and the projectile wound in his hip had also healed, around the spear point. Most interesting was the team's finding that Kennewick Man had been deliberately buried.

Kennewick Man's remains are still at the Burke Museum in Washington, controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers. It is possible that some day additional tests will be done - isotope or DNA analysis - but the eventual disposition of Kennewick Man is unknown. He is clearly Palaeo-Indian, and he is clearly an important specimen for our reconstruction of the population history of North America. [7]

Navigating Contested Identities

The Kennewick Man case makes NAGPRA sound like a wedge between Native groups and Euroamerican scientists, but that's not always the case. At the AIA meeting in Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, I heard a wonderful presentation by Sandra Hollimon called "Death, Burial, and the Liminal: Identities at Fort Ross, California."

A skeleton was found eroding out of a bank at Fort Ross, California in 1999. The history of the fort is complex: in the early 1800s, the Russian American Company, in search of furs to sell, brought populations of Native Alaskans to northern California to help trap sea lions. At the time, then, the population living in and around Fort Ross included Russians, Native Alaskans, as well as two groups of Native Americans: the Miwok and the Kashaya Pomo. The skeleton was found almost literally at the intersection of the three neighborhoods: Russian, Alaskan, and Californian.

The group shares stories of who Fort Ross Man may
have been. (credit)

Hollimon was able to study the remains in order to determine which group it may have belonged to. She found that the individual was too tall for the Native Alaska or California populations, but that his dental wear looked more Native. Permission was granted to do mtDNA analysis, which revealed the individual had maternal ancestry from Alaska. Hollimon's interpretation is that the man had a Native Alaskan mother, was brought to northern California by Russian traders, and may have lived with a Native Californian woman, who cooked him food in her traditional way, thereby giving him Native-looking dental wear. "Fort Ross Man" was reburied in 2001 along with collaboration from Native Alaskan groups and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Because of very close consultation with Native groups and strict adherence to NAGPRA, Hollimon was able to do DNA analysis, which let her discover something new about "mixed" identities in the early 19th century and let her culturally affiliate the remains so that Fort Ross Man could have a proper disposition.

The future of bioarchaeological ethics in the U.S.?

We've made great progress in the past 30 years, both in recognizing the needs of Native Americans to protect their ancestors and their material pasts and in understanding the population history of North America. NAGPRA isn't perfect, though, as it leaves a lot to interpretation. As a bioarchaeologist, I generally fall on the side of scientific importance: Palaeo-Indian remains are few and far between, so each new skeleton that is found can help us fill in the picture of ancient life, in the same way that each new hominin fossil gives us a better understanding of the diversity and evolution of humankind.

I hope that, with close consultation with Native American groups as Hollimon had, we'll be able to study these human skeletons in an appropriate manner - in a way that is comfortable to all stakeholders. In the meantime, though, the questions of cultural affiliation, legal rights, and scientific prerogative continue to surface as archaeologists and Native groups continue their dialogue about who controls the past.

Further Reading

The 9,000-year-old La Jolla Fisherman and -woman (Powered by Osteons, 5/20/11)
Gould's Straw Man (Powered by Osteons, 6/8/11)
Biocultural Bodies and the Anatomy of Controversy (Anthropologies, 8/1/11)
Researchers, tribes clash over human bones (USA Today, 1/15/12)

Footnotes

This post has been adapted from a lecture that I routinely give to my Bioarchaeology, Human Osteology, and Palaeopathology classes. As such, I've provided a list of references used for the lecture (below), but I haven't put in every parenthetical citation I would in a published article. Each section of this post is footnoted as follows:

[1] Thomas 2000, Ch. 1.
[2] Thomas 2000, Ch. 2.
[3] Thomas 2000, Chs. 3 & 4; Fabian 2010; Gould 1981, Ch. 2.
[4] Cole 1985; Harper 2000; Thomas 2000, Chs. 6 & 9; Fabian 2010.
[5] Deloria 1969, 1992; Turner, 1986; Thomas 2000, Ch. 20.
[6] NAGPRA 1990; Goldstein & Kintigh 1990; Meighan 1992; Lovis et al. 2004; Ousley et al. 2005.
[7] Chatters 2000; Ousley et al. 2005; Lemonick et al. 2006.

References

Chatters, J. (2000). The Recovery and First Analysis of an Early Holocene Human Skeleton from Kennewick, Washington American Antiquity, 65 (2) DOI: 10.2307/2694060.
D. Cole (1985). Captured Heritage: the Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. University of British Columbia Press.
Deloria, V. (1992). Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future American Antiquity, 57 (4) DOI: 10.2307/280822.
V. Deloria (1969). Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press.
A. Fabian (2010). The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead. University of Chicago Press.
L. Goldstein, & K. Kintigh (1990). Ethics and the Reburial Controversy American Antiquity, 55 (3), 585-591.
S.J. Gould (1996). “American polygeny and craniometry before Darwin,” in The Mismeasure of Man, pp. 62-104. W.W. Norton & Company.
K. Harper (2000). Give Me My Father's Body: the Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. Steerforth Press.
M.D. Lemonick, A. Dorfman & J. Kluger. 2006. The Untold Saga of Early Man in America. Time Magazine 167(11), March 13, 2006.
W.A. Lovis, K.W. Kintigh, V.P. Steponaitis & L.G. Goldstein (2004). Archaeological perspectives on the NAGPRA: underlying principles, legislative history, and current issues. In: Legal Perspectives on Cultural Resources, edited by J.R. Richman and M.P. Forsyth. Altamira Press, pp. 165-184.
C. Meighan (1992). Some Scholars' Views on Reburial American Antiquity, 57 (4), 704-710.
Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990).
Ousley, S., Billeck, W., & Hollinger, R. (2005). Federal Repatriation Legislation and the Role of Physical Anthropology in Repatriation American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128 (S41), 2-32 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20354.
D.H. Thomas (2000). Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. Basic Books.
C.G. Turner (1986). What is lost with skeletal reburial? I. Adaptation Quarterly Review of Archaeology, 7 (1), 1-3.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XII

2012-01-12T09:51:00.000-05:00

In this edition of the RBC, not a lot has been happening, but there has been significant coverage of a couple high-profile finds:

Inscription from Sarmizegetusa
(credit)

26 December - A large Roman city has been uncovered in Romania, reports Popular Archaeology. Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa's 2nd-3rd century AD layers are currently being excavated in what used to be called Dacia. Archaeological attention was focused on this site in the past, but only about 15% of the site has been uncovered so far. Archaeologists are returning in 2012 to learn more about the city and its necropoleis. I hope they find skeletons - Dacia produced a lot of slaves after they were defeated by Trajan in 106 AD, and I'd love to get my hands on some samples to test for Sr/O. Perhaps we could find out whether any of the people buried in Rome were originally from Dacia.

Excavation of the "princely" tomb
(credit: Il Messagero)

31 December to January 4 - There's been a significant amount of reporting about a high-status burial from an Etruscan cemetery at Montalto di Castro, near Vulci in Viterbo. Particularly interesting is the recovery of a sphinx dated to the 5th-4th centuries BC. Because of the rich grave goods, including the bones of a horse, archaeologists think the burial might be of an Etruscan prince. Only dignitaries apparently were buried with horses and armor. This burial is part of a larger necropolis of at least 37 tombs, but it sounds like only a handful of these tombs have been properly excavated. It'll be interesting to see what else archaeologists find as they excavate further at Montalto di Castro - clearly, the site hasn't been completely looted. Coverage of the find can be found at ArcheoRivista here and here, by the newspaper Il Messagero here, and in a cool video here.

Excavations of a room at Pompeii
(credit: A. Emmerson, via PhysOrg)

4 January - In advance of the AIA conference, U Cincinnati graduate student Allison Emmerson got out a press release about her work on the tombs of Pompeii. Namely, she argued that the Pompeiians were perfectly ok living with trash - on their streets, in their tombs, near their cisterns. In the past, many archaeologists thought that the presence of trash at Pompeii meant that the city was collapsing, but Emmerson argues that it was just normal. While Emmerson's work is interesting, she's not the first to suggest this - in particular, Lepetz and Van Andringa (among others) have been sorting through the layers of deposition at tombs in the Porta Nocera necropolis at Pompeii for years. You can read my notes from Emmerson's AIA talk here, and Katy Meyers covers it at Bones Don't Lie.

And in case you missed it over the weekend, I blogged about my experience live-tweeting from the Archaeological Institute of America conference, including numerous papers on Roman and Greek bioarchaeology - Storified AIA Papers and Lessons from Live-Tweeting the AIA. Plus, you can also read a new review of the edited volume Roman Diasporas in the American Journal of Archaeology, in which I have two papers.

