#osteoarchaeology

[amentainsularis]

July was as precarious and as messy as my working desk during field season

[suzythered]

the problem with being friends with osteoarchaeologists is sometimes you catch them staring at you and you just know they are thinking about what your skull looks like without all the flesh

[aziraphles-ox-ribs]

Finding cool research papers to read and actually reading the cool research paper gives the same energy as buying new books and actually reading the new book

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Favourite 'weird' or obscure sub-discipline of archaeology?

Oh man I have so much respect for any of the really niche disciplines, but the bones people (both animal and human) deserve a shout out. @wafflelovingbatgirl I could never do what you do. Bones confuse me so hard. There are just so dang many of em...

-Reid

[bookymcbookface]

‘Ancestors: The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials’, by Professor Alice Roberts

[ancientstuff]

Oh man, this poor guy. What a way to die. Vicious.

[pumpking64]

that fucked up archaeological urge to skeletonise and sex your own skull

[southeastasianarchaeology]

[Paper] Hypomineralization disorder in tropical Southeast Asia during the agricultural revolution: Analysis of morbidity and mortality

Study at Vietnam's Man Bac site shows widespread bone disorders among Neolithic children, linked to dietary shifts and vitamin deficiencies.

via International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 03 March 2024: Paper by Vlok et al. Research at the Neolithic site Man Bac in northern Vietnam uncovers a high incidence of hypomineralization disorders (rickets and osteomalacia) among children, linked to a broader spectrum of diseases including scurvy, thalassemia, and malaria. Nearly half of the examined individuals showed signs of these bone…

[lesbiantaylorswiftstan]

i'm literally never more productive than when i'm procrastinating something. this weekend, i did a mini road trip with my best friend and his boyfriend, finished a homework assignment, read a pretty big chunk of my current book, paid my tuition, went for a hike, hung out with my aunts and my mom for a few hours, and am currently figuring out how to apply for a passport. all to procrastinate on writing the jemily fic

[froody]

as much as I love osteoarchaeology, I’m not sure I could do it. I’d just be standing there looking at a badly healed break on a femur from the Paleolithic era thinking “ow. owwwww. yeowch. ouchie.”

[amentainsularis]

The fact that everything in archaeology/bioarchaeology is all about the context makes my weird neurodivergent brain very happy! Every bit of information is necessary, and there's always a new thing to learn!

[suzythered]

BONE BADGE BONE BADGE BONE BADGE

[aziraphles-ox-ribs]

Do not lick the bones, the bones will not lick you

[cellarspider]

9/30 What remains

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We return to the movie that I’m not giving a jokey intro to this time, Prometheus. 

When I was in archaeological field school, we were digging in an area that had been continuously inhabited since the Neolithic period. Untold numbers of people had lived there through the ages.

And so it wasn’t entirely unexpected when someone told the professors that a construction crew across the street had just dug up a human skull.

(https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/work-begins-to-excavate-45-000-skeletons-from-hs2-site-at-london-euston-a3972926.html )

One of the grad students slapped on a dayglo vest and hard hat, and ran over there to speak with the crew. Undergrads were not allowed anywhere near the site, simply because of the liability risk. But the bones themselves? We weren’t allowed to touch them. They went right into boxes for a specialist to take care of. 

All told, remains from 18 skeletons were found, twelve of them children. They’d been there for about eight hundred years. The professors said the construction crew was diffing on top of a medieval churchyard. They’d dug a hole to connect up the utilities, and their trench went right up to the wall of the former church. You could tell that, the professors said, because unbaptized children would’ve been buried under the eaves of the church: rainwater falling from the eaves was thought to be sanctified, so they’d be blessed every time it rained.

The construction crew wasn’t actually obligated to tell anyone about the bones. There was no legal requirement–the dead were everywhere there. As long as there was no reason to suspect a murder, people could just dig.

But because they did stop, just long enough for the bones to be retrieved, those skeletons would be examined, cataloged, and would either be held in an osteoarchaeological collection for further research, or reburied. There was no strong legal or social pressure one way or the other. That’s not universal–some peoples forbid the practice of handling and studying human remains, or require that remains be reinterred with the most culturally appropriate religious rites that can be provided. There is a lack of international or even regional consensus on what to do in these situations.

(https://railuk.com/rail-news/the-archaeology-of-hs2/)

And there are a lot of places where the wishes of descendants and local cultures have not been honored by archaeologists. The twenty year fight over custody of the bones of Kennewick Man (or the Ancient One) is one notable, hard-fought win for repatriation and reinterment of human remains, and there are many, many cases that have been far worse, that are still worse.

But where we dug, the relevant ethical standards for osteoarchaeologists stressed that “[b]iological remains, particularly human remains, of any age or provenance must be treated with care and dignity.”

We students never saw the bones. We didn’t need to, frankly, it would have been incompatible with those values. Is this how it’s handled everywhere? No. And most of the time, our dig was a very casual and lively place. But these professors were trying to start us out with the best ethical standards they could, which I am grateful for.

That’s the context that was running through my head as I watched Prometheus. Movies tend to treat dead bodies with far less reverence. They often carry some sort of emotional weight–fear, disgust, grief, or even excitement or humor. In violent movies, they’re set dressing, less important than the main characters–unless one of them was a main character. I chafe at that distinction, sometimes, but I’m not squeamish about movie violence. Two of my favorite movies of the year prior had been The Raid and Dredd. Two serendipitously similar action movies where death was relentless, graphic, and cheap–content warning in both links, by the way.

Both movies had carried me through because they were consistent on what they were throughout. I didn’t expect anything more sensitive from movies about action-fantasy cops. Prometheus had already lost me, and it was about archaeologists. Ones who professed a belief that they were there to meet their makers.

And so I found the way they treat the discovery of an alien body to be utterly galling. Despite the fact that I didn’t expect anything better from them by this point, I still wasn’t willing to meet the movie where it wanted me to be. I wasn’t feeling their excitement, trepidation over what else they were going to find next, or any voyeuristic excitement over how screwed they obviously were–any of those might have been the intended emotion, I’m honestly not sure what sort of horror movie Prometheus was trying to be at this point.

I was just seething that they were touching the body. Sticking probes into it. That was bad enough. 

We haven’t even gotten to what they do to the head yet.

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Citations for alt-text:

All links listed in-line below the images this time.

[bookymcbookface]

[tashacee]

For the truth or dare ask game: 🔪

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

Hmm, probably bones.

I had to read some papers on the impact of prolonged strain on skeletal remains for Untarnished because my osteoarchaeology is a bit rusty.