Antonio Fornaciari

Environmental Microbial Forensics and Archaeology of Past Pandemics

The development of paleomicrobiology with new molecular techniques such as metagenomics is revolutionizing our knowledge of microbial evolution in human history. The study of microbial agents that are concomitantly active in the same biological environment makes it possible to obtain a picture of the complex interrelations among the different pathogens and gives us the perspective to understand the microecosystem of ancient times. This research acts as a bridge between disciplines such as archaeology, biology, and medicine, and the development of paleomicrobiology forces archaeology to broaden and update its methods. This chapter addresses the archaeological issues related to the identification of cemeteries from epidemic catastrophes (typology of burials, stratigraphy, topography, paleodemography) and the issues related to the sampling of human remains for biomolecular analysis. Developments in the field of paleomicrobiology are described with the example of the plague. Because of its powerful interdisciplinary features, the paleomicrobiological study of Yersinia pestis is an extremely interesting field, in which paleomicrobiology, historical research, and archeology are closely related, and it has important implications for the current dynamics of epidemiology.

Autoptic practices in 16th–18th century Florence: Skeletal evidences from the Medici family

During the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance autopsy started to be practised for medico-legal purposes in order to investigate the causes of death. The other reason for dissecting a body was embalming, a diffused custom typical of the elitarian classes. The exploration of the Medici tombs in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence offered the opportunity to investigate the practice of autopsy on these aristocratic personages of the Renaissance and Early Modern Age. A total of 25 currently skeletonized individuals, almost all of whom formerly artificial mummies, were exhumed. Accurate examination of the skeletons revealed evident signs of autoptic practices such as horizontal and oblique craniotomies, longitudinal and transversal cuts of the sternum, and sectioning of the sternal extremities of the ribs. In this group, women were treated differently to men at autopsy, as only men underwent craniotomy; autopsy and embalming were carried out also for the illegitimate members of the family and for subaldults. The extremely rich documentary archives of the Medici family confirm that the corpses were in several cases submitted to autopsy. The present study offers important direct information on the 16-18th century autoptic practices that the court surgeons in Florence performed on the members of the elite class.

Cautery in medieval surgery: a unique palaeopathological case

Cautery is a fundamental tool in ancient and medieval surgery. According to a aphorism of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, “Those diseases which medixad cines do not cure, iron cures; those which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable”. This statement was accepted in Roman medicine and then by the Byzantine and Islamic surgical practices in the Middle Ages. Despite this widespread acceptance, the bioarchaeological evidence of the use of cautery is extremely rare. We present a unique and original case of cautery dating back to the 11th century, discovered in 2018 on the mummy of an Italian saint. The mummified body of Saint Davinus of Armenia has been preserved for about 1000 years in San Michele in Foro, a basilica church in Lucca, Italy. In the hagiographic sources, we read that Davinus left Armenia and arrived in Lucca in the year 1050, after a long pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome. He died in a hospital annexed to the church of San Michele in Foro during a pilgrimage stop to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Veneration of the saint’s body was already attested in the 11th and 12th centuries. On March 26–29, 2018, a complete study of the body, including macroxad scopic and radiological examination (CT total body), revealed the natural mummy of a young man aged about 25 years. Two traumatic lesions of the skull, which appear not to have been fatal, were discovered: a superxad ficial cutting wound on the left frontal bone (5 cm long, 0·5 cm wide), proxad duced by a toothed blade, and an elliptical (2 × 1 cm) wound with dexad pressed fracture, produced by a blunt weapon on the right coronal suture (figure). Around the elliptical lesion we observed a wider scar with a thin margin (0·5 mm), pentagonal in shape, evidently caused by the application of a redxadhot iron, a cautery with a pentagonal head (figure). The cautery was probably used to stop the bleeding of a wound that had been previously cleaned. Cauteries had variable shapes (round, square, or polygonal, as in the present case) depending on their primary aim, as documented by the surgical treaty (AlxadTasrif) of Albucasis, a great Muslim surgeon of the 10th and 11th centuries, and master and unyielding advocate of cautery practice. The cautery of Saint Davinus the Armenian is one of the very rare inxad stances in which direct evidence of ancient surgery can be gained from skeletal examination, and, above all, this is the first time that the use of medieval cautery related to the surgical treatment of a cranial blunt trauma has been documented in palaeopathology.

A Hanged From the Past: Medical Consideration on the Judas Iscariot Fresco-Chapelle Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines, La Brigue (15th Century).

AbstractThe medieval chapel of Notre Dame-des-Fontaines (Our Lady of the Fountains), in the French Maritime Alps, is entirely covered by the fresco cycle of the Passion (15th century) that depicts the last days of Jesus from the Last Supper to the Resurrection. Under a small window, there is the brutal representation of the suicide of Judas Iscariot, hanging from a tree, with the abdomen quartered from which his soul, represented by a small man, is kidnapped by a devil. The author, Giovanni Canavesio, represented the traitors death with very detailed anatomical structures, differently thus from other paintings of the same subject; it is therefore possible to assume that the artist had become familiar with the human anatomy. In particular, the realism of the hanged mans posture, neck bent in an unnatural way, allows us to hypothesize that it probably comes from direct observation of the executions of capital punishment, not infrequently imposed by the public authorities in low medieval Italy.