Links to AIA Live-Tweeted Papers

2012-01-09T12:57:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick list of the AIA papers that I live-tweeted (with tweets by others who were in the same session). Each link sends you to a collection of tweets through Storify:

Papers tweeted by Kristina Killgrove (@BoneGirlPhD) -

Brendan Foley (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Greek underwater surveys and amphora DNA evidence of ancient trade
Mary K. Dabney (Bryn Mawr), Mycenaean mortuary practices in ancient Nemea
Aleydis van de Moortel (UTK), The politics of death and Mitrou, East Lokris
Catherine Pratt (UCLA), Objects and agents: transnational interaction between Cretans and Phoenicians in the Early Iron Age
Jared Beatrice and Jon Frey (MSU), A bioarchaeological approach to the Early Christian and Byzantine burials from the Sanctuary of Nemean Zeus
Allison Emmerson (U Cincinnati), Repopulating an "abandoned" suburb; the case of Pompeii's tombs
David Fredrick (U Arkansas), Toward a social network analysis of Pompeian wall painting
Michael MacKinnon (U Winnipeg), Breeding a better Empire: Roman impact on livestock breed developments in the ancient Mediterranean world
Francesco de Angelis (Columbia), Monuments for the many: burial and society in Hellenistic Etruria
Susan Gillespie (U of Florida), Residential burial practices in Mesoamerica
Caroline Goodson (Birkbeck) and Cori Fenwick (Stanford), The Medieval cemetery of Villamagna (Italy): burying the estate workers, from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries
Sandra Holliman (Santa Rosa Community College), Death, burial, and the liminal: identities at Fort Ross, California
Anna Gallone (Gabii Project), The use of lead in central Italian funerary contexts: new evidence from Gabii
Jenny Kreiger (U Mich), Remembering children in the Roman Catacombs

The papers are arranged in chronological order, so you can see how my tweeting progressed over the 36 hours I was doing it. In general, the less interested I was in a paper, the fewer tweets it got. But this isn't a perfect correlation because the lack of wifi in the conference rooms meant that half of these papers were tweeted from my crappy phone and half were tweeted when I snagged a wireless connection for the Presidential Plenary Session. I tweeted less and used many more abbreviations when using my cell phone, and I tweeted more and used fewer abbreviations when on my laptop.

Perhaps this will encourage someone to Storify the papers tweeted by Francesca Tronchin (@Tronchin), Timothy Phin (@TimothyPhin), and Tom Elliott (@Paregorios)...?

Lessons from Live-Tweeting the AIA

2012-01-09T10:36:00.000-05:00

As an experiment, I decided to live-tweet all the papers I attended at the Archaeological Institute of America conference this past weekend. Tweeting of conferences has become more popular recently, and several people tweeted from last April's AAPA meeting and the 2010 AAA meeting I attended. I was surprised, then, that so few people at the AIA/APA - which had record-breaking attendance, with over 3,200 people there - were tweeting.

So what does live-tweeting a paper look like? Here's a Storify link to my tweeting of the paper on lead burials at Gabii:

Cool, huh? You obviously don't get to see the pictures I did while in the audience, but the highlights of the paper are all there, and you can search for the Gabii Project and find out more.

But live-tweeting wasn't easy. The main barrier to live-tweeting was internet access. Since I had free wifi access in my room, the lobby, and hallway/common areas of the conference hotel, I thought it would be simple to tweet from my laptop. The Marriott's setup, though, was to have a completely different - and blocked - wireless network for the meeting rooms than for the rest of the hotel, and the AIA did not pay to give us all access. This meant that I could get on the hallway wifi in only one meeting room, so for the majority of the talks, I was tweeting on my not-very-smart phone with a Twitter app that doesn't even count the number of characters I've typed.

Another problem was that, even though the AIA has a Twitter account (@Archaeology_AIA), it was only broadcasting announcements that could be found in the program, not engaging in any sort of interaction with its followers and not re-tweeting those of us who were discussing papers or encouraging people to follow us. While it's totally fair to use Twitter as a one-to-many broadcast system, that use pattern doesn't harness the full potential of the platform.

At the outset, only four of us were tweeting papers: me (@BoneGirlPhD), Darius Arya (@SaveRome), Tom Elliott (@Paregorios), and Francesca Tronchin (@Tronchin). After we started tweeting in earnest, we were joined by others like Tim Phin (@TimothyPhin), @Austin_Hoya, and Sylvia Deskaj (@SylviaDeskaj), and the occasional tweets by others in attendance. Even if we estimate that a dozen people contributed at least one #aiaapa-hashtagged tweet, that's still not even close to 0.5% of the conference attendees interacting through Twitter!

After a day of tweeting, I met up with Tom and Darius and we discussed ways the AIA could encourage tweeting in the future. We also had online conversations about this with the Rogue Classicist (@RogueClassicist), and we were thanked repeatedly by people who couldn't attend the conference but still wanted to keep up on the latest developments in their field:

So this is just a quick post and a couple quick Storify links, but I wanted to point out to the AIA and others that:

people who can't come to the conference appreciate the information they are getting from attendees;
many of those people will come to the conference next year;
a greater dialogue has been created not just between me and others in my field, but among presenters, attendees, and those who couldn't come; and
the openness of Twitter means that information is being disseminated to researchers outside the field of classical archaeology and to the general public.

These are all good things.

Please make wifi available to all conference attendees next year, AIA/APA, and encourage all classicists to engage in outreach with a larger audience through Twitter, blogs, and other forms of social media.

AIA/APA 2012 - Live Tweeting

2012-01-07T08:15:00.002-05:00

I'm at the AIA/APA meeting this weekend, and this afternoon's slate of papers looks pretty awesome. So awesome, in fact, that there is a giant conflict from 2:50-4pm: the Presidential Plenary Session on Death & Burial conflicts with Finding Peasants in Mediterranean Landscapes. It's the Sophie's choice of Roman bioarchaeology...

At any rate, I will be attempting to live-tweet the talks sporadically this morning and definitely from 2:30-5pm today, using the hashtag #aiaapa. Or, of course, you can follow me @BoneGirlPhD.

These are the talks that I'll be going to:

Saturday, January 7

Current Research at Nemea

10:55 - Jared Beatrice and Jon Frey (MSU), A bioarchaeological approach to the Early Christian and Byzantine burials from the Sanctuary of Nemean Zeus

Pompeii and Ostia

12:30 - Flint Dibble (U Cincinnati), Unpacking construction fill: archaeological formation processes of activity, refuse, and construction in an urban environment
12:50 - Allison Emmerson (U Cincinnati), Repopulating an "abandoned" suburb; the case of Pompeii's tombs [media coverage]

Finding Peasants, Session 5J

2:30 - Nicola Terrenato and Laura Motta (U Mich), Not your run-of-the-mill cereal farmer? The evidence from small rural settlements in the Cecina Valley in Northern Etruria.

Death & Burial, 2012 Presidential Plenary Session

2:45 - Introduction
2:50 - Francesco de Angelis (Columbia), Monuments for the many: burial and society in Hellenistic Etruria
3:15 - Susan Gillespie (U of Florida), Residential burial practices in Mesoamerica
3:40 - Tim Pauketat (U of Illinois), Mortuaries, the moon, and spirit journeys in the ancient Midwest
4:15 - Caroline Goodson (Birkbeck) and Cori Fenwick (Stanford), The Medieval cemetery of Villamagna (Italy): burying the estate workers, from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries
4:40 - Sandra Holliman (Santa Rosa Community College), Death, burial, and the liminal: identities at Fort Ross, California

But I may also duck back into Finding Peasants for Rob Witcher's (U Durham) talk Stuffed or starved? Evaluating models of Roman peasantries at 3:05 and Kim Bowes' (U Penn) talk Excavating the Roman peasant.

So please join me - vicariously or with your own tweets - for these sure-to-be-interesting talks!

(P.S. If you are at the meetings and want to say hi, I'm the only person wearing a skull-themed scarf. And it's gotten me a whole lot of weird looks already... :)

Sunday, January 8

Roman Funerary Images and Rituals

8:30 - Anna Gallone (Gabii Project), The use of lead in central Italian funerary contexts: new evidence from Gabii
11:05 - Jenny Kreiger (U Mich), Remembering children in the Roman catacombs

Post-Pharonic Egypt

10:20 - Thomas Landvatter (U Mich), Identity and burial practices at Graeco-Roman Abydos: the 2011 season of the Abydos Middle Cemetery Project

If you had to catch any infectious disease...

2012-01-03T09:25:00.000-05:00

... before the invention of treatment for that disease - which one would it be and why?

That was the extra credit question on the final for my fall class on Health and Disease in Ancient Populations, helpfully proposed by my friend Laura.

Curious about the results, I tallied them up:

The top scorer was the treponemal disease pinta, with 6 responses. This totally makes sense - pinta is a skin disease. Unlike its cousins bejel, yaws, and venereal syphilis, it doesn't cause bone changes and doesn't kill you. Every student who chose pinta suggested they could live with something that discolored their skin but didn't generate any more serious damage.

