The fall you had outside the monkey bars in fourth grade it may seem like a lifetime ago, but for scientists studying the skeletal remains, these crucial – and painful – moments can be important clues to how we live hundreds of years after our deaths.
Skeletal trauma it is the evidence of breaks and fractures accumulated throughout life. These clues are especially important when it comes to decoding the lives of those who lived centuries before, including the inhabitants of the Middle Ages.
In a new study, archaeologists used X-ray analysis of 314 remains discovered in Cambridge, UK, between the 10th and 14th centuries, to examine the past. Specifically, the researchers were interested in documenting the impact that social class differences could have on the body. What they found was revealing, to say the least.
Why does it matter – The team discovered some gray truths about the lives of these medieval Britons – the lives of the poor were especially brutal. They also discovered the harsh reality of domestic violence in the period.
The results were published Monday in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Here’s the background – Modern Cambridge is more easily associated with the city’s university, which has already received academic luminaries from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking. But in medieval times, Cambridge looked very different from the picturesque colleges, cobbled streets and manicured river banks for which the city is known today.
In the 13th century, the city was home to some 4,000 workers, artisans, farmers and religious monks who attended the then-emerging university.
The difference between the work of a farmer and that of a friar may seem obvious, but the research team at the University of Cambridge who conducted this study took a deeper approach to truly rebuilding these people’s daily lives.
The research team examined the remains of three different tombs across the city:
The Augustinian convent: the final resting place for wealthy religious patrons and friars
The São João Evangelista Hospital: graves of the seriously ill or housed for charity
The Parish of Todos os Santos: the tomb of ordinary workers
Using the breaks and fractures left in the bones of these skeletons, the researchers began to reconstruct what each individual’s life really was like.
What they did – Archaeologists examined 75 remains from the Augustinian convent, 155 from the São João Evangelista Hospital and 84 from the Todos os Santos cemetery. They used a combination of a macroscopic examination – examinations done with the naked eye – and a portable X-ray machine to look beneath the surface of the bones.
The team used clues such as calcification of teeth, the shape or size of the skull, pubis and rib bones to judge the age of each skeleton at the time of death and sex. Once determined, the remains were categorized as adolescent (12-17), young adult (18-25), average adult (26-44), mature adult (45-60) and elderly adult (60+).
Children under 12 were excluded from the study because they were less likely to work outside the home.
“Life was more difficult down there – but life has always been difficult.”
What they found – Perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest number of skeletal traumas was seen in the remains of Todos os Santos, with 37 of 84 individuals showing evidence of some type of bone trauma.
Jenna Dittmar is the lead author of the study and a research associate at the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. She explains in a statement why people buried in Todos os Santos probably suffered injuries during their daily routine as workers.
“We can see that ordinary workers were at a higher risk of injury compared to the friars and their benefactors or the interns of more protected hospitals,” she says.
“They were people who spent their days working long hours doing heavy manual labor. In the city, people worked in crafts and trades such as bricklayer and blacksmithing, or as workers in general.”
“Outside the city, many spent dawn to dusk doing bone-crushing work in the fields or tending cattle,” she adds.
The researchers found that mature adult men tend to have more evidence of skeletal trauma than women. But this is not necessarily because women spend all their time indoors. Their tasks may have been less dangerous, but the women also worked outdoors, especially on farms, the researchers say.
The relationship between poverty and physical suffering and injury is not a shock. People living below the poverty line today still suffer disproportionate trauma to those with more privileges. But the research revealed other counterintuitive findings about the life of friars, domestic violence and Cambridge’s role in the war.
For example, they found evidence to suggest that some friars may have led dangerous lives before joining the church, although domestic violence may have been much more common in the Middle Ages than previously thought.
What we don’t know – Even if that evidence is defined in the bone, it does not necessarily mean that the conclusions drawn in this study are etched into the stone, say the researchers. While it is possible to make substantive assumptions about how these people acquired their injuries – whether from work, accident or interpersonal violence – it is difficult to know for sure.
Interestingly, the study also found lower scores of knife knife violence than previously reported, which the researchers say may be due in part to a lack of soft tissue evidence, rather than any indication of the realities of life in Cambridge. Medieval.
There is one thing that they can say for sure, according to Dittmar: life was Difficult across the board for medieval cantabrians.
“We can see that inequality recorded in the bones of the medieval residents of Cambridge, “said Dittmar.” Severe traumas prevailed across the social spectrum. Life was more difficult down there – but life was always difficult. “
Abstract:
Objective: To explore how medieval living conditions, occupation and an individual’s role in society impacted their risk of skeletal trauma.
Materials: The remains of 314 individuals from medieval Cambridge who were buried in the parish cemetery of Todos os Santos next to the Castle (n = 84), in the Augustinian convent (n = 75) and in the cemetery of Hospital de São João Evangelista (n = 155) were analyzed.
Methods: Macroscopic examination and simple radiographs were used to classify the type of fracture. The causal mechanisms and forces applied to a bone were inferred based on the fracture’s morphology.
Results: The observed skeletal trauma represents accidental injuries, probably suffered through occupational or daily activities, and violence. The highest prevalence rate was observed in individuals buried in Todos os Santos next to the Castle (44%, n = 37/84), and the lowest was observed at Hospital de São João (27%, n = 42/155). Fractures were more prevalent in men (40%, n = 57/143) than in women (26%, n = 25/95).
Conclusions: Skeletal trauma was greater in the cemetery of the parish of All Saints, indicating that the poor, whether working in urban or rural areas, had the highest risk of injury. The pattern and types of fractures observed suggest that men experienced more serious traumatic events than women. However, women who were routinely involved in manual labor were also at a higher risk of injury.
Meaning: This article increases our understanding of how traumatic injuries differed by age, sex and burial places in the medieval period.
Additional research: Additional comparative studies in different geographic regions are needed to determine how representative these results are.