Pinta (credit)

Tied for second place, with 4 votes each, are the related diseases of tuberculosis and leprosy, both caused by a mycobacterium. These diseases can cause bony changes - the final stages of both TB and leprosy involve quite severe resorption or erosion of bone, resulting in the classic disfigurement of leprosy (in the nose, mouth, fingers, and toes) and the dowager's hump of tuberculosis. Most students who chose these diseases noted that the diseases carry low mortality rates and that only a small percentage of cases actually progress to the later stages that involve severe bone changes.

Normal and leprous feet (credit)

And with 1 vote each: typhoid fever and measles. Typhoid fever can be pretty nasty - it's been suggested as a cause of the 5th century BC Plague of Athens. But a person can also carry typhoid fever and not be particularly sick, as in the infamous case of Typhoid Mary. And measles is a childhood disease that most people got prior to modern vaccines, kind of like chicken pox. Both diseases caused quite a number of deaths in the past, but if you survived them, you'd be doing ok.

I plan to pose this question again in the future. If any of you out there use it, please let me know which diseases your students would opt to have! Or feel free to tell me in the comments which disease you'd prefer to catch...

Review of Roman Diasporas in AJA

2012-01-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

A review has come out in the latest issue of the American Journal of Archaeology of an edited volume in which I have two papers. David Mattingly's comments on Roman Diasporas (2010) are quite complimentary, which means a lot coming from a giant in the field. Thankfully, AJA has seen fit to make the review free to read online. Please do read it if you're interested in the latest approaches - both scientific and humanistic - to the study of the disparate peoples of the Roman Empire.

My only major quibble with Mattingly's review is that he characterizes the Montgomery et al. article (on which I'm a coauthor) as a study of lead concentration to identify immigrants. Lead isotopes can do so; lead concentration tells you how much lead a person ingested (and thus whether or not they had lead poisoning, which, to me, is a more interesting finding than the lead isotope data). Perhaps it's just his wording, but it seems he's conflating isotopes and concentration. (Minor grammatical quibbles that may be AJA's fault: page one has "isoptic" and page three has "data is.")

If you want the whole thing, you can buy Roman Diasporas through the Journal of Roman Archaeology, or email me if you can't find a copy and want to read my articles:

Killgrove, K. 2010. Identifying immigrants to Imperial Rome using strontium isotope analysis. In Roman Diasporas: Archaeological Approaches to Mobility and Diversity in the Roman Empire, H. Eckardt ed. Journal of Roman Archaeology supplement 78, Chapter 9, pp. 157-174.

Montgomery J, J Evans, S Chenery, V Pashley, K Killgrove. 2010. “Gleaming, white and deadly”: lead exposure and geographic origins in the Roman period. In Roman Diasporas: Archaeological Approaches to Mobility and Diversity in the Roman Empire, H. Eckardt ed. Journal of Roman Archaeology supplement 78, Chapter 11, pp. 199-226.

2012: the Year of Evolution

2012-01-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

The turning of the calendar to a new year is a cultural milestone, marked in societies around the world with song, dance, food, and, of course, Dick Clark. As we reconsider our actions of the previous year, many of us vow to do better in the time to come.

One of my new year's resolutions for 2012 is to better integrate evolution into the classes I teach and the blog posts I write, and to better explain evolution to all students, from my preschooler to my undergraduates. I started on this resolution last year, actually, when I recorded a 2-minute video about the importance of teaching evolution to schoolkids. It was an invited contribution to the SCOPE project, which used the video to address the Miss USA debacle by asking a dozen or so female scientists to talk about evolution.

Since many people don't click videos or would rather read than watch a talking head, here's the full transcript of my contribution:

Why should we teach evolution?

180 years ago, Charles Darwin embarked on a sea voyage, as the naturalist aboard the Beagle. His travels took him far beyond the world that most of his contemporaries knew, and Darwin diligently paid attention to the world around him, taking notes on the animals he encountered and watching their behavior.

What Darwin noticed was that life on earth was interconnected. He started making diagrams to demonstrate this, drawing the relationships between animals much like the family trees we all create in grade school. And he wanted to find a way to explain and understand how it is that animals that look so different can also be so closely related.

Like Darwin, today’s schoolchildren are great naturalists. They watch the world, trying to figure out how best to interact with others. They pay attention to things that many adults ignore as routine. And they ask questions – so many questions – trying to understand how things work. That’s the great thing about humans: we have a natural curiosity.

Teaching children about evolution – like teaching them about language, math, and technology – means giving them the keys to understand the world around them. These kids will be tomorrow’s doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, soldiers, and politicians. Evolution is important to all of these professions – if kids don’t grow up to understand the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, for example, they won’t be able to create new medicine, to legislate rules for its use, or to keep our troops safe from biological weapons.

Evolution, then, is a framework that helps us answer questions like “Why did that happen?” Children’s natural curiosity about the world should be encouraged by teaching them about evolution. It is the job of our educators – and I count myself among them, as a biological anthropologist – to give students the tools they need to succeed in the real world, including a basic understanding of the interconnectedness of life and the ways in which life forms can change. By understanding evolution, the schoolchildren of today will be prepared to lead us into the future.

I'll reflect on this post a year from now, to see how well I brought the biocultural message of anthropology to students.

In the meantime, you can help me kick off 2012 right... teach a kid about evolution!

Best of Powered by Osteons - 2011

2011-12-31T10:53:00.001-05:00

Somewhere in the middle of 2011, I totally revamped this blog. It got a new name, a new URL, a new format... and I've also gotten more involved with science blogging - writing about scientific discoveries in the news, offering critiques, and discussing my own research as well.

This year, I've posted 145 times and have gotten over 110,000 page views. Since everyone else is doing an end-of-year retrospective, here are the top 10* posts of 2011:

"Line on the left, one cross each": the Bioarchaeology of Crucifixion (November 4)
Gay Caveman! ZOMFG! (April 6)
Cranial Vault Modification or Alieeeeens? (November 22)
Ethnic Cleansing of Jews May Date to 12th Century (June 23)
Witches and Prostitutes in Medieval Tuscany (September 23)
Sickle-Cell Disease, Oxygen Isotopes, and Malarial Romans (June 15)
Why is anthropology needed? (October 11)
Holding Hands into Eternity (October 21)
Viking women immigrated to England, but were they warriors or wives? (July 22)
QR Code for Academic Posters (April 3)

* The top 10 above doesn't include any Bones reviews. The top Bones-related post is the Season 6 finale, which - surprise, surprise - I didn't particularly care for.

Some other popular posts of mine that I particularly like, which were posted here and elsewhere in 2011:

The Accidental Anthropologist - Powered by Osteons (February 22)
Men Talk about Mars, Women Talk about Venus - Powered by Osteons (July 8)
Let's Talk about Evolution - Powered by Osteons and the SCOPE Project (November 21)
The Skull with the Mona Lisa Smile - Past Horizons (May 26)
Teaching Preschoolers about Anthropology - ThenDig (August 2)
Biocultural Bodies and the Anatomy of Controversy - Anthropologies (August 1)
So you want to be a Roman bioarchaeologist... - Day of Archaeology (July 29)

So thanks, everyone, for reading Powered by Osteons this year! In 2012, you can look forward to more Bones reviews, some updates on the Roman DNA Project, conference papers I'll be giving at the Paleopathology Association and American Association of Physical Anthropologists meetings, the Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival, and of course reports and critiques of biological anthropology in the news.

Happy new year!

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XI

2011-12-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

It's been predictably sleepy leading up to Christmas. Just a couple items of interest...

15 December. More on the reopening of the Tomb of the Scipios at ArcheoRivista. The Scipio family, of course, was famous for their fighting in the Punic Wars, and the tribunes of the plebs, the Gracchi, were also related. The underground tomb is now open to the public on Saturdays by guided tour only (cost: 8 euro). It hasn't been seen by the public since 1992. It's a pretty cool-looking columbarium; I'll be sure to check it out next time I'm in Rome:

Tomb of the Scipios, via ArcheoRivista

18 December. An annual presentation on the excavation at the site of Castello di Piombinara is summarized at ArcheoRivista. This site is near Colleferro, a small town not far from Rome. The necropolis at the site boasts 68 graves with more than 100 individuals of all ages and both sexes, dating from the Late Roman through the Medieval periods. The graves seem to have many artifacts in them, which is useful for dating, but there isn't any further mention of the anthropological analysis beyond the range of age and sex. There is, however, a picture of at least three skeletons (one young-ish adult or teenager at the bottom, a child in the middle, and a probable adult at the top):

Burials at Castello di Piombinara, via ArcheoRivista

Oedipus Rex and the Plague of Athens

2011-12-28T17:22:00.000-05:00

A new article out in the January 2012 edition of the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases is called "The Plague of Thebes, a Historical Epidemic, in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex" (Kousoulis et al. 2012). The authors' goal was to try to tease out whether the plague described in the play was an actual historical event, whether it was the same kind of plague known in historical records as the 5th century Plague of Athens, and which pathogen was the cause of this plague.

Plague of Thebes
by C.F. Jalabeat

Following a close reading of the ancient text, the authors conclude that the most likely causative agent was Brucella abortus, which causes brucellosis, a zoonosis that is easily passed to humans. It has low mortality rates - as evidenced by the fact that brucellosis can show up on the skeleton - so the authors suggest that perhaps this strain of Brucella was more virulent than previously known, or perhaps the plague referenced was actually multiple diseases affecting the Thebans in Oedipus Rex (and the Athenians in history) at once (leptospirosis, listeriosis, and salmonella, e.g.).

Since Sophocles is known as a realistic tragedian and since Greek tragedies were often placed within real historical frameworks, the authors believe that the plagues referenced in Oedipus Rex in Thebes and in historical Athens are one and the same. Their conclusion reads (p. 156):

The critical reading of Oedipus Rex, its comparison with Thucydides’ history, as well as the systematic review of the existing historical data, lead us to strongly suggest that this epidemic, for which the name Plague of Thebes may be used, was an actual historical fact, likely caused by B. abortus. With the deadly plague, which struck one of the most historic Greek cities, on the one hand and the tragic fate of a character who has become among the most recognizable in world theater on the other, Sophocles masterminded a dramatic frame and offered a lyrical, literary description of a lethal disease. As the protagonist approached his tragic catharsis, the moral order much desired by the ancient Greeks was restored with the end of the epidemic.

I'm not big on ancient-historical epidemiology, particularly in cases where there's not likely to be any skeletal data, since it means there's no good way to further an argument based on a close reading of a text. This is one of those cases. Brucellosis can cause bony changes, but it can take years. People who died quickly of brucellosis in a plague situation would not have had time to develop skeletal lesions.

The other line of evidence that can back up an historical-epidemiological hypothesis is pathogenic DNA. In 2006, a group of researchers did a DNA analysis of dental pulp from skeletons found in what is thought to be a mass plague grave dating to the 5th century in the Athenian Kerameikos cemetery (Papagrigoriakis et al. 2006). They isolated Salmonella enterica from the skeletons, concluding that the Plague of Athens was likely typhoid fever or a related disease. Some have questioned this research (Shapiro et al. 2006) and the study may need to be redone, but as the recent sequencing of the Y. pestis genome has shown, clearly DNA/skeletal analysis is the way forward in ancient epidemiology.

It's unclear to me why Kousoulis et al. don't discuss the DNA study at all. They simply mention "historical medical literature" when citing it. There is an interesting Technical Appendix to the article (which I just found), which does mention typhoid fever. Was the Papagrigoriakis et al. article really so flawed that it shouldn't be engaged with and that typhoid fever shouldn't be considered a possibility for the Plague of Athens? Kousoulis et al. talk about the need for "historical verification" but don't mention the need for scientific verification - there are skeletons, and bioarchaeologists can look for pathogenic DNA in them. Close reading of Sophocles won't give us the answers we're looking for, although it could give us a way to start developing new hypotheses.

Update (1/2/11) - Fixed my initial conflation of typhus and typhoid fever.

References:

Kousoulis AA, Economopoulos EP, Poulakou-Rebelakou E, Androutsos G, & Tsiodras S (2012). The Plague of Thebes, a Historical Epidemic, in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 18 (1), 153-157.

Papagrigorakis MJ, Yapijakis C, Synodinos PN, & Baziotopoulou-Valavani E (2006). DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 10 (3), 206-214, PMID: 16412683.

Shapiro B, Rambaut A, & Gilbert MT (2006). No proof that typhoid caused the Plague of Athens (a reply to Papagrigorakis et al.). International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 10 (4), PMID: 16730469.

Is anatomy different in Peru?

2011-12-19T15:16:00.002-05:00

Time once again for my favorite game: "What's wrong with this skeleton?" Today's contestant comes from an NPR piece "Finders, Not Keepers: Yale Returns Artifacts to Peru". I'm guessing NPR itself didn't take the photo - likely someone at Yale did - but the errors are egregious. See for yourself:

Photo by Tim Moran (found at NPR.org)

Have at it, commenters. How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

Once you're done with that, see previous episodes of "What's wrong with that skeleton?" - here courtesy the Daily Mail, here from Staffordshire University, and here from Bones.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival X

2011-12-15T17:22:00.000-05:00

This is a wee bit late, since I just finished grading for the semester and am cleaning out my office (since I'm headed back to Chapel Hill on Saturday). There are a bunch of interesting links this week, so let's get started...

5 December. A pre-Roman cremation necropolis (1200-1000 BC) and two Roman houses (one with an oven) were found in Bolzano. Coverage is in Italian via ArcheoRivista.

6 December. The Romans performed human sacrifice. Short blog post at History with a Twist.

8 December. In 2008, Megan Perry and colleagues published an article in the International Journal of Palaeopathology on a possible parasite recovered from a Late Roman burial from Aqaba, Jordan. A reanalysis of the object was published in IJOA this week by Della Cook and R.R. Patrick, who think that it may instead be a fossil marine invertebrate rather than human tissue or a human parasite.

8 December. A second necropolis in Vatican City will be opening to the public in spring 2012 (ignore the fact that the article mistakes Pompey for Pompeii). The necropolis runs along the ancient Via Triumphalis and consists of over 40 grave structures and over 200 individual tombs, dating to the 1st-2nd centuries AD. This find is significant and important, particularly for those interested in grave types in the Empire, and I think this is the one published in The Vatican Necropoles, which is an astounding book (in English!) with the best pictures of Roman grave structures I have ever seen. Now if only I could get my hands on all the skeletons...

9 December. Julio Martinez Florez claims to have found the earliest evidence of trepanation that was practiced for medical reasons, in late 5th-mid 6th century Spain. The skull comes from a man of about 40-50 years old, and Martinez Florez diagnosed the man with a brain tumor. There's only one good picture of the skull, and it doesn't look anything like a trepanation to me. It looks like some sort of lytic lesion. It's entirely possible that the hole we see is the direct result of a brain tumor. I'm not at all sure what his evidence for surgical intervention (trepanation) is. Trepanations typically have very well-defined edges - it's been practiced for centuries, and in most societies there are high survival rates, evidence of healing, and evidence that the surgeon knew what he was doing. This hole in the skull looks like it could be the result of a disease process (hell, it could be post-mortem for all I can tell from the picture). Anyway, until a peer-reviewed article comes out on this, I'm very skeptical.

Skull that reeeeally doesn't look like it was trepanned
(credit: ArcheoRivista)

12 December. A nice piece by Reuters discusses Spain's prehistoric burial chambers, which date back 5,000 years. In 2007, a burial chamber was found with the skeletons of one man and 19 women arranged in a circle. The thought is that the drank poison to accompany the man into the afterlife. Now, experts are suggesting that Spain generate tourist dollars from displaying the dolmens, but the Spanish are also concerned with preserving their heritage.

13 December. Real Roman gladiators suffered broken noses and bruises. Now you too can make your body look like that of a gladiator - by joining an "authentic" gladiator school in Trier (Germany). The first rule of Roman Fight Club is, you do not talk about Roman Fight Club!

14 December. Read an interesting-looking article on "Toys, Play and Swaddling: Indications of Early Childhood in Ancient Greece" by M.S. Sommer, which draws on iconography, figurines, and toys (but not, unfortunately, skeletons) to reconstruct what life may have been like for children in ancient Greece.

Possible skulls of Boudica's rebels (credit: London Evening Standard)

15 December. Hundreds of skulls discovered in London could be the remains of Queen Boudica's rebel Iceni tribesmen. Timbers that were prepared in a native way, rather than a distinctly Roman way, suggest that the native ancient Londoners were being used as slave labor.

15 December. The Tomb of the Scipios in Rome is reopening to the public. No skeletons here, I assume, but still pretty cool. Check out the pictures.

Bones - Season 7, Episode 5 (Review)

2011-12-08T23:15:00.001-05:00

I have to confess that I didn't have much patience for Bones tonight. This morning, I took my Human Osteology class to Vanderbilt's spiffy gross anatomy lab. We got an awesome tour of the lab space and got to poke around (and in) the cadavers that the med students are studying. And we got regaled with stories by the lab manager, who studied forensic anthropology at UTK and worked at the Body Farm. My hands still kinda smell like latex, but it was totally worth it. Anyway, on to the show...

The Twist in the Twister

Episode Summary

A dead body with a stake through it is found on a campground that hasn't been used in two months. Brennan concludes that the victim was male from the pelvis and in his 30s from dental wear. There is obvious penetrating trauma, but there are additional compound fractures to various bones. With the body back at the Jeffersonian, Hodgins estimates time of death at 5 weeks ago. Saroyan finds that the penetrating trauma did not kill him, since there is no hemorrhagic staining in the wound. Fisher thinks that the victim may have been in a tornado that came through about 5 weeks ago, and he finds three instances of blunt force trauma to the right parietal. Hemorrhaging in the skull later confirms this. The murder weapon - which was cylindrical - left orange paint in the wound. Angela reconstructs the victim's face, and he is identified as Scott Braley, a storm chaser.

Braley's brother is brought in to the FBI for questioning, and he asks about Scott's "mini moho" - an expensive, tricked-out motor home Braley used to chase storms. Booth locates the vehicle in North Carolina and heads down with Sweets after lying to Brennan about his involvement in the expedition. They find the mini moho, which Nolan - Braley's assistant - is living in. Braley owed Nolan money, but Nolan did not kill him. Booth also finds out that the National Science Federation awarded a $500,000 contract to Toni Lawrence to film tornadoes. Toni and Scott had a rivalry, so Booth and Sweets track her down while she's filming a tornado. As they're questioning Toni and her crew, the tornado comes closer. They all duck into a cellar - and Brennan shows up. Sweets questions a variety of people on the crew - Misty, who loves rainbows, and Wes, her ex-boyfriend who films tornadoes - but they claim to have alibis for the date of Braley's death. Toni notes that Braley was yelling at someone about money shortly before his death.

Angela somehow manages to narrow down the location of Braley's death through a combination of particulate density ratios and a probability index ('cause those are real things). She and Hodgins decide to go to southern Virginia to investigate, leaving their son with his grandfather. They find Braley's tornado probe, as well as glass with colored paint and blood on it. It's a rainbow-patterned bottle, so Booth calls in Misty for questioning. She admits to having seen the mini moho before, but she slept with Nolan, not Braley. Seems her boyfriend Wes found out (after seeing her water bottle in Braley's vehicle) and killed him. The team proves that Wes doesn't have an alibi because he has footage of a tornado spinning clockwise, which is rare in the northern hemisphere.

Also, Booth is overprotective. But not really, because Brennan does some stupid shit this episode.

Forensic (and Plot) Comments

There was a severe lack of skeletal material in this episode. Mostly, the team talked about things like xrays, trauma, blood staining, but they were never shown. That made for poor television.
While we do get tornadoes in my home state of Virginia and my now-home state of North Carolina, they're really quite minor. Here's a news story from April about 7 tornadoes that touched down in central VA - and two houses were damaged. That's a far cry from the destruction shown in this episode. Now, a hurricane - that can do some damage to the Southeast.
The footage of the storm was also horribly, horribly fake. I mean, we are expected to suspend disbelief for this kind of thing - no one's going to wait for a weather phenomenon to occur just to film an episode of Bones - but wow, their special effects budget has dropped in the past couple of years.
And then Brennan showed up in the cellar through the magic of teleportation apparently. Which made me write this in my notes: "W.T.F??!?!?!?! Bones?" Followed quickly by, "Seriously, is there no one who thinks of time continuity? NC is 4. Hours. Away. Fuck." Booth told Brennan that the mini moho was in NC. He and Sweets get there, find the truck, have lunch, and find Toni. Brennan decides - when Booth is almost to NC - to come down herself and gets there in less than half the time it should take (after finding him through a cell tower ping and a gratuitous shout-out for Vincent Nigel-Murray). Then she leaves Booth and Sweets at the storm site... to drive back 4 hours. I realize she's supposed to be pissed, but that's some passive-aggressive shit right there. She gets back by dinnertime, as does Booth, because time doesn't matter.
To continue with the lack of continuity... Angela and Hodgins tell her father that they'll be gone "a couple of hours" to work a scene in southern VA. Which is at least 3 hours from D.C. They get back in time for bed (although ZZ Top said that the kid had been asleep for 4 hours).
Angela and Hodgins work a destruction scene that looks pretty recent. But the tornado in question happened 5 weeks ago. Are we supposed to believe that there has been absolutely no attempt at cleanup in that time? In what was clearly a neighborhood in Virginia? I don't buy it.
And in 5 weeks, the blood hasn't washed off the waterbottle? There's probably been some rain.
Oh yeah, so why did Hodgins have the baby in his lab? Saroyan cracked down on that a couple episodes ago. And the baby is in daycare.
Who let ZZ Top in to the uber-protected, super-safe Jeffersonian lab? I hate how people can just walk in and out and around the lab with no one asking questions, signing them in, making them wear a visitor pass, etc.

Dialogue

National Science Federation? Really?
Fisher thinks he and Dr. Brennan might end up "on the cover of the journal." 'cause there's only one journal.

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - D. Did not care at all about the victim. We knew nothing about him. The killer was a guy who had less than a minute of screen time and didn't say anything when confronted with evidence, just gave a hang-dog look. Lame.

Forensic Solution - D+. The age/sex of the victim was glossed over, as usual. Angela's miraculous facial reconstruction (which we don't even see) ID'ed him. The numerous traumas were mentioned, as were methods for figuring out directionality of wounds, etc., yet never shown. Writers: please show, don't just tell.

Drama - D-. I really, really didn't care about this episode. The woman who loves rainbows was an offensively dumb character. The "overprotective" storyline sucked because, well, Brennan is being an idiot about her pregnancy and a massive tool to Booth. This is quite possibly the worst episode of the show I've seen yet (but I'm too lazy to check through the archives to see last season's grades).

Ruins of the 19th Century Maya

2011-12-06T10:02:00.001-05:00

As part of the #SciFund Challenge, John Gust, a doctoral student in anthropology at UC Riverside, is looking for a small amount of funding to finish his research. I read about John's RocketHub project - Send John to the Jungle - but wanted to know more about his research goals and the importance of his work.

John works in the Yucatan Peninsula studying the remains of the indigenous Maya in the 19th century. Since people (me included) only ever hear about the Classic-period Maya civilization (c. 250 to 900 AD), I asked John to tell me more about what he expects to learn. Following are my questions and his responses (edited a bit).

Tell me about the Historic-period Maya. What are your research questions?

The larger project of which this is a part is looking at extractive industries in northern Quintana Roo, about 20 miles south of Cancun. In 1847, the lower classes, mostly Maya, initiated a peasant revolt against the government known as the Caste War. Within about 10 years, the war was over and the Maya were defeated. Some settled with the government and received relative autonomy, but were subject to raids by the hold-out rebels into the 20th century.

In addition to social unrest, at this time in Mexico, the first age of globalization got going. Foreign capital, ideas, images, and goods were being funneled into even very remote areas as the resources were being harvested for export. Yet the area of Mexico in which I work is very hard to farm mechanically due to thin soils. I am interested in a number of questions, such as: What effects did this area's resources have on the destinations of the exports, and vice versa? Did the eventual failure of the agricultural industries relate strictly to environmental problems or was it affected by continuing Caste War violence?

What will this project contribute to anthropology?

Globalization continues today, and it's important to understand its beginning to fully understand current processes. A particularly germane aspect of globalization is the movement of people. Although Cancun is a quickly-developing tourist area, the Mexican state underfunds the Yucatan Peninsula. The government projects that are funded tend to focus on natural pools known as cenotes and cultural wealth, such as the large-scale archaeological sites of the Classic-period Maya civilization.

This focus on large-scale cultural patrimony ignores the last several centuries of Mayan history. Following the Classic period, the Maya have lived in settlements of various sizes - some large, some smaller - but without the monumental architecture that is seen as a hallmark of the Classic period. Up to the 1970s, many people made their living through extraction of mahogany, dyewood, and chicle (natural chewing gum base). These industries were spread out on the landscape and lacked large concentrated factories, meaning travel and transportation were important to the livelihood of the Maya. The routes the Maya used tended to follow ancient roads because they were the best paths.

As the tourist industry grows, though, these ancient routes are being expanded for automobiles, destroying the old roads and narrow-gauge railroad lines. With destruction of these routes, the possibility of understanding the last centuries of the area goes with them. The people who worked in chicle production in the 1970s are aging, which means that one of our major sources of oral and written history will soon disappear. Doing archaeology in this region will preserve this history, but it is imperative that the research be done now.

We hear a lot about Classic-period Maya, of course. Why focus on this particular time period?

Ruins of a sugar processing facility at Xuxub
(credit: John Gust)

As you know, there has been a longstanding bias pretty much worldwide towards larger sites with elite contexts, and that continues in some ways today in the Maya area. In terms of the Historic period, there has been little archaeology in Mexico generally. The archaeology that has been done is problematic - much of it has aided reconstruction of large, primarily Spanish or otherwise white-owned settlements. There has been basically no research focused on the lives of the non-elite - the average Maya. Past historical archaeology projects, for example, have told us what a building looked like 300 years ago but do not tell us about the people forced to build it.

My project is important because it looks squarely at the common people in the area - people who worked at sugar plantations and whose life histories are otherwise lost. Archaeology will help us tell their stories.

How John accesses the ruins
(credit: John Gust)

The fact that John's project focuses on the commoners is particularly compelling for me, since my own bioarchaeological research deals with understanding the non-elite of a civilization that was large and understood through the eyes of the elite.

If you're interested in funding his research, he needs just $200 more to finish his dissertation research. For a $40 contribution, you get your very own pint glass with the logo of his research team on it. And, be honest, every archaeologist could use another pint glass! John notes that funding beyond his goal will go towards the costs associated with the project - namely, costs associated with traveling to and accessing the field site.

Bones - Season 7, Episode 4 (Review)

2011-12-01T22:30:00.001-05:00

The Male in the Mail

Episode Summary

At the post office, Saroyan, Brennan, and Booth find a series of boxed packed with human remains. From the wear on the lower incisors and the mandibular angle, Brennan notes the victim was a male in his early 20s. His head was dismembered at an unspecified cervical vertebra, and there are other marks of dismemberment on the acromion processes of both scapulae.

At the Jeffersonian, Hodgins uses a fancy-pants eye surgery laser to cut open the cardboard box. Once they get out all the bones, Edison notes that the victim had a sesamoid bone at the second metacarpal of his left hand. The weapon that was used to dismember him was a blade that was uniform with vertical striations. Angela traces the label on the boxes to a Ship-n-Print in Hyattsville, MD. As Booth and Brennan head over there to check it out, Edison finds a hit in dental records for an Oliver Lawrence, who worked at the store.

B&B interview the front desk guy, Tony Dunson, but quickly ask to speak to the manager, Connor Trammel. Trammel notes that Oliver was a good employee and went missing a while back. There was also a bunch of staff turnover around the same time, as he and a group of employees - Sheila Burnside, her husband (Hugh?), and Ralph Berti - won the lottery. He no longer speaks to them, though, since he's still working at the copy shop and they've squandered their riches. Hodgins and Edison finally work out the weapon that dismembered Oliver - a guillotine best fits the profile of the weapon, and Brennan realizes that the industrial paper cutter in the shop matches pretty well.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Edison notes that there were microfractures to the victim's third and fourth left ribs, as well as his left radius, leading Brennan to conclude that there was a fistfight. There are also different weapon marks - this time, there are kerf marks, on the right scapula (acromion), humerus (greater tubercle), and ulna (olecranon). The victim was hit on the shoulder and elbow with a tiny saw. Meanwhile, Hodgins is still boiling the boxed body and comes up with a sternocleidomastoideus muscle for Saroyan, who sees a piece of tape embedded in the muscle. This suggests that the victim was killed when his right subclavian artery was severed. Edison thinks the weapon may have been a tape gun and has Angela compare the blades of the guns used at the Ship-n-Print to the marks on the bone, and one matches.

One of the last jobs that was run on the company's printer was of a woman sitting on the copier, with a man's hands cradling her butt. Based on the distance between her ischial tuberosities, Brennan thinks the woman was Sheila. Based on the slight deformity of the left second finger, Brennan thinks the man was Oliver. Because of this evidence and because of the location of the injuries on the victim's right side, Brennan thinks the killer may have been Hugh, Sheila's husband. But the Jeffersonian team finally finds the smoking gun: a fragment of bone embedded in the victim's muscle. This bone, however, came from the Buddhist necklace that Tony Dunson always wears. He was shipping psilocybin mushrooms to clients, and Oliver found out. Tony didn't mean to kill Oliver, but it just happened.

Oh, and Booth's father died. I actually missed the first few minutes of the show (stupid DVR), so I didn't get the explanation. But lots of the show was about encouraging Booth to mourn for the father who beat him and whom he had cut out of his life 20 years ago. His grandfather rightly chastizes Booth for being so callous that he (the grandfather) lost a son, and gives him a box full of his father's mementos. Booth squints through fake tears at the benches he took from the baseball stadium in last season's power-outage episode, and he has a bunch of misty watercolor memories.

Forensic Comments

As always, the mandibular angle is a terrible way to estimate sex and dental wear is a terrible way to estimate age-at-death. Both are hugely error-prone, and even given the sparse remains Brennan had to work with initially, she could have used more accurate methods to assess sex and age.
Sesamoid bones occur in the hands and feet all the time. (A sesamoid bone is one that forms within a tendon, like the patella or the pisiform.) In addition to the two large sesamoid bones everyone has, most of us have one or two sesamoid bones at the toe end of our first metatarsals. I'd think a hand sesamoid bone was interesting, but I wouldn't expect to see any deformity in a living person and certainly wouldn't use it as a positive ID on a person.
There's no way the antiquities department at the Jeffersonian would let Hodgins and Edison whack the crap out of fake bones with their ancient, priceless weapons.
Ischial tuberosities are not like fingerprints in your pants.
The location of injuries on a victim doesn't necessarily correlate with the handedness of an assailant. Many of us southpaws use our right hands just as often as we use our left hands. Then again, I guess I would use a tape gun left-handed.

Dialogue

The only pregnant-Brennan mention this week comes with her adjusting her bra excessively, so there wasn't much cheesy dialogue in the forensic side of the plot.
Actually, the show was pretty much all business this week, except for the Booth's-dead-father plot, so there isn't much dialogue to comment on.
Oh right, and there's that new FBI agent, Genevieve Shaw. She was suck-uppy, which is not a good trait for an FBI agent to have.

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C-. The writers threw so many red herrings at us I got a mouthful of caviar. The mystery felt rather clumsy.

Forensic Solution - B+. The forensics seemed reasonable. Brennan's portable xray was fancy but not unrealistic, and even Angela's re-creation was within the realm of normal possibility. Other than the usual odd choices for sex/age estimation, the forensics were alright.

Drama - C+. Maybe it's because I missed the first few minutes, but killing off Booth's father (whom we've never actually met) seemed like a cheap ploy to pad out the drama this episode.

Next week: Oh man, are we only up to episode 5 next week? I know this season started late, but it seems loooong already.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival IX

2011-11-30T13:29:00.001-05:00

Not much on offer for this carnival as we head to the cold, rainy season punctuated by holiday merriment.

New Finds

One of the Cirencester skeletons (photo credit)

17 November. A Romano-British cemetery was recently discovered in Cirencester, dated based on pottery to about 70 to 120 AD. The significance of this cemetery is that it may very well be the earliest example of an inhumation cemetery in Roman Britain. Inhumations aren't common until after 200 AD, so the cemetery is quite interesting (although I would argue that just because cremation was the "norm" doesn't mean there weren't plenty of people inhuming their dead for religious or financial reasons). Earlier excavations at the site in the 1960s revealed several dozen cremations, suggesting a change in burial tradition from inhumation to cremation over time. There are a ton of interesting details in the news reports about pottery and jewelry, and excavators even found a decapitated skeleton, with its head between its feet. I can't wait to hear more once the analyses are complete.
15 November. An Etruscan tomb dating to the 6th century BC was found near the archaeological park of Vulci, apparently just ahead of some tombaroli who wanted to loot it. There's a neat video at the link above (an Italian news report) as well as a bunch of pictures of the pottery recovered from the tomb. No skeletons or bone fragments, though.

Exhibitions

17 November. The Manchester Museum is running an exhibit until March called "Grave Secrets: Tales of the Ancient Nubians." One of the specimens on view is the skull of individual 15A, whose healed wounds suggest he was knocked down, but he got up again (you're never gonna keep him down!). Also on offer is a giant-cell tumor of a humerus, a rare instance of cancer identified in skeletal remains. The remains were uncovered at the turn of the 20th century by Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, an anatomist and early proponent of the study of palaeopathology, but there's no indication in the brief news blurb about when specifically the skeletons date to.
22 November. Seen over on one of my favorite blogs, Street Anatomy, photographer Thom Atkinson got permission to photograph some very interesting medical artifacts from the Wellcome Collection in London, including preserved tattoos, a wax model of a decomposing body, Charles Darwin's walking stick, and these assorted Roman votive offerings (below). One of these days, I want to write a post on Roman body part votive offerings and disease. Until then, check out Thom's work at thomatkinson.com.

Assorted Roman Votive Offerings. Copyright Thom Atkinson.

Beyond the Romans

18 November. Over on History in an Hour, Liam A. Faulkner writes about the Plague of Athens (430-426 BC). It's a short summary of our understanding of this disease epidemic based on the writings of men like Thucydides and Plutarch, as well as the Hippocratic Corpus. One day, we may start finding more cemeteries in the Greco-Roman world whose skeletons yield evidence of various plagues and help us reconstruct history better than the eyewitnesses who didn't understand germs or disease ecology.

Cranial Vault Modification or Alieeeeens?

2011-11-22T17:34:00.000-05:00

As usual, a Daily Mail article caught my attention with its first line, "A mummified elongated skull from Peru could finally prove the existence of aliens." The purpose of this kind of opener, of course, is to get people to read the tripe the Mail peddles. According to the article, "three anthropologists agree: it is not a human being." Well, if three unnamed Spanish and Russian anthropologists agree, then it must be an alien.

Alien? Uh, no. (Photo: The Nation)

Without even reading another line, though, I knew the subject of the article: cranial vault modification, a common practice around the world but particularly associated with ancient peoples of the Andes. And yet headlines from not particularly good news sites range from "Mysterious, triangle-shaped alien skull found in Peru" to "Malformed mystery mummy stuns world!" Cranial vault modification (CVM) is a pretty easy thing to accomplish, though. By applying continued pressure to certain areas of the still-forming skull, the bones of a child's head grow in a certain direction. Common methods of producing CVM include putting pressure with a board or other flat object on the occipital region (back of the head), the frontal region (front of the head), both occipital and frontal regions, and along a transverse axis. These methods generally result in flattening of the skull. Another method involves encircling the head with bands of fabric, which results in an often dramatic elongation of the skull as seen in the Peruvian mummy in this news this week.

An example of CVM from Cuzco (Credit)

Although the practice used to be called "cranial deformation," it has been renamed in light of the lack of evidence for any sort of pathology associated with it. That is, there may be minor anatomical abnormalities associated with CVM, but the practice does not seem to have interfered with brain growth or functioning in any way (Ortner 2003). CVM wasn't limited to the people of ancient Peru - the history of the practice has been traced back to the Old World, where a female skull with an annular CVM was found in Iraq dating to the 5th millennium BC (Gerszten and Gerszten 1995) - but it is perhaps best known in the mummies from the Andes. Theories as to the purpose of the practice range from reshaping heads to look more god-like (e.g., the maize god of the Mayas or the pathologically deformed head of the Egyptian ruler Akhenaten) to indicating a certain status or kinship, as shown in the following historical documentation of the practice by Martín de Murúa among the natives of the Colca Valley (Peru) in 1590 (quoted in Cook 2007: 13):

The Collas…still use the practice of forming the heads of children in diverse manners or figures with much superstition, and in some places they make them very long that they call cayto uma, making them thin, and making them come to the form of a narrow and long bonnet that they call chucu; in other places they make the heads flat and wide in the front. That is called paltauma; of these they are generally from Cabanaconde…

Photo: ANDINA/Percy Hurtado

So let's take another look at the new child mummies found in Peru. The best coverage - and the best pictures (see right) - of the Andahuaylillas mummies that I found comes from the Peruvian news agency Andina. Anthropologist Elva Torres, head of the anthropology service at Cusco, studied both mummies. One isn't very well preserved and represents a child of less than one year old. The "alien" mummy is actually that of a 3- to 4-year-old child with a classic annular type modification, and Torres even notes that it's possible to see traces of the deforming pads on the skull. As a result of the modification, the child's eye orbits are larger than normal and the fontanelle (soft spot) hasn't yet closed. The rest of the skeleton, though, has evidence of normal growth. My Spanish isn't great, but it seems from the article like Torres is blaming the museum's director, Renato Davila Riquelme, for telling the press that the mummy is non-human. (Davila is indeed the one quoted in the Daily Mail story.)

Why are we so fascinated by cranial vault modification (CVM)? After all, we do weird things to our bodies and have for at least thousands of years - from the tattoos of Oetzi to the Chinese practice of foot binding to piercing our skin, most of us have modified our bodies in a permanent way. What's interesting about CVM, though, is that it was performed on young children who had no choice in the matter. Rather than a marker of personal identity like a tattoo or a piercing, CVM indicates that a person belonged to a certain group, it's a way of marking someone as belonging to you and your community. And that just doesn't sit well with contemporary American ideas of personal agency and choice.

Can you see the "deformity" on the left? (Credit)

The thing is, we still do reshape our childrens' heads. Anything other than a perfectly round, perfectly globular head is pathologized as Positional Head Deformity (PHD), and I'm sure many of you have seen small children wearing these head-shaping helmets at the park. PHD is on the rise because doctors have discovered that placing infants only on their backs to sleep is safer. Without the ability to roll over, many infants who lie on their backs will develop a flattened occipital bone. It's unclear from my quick review of the literature whether this condition is associated with an actual pathology, like muscular torticollis. But it's clear that PHD can cause facial asymmetry, perhaps severe enough that the child's bones would not eventually reshape themselves once the child became mobile and able to hold up his own head.

Adorable child with a "cranial remodeling orthosis" (Credit)

There's honestly little difference between the ancient practice of cranial vault modification and the contemporary practice of modifying positional head deformity: it's done for primarily cosmetic reasons. If an ancient Inca child didn't have a modified head, he may not have been accepted as part of his social group. If a modern American child doesn't have her PHD corrected, she may not grow up to uphold the impossible standards of bodily perfection we enforce on our population.

Insisting that the skeleton of an Inca child is "non-human," "otherworldly," or "alien" demonstrates a complete lack of ability to think critically about one's own culture. The things we do to our bodies today are not natural - they are cultural. The way we dress, the way we talk, the actions we perform are all external indications of "self" - humans are a fascinating mix of biological and cultural traits, and we constantly and often subconsciously signal to anyone and everyone our most salient features, a short-hand for who we are and what we want. Body modification is an important concept in understanding the relationship between the individual and the group, and it would be nice if journalists recognized that CVM is simply one of many things humans have found to assert their identity.

References:

Biggs WS (2003). Diagnosis and management of positional head deformity. American Family Physician, 67 (9), 1953-6. PMID: 12751657.

Cook, ND (2007). People of the Volcano: Andean Counterpoint in the Colca Valley of Peru. Duke University Press.

Gerszten PC, & Gerszten E (1995). Intentional cranial deformation: a disappearing form of self-mutilation. Neurosurgery, 37 (3). PMID: 7501099.

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

(Special thanks to Matt Velasco for his interesting lecture on cranial vault modification in my Health and Disease in Ancient Populations class on 11/17/11. This post is a mixture of his summary of the practice, my notes, our lengthy discussion after class, and additional source material.)

Let's Talk about Evolution

2011-11-21T14:27:00.001-05:00

Back in June, teh internetz were ablaze with criticism for the Miss USA contestants, who had a chance to respond with a prepared comment to the question "Should evolution be taught in schools?" And they horribly, horribly failed. I wrote about the story in my post "Miss USA Contestants Are Idiots," but my favorite coverage was a satirical video called "Should Math Be Taught in Schools?"

A few months ago, I was invited by the members of the SCOPE project to contribute a short talking-head video about the importance of evolution, and the 6-minute end product has now been posted. The SCOPE Team notes that:

This video was produced to allow scientists to explain, in their own words, the importance of evolution to science -- and the related importance of teaching evolution in schools. Our goal is to convey the fact that evolution is an amazing, uplifting discovery that has served as the genesis of countless advances in many fields of science. We also wanted to highlight female role models in the science community.

Each individual video will be posted to the SCOPE project's YouTube channel soon, and you can view my full 2-minute video here. You can catch me in the project's video, though, around the 5-minute mark. Fair warning: I am not an actress, but I say neat things.

Bones - Season 7, Episode 3 (Review)

2011-11-17T22:47:00.001-05:00

The Prince in the Plastic

Episode Summary

Two antiques dealers are scrounging through a trash dump for treasure when they stumble across a body wrapped in plastic. The Jeffersonian team determines that the sun probably fused the polyethylene plastic to the body like a sausage casing, trapping the moisture and decomposing tissue. Brennan, Saroyan, and Daisy drain the package before cutting it open to reveal the body. From the skull, Brennan determines the victim was a female, and the state of cranial suture closure indicates she was in her 30s. She was also buried with a Prince Charmington doll.

Hodgins doesn't get any bugs or larvae, but decomposition puts the victim's time of death at about two weeks prior. Daisy looks into the skeleton and notes that the victim had remodelled perimortem and postmortem injuries, including compound fractures to the 7th thoracic vertebra, spine of the right scapula, posterior aspect of the humerus, and anterior aspect of the left ulna, suggesting she was beaten. Further, she had healed fractures of the patellae, femoral necks, pelvis, and most of the ribs that likely occurred when she was a child. Brennan notes bilateral Colles' fractures of the radii that occurred perimortem, indicating the victim fell before her death. Based on some skin traces on the plastic, Angela discovers that the victim is Debbie Cortez, who was reported missing by her brother.

Booth and Sweets bring in the brother for questioning. He explains that Debbie and their parents were involved in the crash of a small plane when she was 9. She was the only survivor and spent a year convalescing from her injuries. Booth also visits Debbie's work, a toy company called Dillio, where she was a vice president in charge of toy development. He questions Bianca (Morgan Fairchild!), who owns the company, and Lawrence, a VP who was jealous of Debbie's success.

Back at the Jeffersonian, the team finds a small piece of metal lodged in one of Debbie's vertebrae. They reconstruct Debbie's position at death, finding that she was likely face down on concrete when she was struck. Based on Angela's reconstruction, Brennan guesses that Debbie wasn't hit by a bludgeon that someone was wielding, like a bat or a 2x4, but may have been hit by something quite large that caused all the perimortem fractures at once. At Dillio, Booth and Daisy discover a partly damaged door in the prototype lab and traces of blood on the floor, guessing that Debbie was killed when the door fell on her. The shard of metal in her vertebra is the same as in the door, which was propped open with a car jack.

Daisy does an autopsy on the Prince Charmington doll, which leads her to notice that his leg had been ripped off. This doll was a collector's item and was worth around $10,000, plenty of motive for murder. Angela discovers that Debbie has been emailing with someone about selling stolen toys on eBay. The IP address is traced to her brother, who admits to stealing and selling the toys but denies killing his sister. He recognizes the Prince Charmington doll as the last thing their mother gave Debbie.

Hodgins finds a piece of the victim's nail and some glue attached to it. There are epithelial cells between the nail and the glue, which are DNA matched to Brock Vorback, who plays Prince Charmington in real life. He and Debbie were in a relationship that they kept secret from Bianca, who didn't like workplace dalliances, and Debbie was planning to leave Dillio. But Hodgins also discovers the material that caused the chemical burn to the Prince Charmington doll: lead sulphate from a car battery. He does an isotope analysis of the berber wool fibers, which indicate the material was made in Modena, Italy - specifically, a trunk liner for a Maserati. Booth and Brennan confront Bianca, who owns a Maserati, and find traces of blood in her trunk. Bianca explains that Debbie's leaving would have caused Dillio's stock to drop. When she confronted Debbie, she tripped and fell and the door came down on her. But Brennan points out that Debbie didn't die immediately - she was suffocated, and Bianca didn't try to help.

On the drama side of the episode, Sweets wants to get licensed to carry a gun, but Booth isn't sure he's cut out for it. Sweets puts in time at the shooting range and eventually passes a test, gaining the respect of Booth. Angela spends the episode talking about baby toys - first trying to get Brennan to play with dolls, then trying to put together a walker for Michael. Brennan ends up going to the toy store with Angela and Michael, and she picks up two foam-ball-shooting guns, rounding out the episode playing with Booth in his apartment. While I appreciate when TV shows have thematic elements and call-backs, the toy/gun/toy gun subplots were all too neatly tied together.

Forensic Comments

Cranial sutures are a terrible way to tell age at death. They usually return an age that's too old. Brennan should have confirmed with the pubic symphysis.
Yes, Daisy actually notes that the victim had "remodelled perimortem and postmortem injuries." I rewound and listened to it three times. Perhaps the script read "unremodelled" and Carla Gallo just flubbed the line and no one noticed (except me)?
Daisy doesn't describe the location of the victim's fractures very well. For example, "posterior aspect" of the humerus is the whole back side of a very large, very long bone.
If Debbie's fractures at age 9 had remodelled, it is weird that Daisy could tell they were specifically "impact fractures."
What kind of isotope analysis would tell you the source of berber wool fibers? I guess perhaps Sr, if it's in sheep's wool, but isotope values are not nearly precise enough (or unique enough) to source organic material.
Angela is skilled at reconstructing bodies and other three-dimensional objects, but she can't put together a baby walker? That's just weak writing. Also, doesn't Brennan know Chinese? Why didn't she help Angela put together the toy?

Dialogue

Is it just me, or is the new Bones title sequence really weird? And rather cheesy.
I'm with Brennan - playing with dolls is weird. (I never got the hang of it and have no clue what I'll do when my daughter wants me to do something other than put her doll to bed.)
I'm also with Brennan on the charms of the mixed-breed plush dogs: I could see using them to demonstrate genetics somehow.
Lawrence, the Dillio VP, told Booth that "my wife and kids were in Florida with their inlaws." Did he mean "with my inlaws" or "with my parents"?
Brennan's baby's calcaneus is kicking her spleen. (Been there, probably described it like that, actually.)
At the end, Brennan is reading "The Childrearing Habits of South Asian Tribes in East Indian Literature," which is a cute take on the titles of cultural anthropology books and a fitting book for Brennan to be reading.
It still strikes me as odd that Booth calls Brennan "Bones" and that Angela calls her husband "Hodgins."

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. Fingerprints ID'ed the victim quickly. She was clearly important and powerful, so there was no real mystery about why someone would want her dead. The brother, boyfriend, and other VP were obviously not the murders. The special guest star clearly was from the minute her name flashed in the credits.

Forensic Solution - B-. The forensics were more or less reasonable, although cranial suture closure is a crappy way of figuring out age.

Drama - C+. I didn't like the writers' attempts to beat us over the head with toys and guns this episode. But I did like the way Brennan was written today; she wasn't too robotic and was just the right amount of social awkwardness, cluelessness, and anthropologist.

Next week: Clark and ischial tuberosities (which Brennan pronounced wrong in the brief preview)!

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival VIII

2011-11-16T13:08:00.001-05:00

I'm surprised at the lack of skeletons found in Italy this month. It's the rainy season, so perhaps there's not as much excavation going on, but at the same time, rain has a way of unearthing skeletons on its own. At any rate, most of the news for this carnival is from yours truly...

Finds/Projects/Theories

Santa Croce Camerina skeleton
(credit: RagusaNews.com)

Nov 9 - MIT's William Broadhead has developed a new theory about the Roman Republic, namely that it must have been pretty demographically diverse. I addressed Broadhead's theory with some Sr/O data from Republican skeletons in my post "Demography of Republican Rome."
Nov 11 - In Calabria, excavations at Santa Croce Camerina revealed a 6th century AD skeleton near the Byzantine church of Pirrera. The skeleton appears to be male. Oddly, they also found three skulls in or near the burial. The news item doesn't specifically say that the skulls were human, and since they were found near an amphora I'm going to guess they were faunal.
Nov 11 - My newly launched Roman DNA Project got covered on CNN and Forbes because of the "99% of ancient Rome" angle. I was thrilled to get the attention, and the pilot phase of the project is now fully funded. Over on the project's blog, I put up a post about our research goals. We'll start analysis in January, hopefully getting results before summer.

New Analyses/Summaries/Articles

Evidence of crucifixion
(Maslen & Mitchell 2006)

Nov 4 - I wrote a post about the bioarchaeology of crucifixion, which got quite a bit of traffic from being profiled on The Browser and on The Daily Beast. Long story short: there is all of one example of crucifixion from the ancient world. I explore the possible reasons for this and suggest we Roman bioarchaeologists keep our eyes open for other potential examples.
Nov 5 - An interesting blog post (with illustrations) on Roman medicine and medical instruments.
Nov 8 - Katy Meyers at Bones Don't Lie summarized the recent AJPA article by Redfern and DeWitt on health in Roman Britain (Dorset), in which the authors argue that health outcomes are mediated by social status.
Nov 10 - Katy also summarized the latest news out of the Kenchreai Cemetery Project. Joe Rife of the classics department here at Vanderbilt is doing awesome work, with the collaboration of Doug Ubelaker, in looking at burial rites and cremated remains from the Roman period in this Greek cemetery.

Exhibits

Nov 4 - The Museum of Natural History in Basel has a temporary exhibition of part of their 10,000-skeleton collection from various time periods.

Field Schools

Nov 2 - The Gabii Project has opened up applications for its summer 2012 field school. Come excavate with us! Who knows, maybe you'll find another lead burrito...

Roman DNA Project Funding Success!

2011-11-11T17:00:00.001-05:00

Thanks to an amazing piece at the CNN blog Light Years by Ed Yong, the outpouring of support for the Roman DNA Project today has been astounding!

In financial news, we have actually exceeded our $6,000 goal, after just 10 days. That goal was to fund analysis of at least 20 individuals (the immigrants to Rome that I found through Sr/O isotope analysis). Of course, we are accepting donations through mid-December, so additional funding will be put to good use – studying more ancient Romans!

And I’ve received a dozen or more emails today from people as excited as I am about this project, offering their encouragement, lab services, expertise, and knowledge about the ancient world. I will respond to all of them, I promise, but it might take a few days!

Again, thank you – all of you reading this – for making this project a reality!

[Cross-posted from the blog of the Roman DNA Project.]