Christopher J. Knüsel

Iron Age breastfeeding practices in Britain: Isotopic evidence from Wetwang Slack, East Yorkshire

We present here the results of carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis of bone collagen undertaken on all skeletal remains of infants and young children below the age of 6 years (n = 34) from the internationally important British cemetery site at Wetwang Slack in East Yorkshire (middle Iron Age, ca. 4th to 2nd centuries BC). The aim of the study is to investigate infant diet, with particular reference to breastfeeding and weaning practices, and to compare the data with previously published studies of archaeological populations, particularly in the context of the variation in data patterns to be seen between sites. The skeletal remains from Wetwang Slack form the only prehistoric collection in the UK, prior to the Romano-British period, with sufficient individuals in this age group to make such an isotopic study viable alongside associated adults and older children. The data are compared in detail with published data from two other sites, one from 19th century Canada and the other from Medieval Britain. The results suggest an unusual situation at Wetwang Slack, with neither the nitrogen nor the carbon isotope ratios conforming to expectations when compared with the putative mothers. We discuss how these data compare with the expectation for breastfed infants and we interpret the divergence in this case to be due to restricted breastfeeding and the early introduction of supplementary foods.

The age of Stonehenge

Stonehenge is the icon of British prehistory, and continues to inspire ingenious investigations and interpretations. A current campaign of research, being waged by probably the strongest archaeological team ever assembled, is focused not just on the monument, but on its landscape, its hinterland and the monuments within it. The campaign is still in progress, but the story so far is well worth reporting. Revisiting records of 100 years ago the authors demonstrate that the ambiguous dating of the trilithons, the grand centrepiece of Stonehenge, was based on samples taken from the wrong context, and can now be settled at 2600-2400 cal BC. This means that the trilithons are contemporary with Durrington Walls, near neighbour and Britains largest henge monument. These two monuments, different but complementary, now predate the earliest Beaker burials in Britain – including the famous Amesbury Archer and Boscombe Bowmen, but may already have been receiving Beaker pottery. All this contributes to a new vision of massive monumental development in a period of high European intellectual mobility….

Comparative degenerative joint disease of the vertebral column in the medieval monastic cemetery of the Gilbertine Priory of St. Andrew, Fishergate, York, England

The pattern of degenerative joint disease (DJD) of the intervertebral and apophyseal joints of the vertebral column of 81 skeletons from the thirteenth to fourteenth century medieval priory cemetery of St. Andrew, Fishergate, York, was recorded in relation to their location of interment: eastern cemetery, southern cemetery, and intramurally (within the priory buildings). Archaeological context and ethnohistorical accounts support the interpretation that people of different social status were buried in these areas. Linear discriminant function analysis and paired Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests showed that the differences in vertebral column DJD pattern and severity among the three subgroups were not statistically significant. As the archaeological and historical evidence seems reliable, it is argued that the analysis of DJD of the vertebral column might not be ideal to study the effects of normal activity patterns, a conclusion which supports the results of recent bioarchaeological research. Further, high-low plots demonstrate that the differences in DJD pattern were located between intervertebral and apophyseal joints of individuals rather than between subgroups of the cemetery. It is thought that this difference was produced as a response to erect posture during bipedal locomotion, reflecting vertebral curvatures, rather than differing occupational stresses. Thus, due to biological constraints on its function, the vertebral column might not be an ideal structure to study markers of occupational stress.

Fragmentation: The Zonation Method Applied to Fragmented Human Remains from Archaeological and Forensic Contexts

Abstract Scattered and commingled human and animal remains are commonly encountered on archaeological sites, and this contextual relationship begs the question of whether human and animals were treated in a similar manner before burial. The recording system presented here provides a means by which to confront problems of equifinality – that is, when taphonomic alterations create apparently similar patterns and, therefore, confuse behavioural inferences drawn from them. This method hinges on a standardised representation of the zones on human skeletal elements that allow comparison with those described by Dobney and Rielly (1988) for animal remains. It is anticipated that the anatomical descriptions in combination with the zone drawings presented will aid others to apply the method generally across skeletal assemblages of any date. This system could also be used to aid the curation of museum collections and as a complement to forensic recovery.

Crouching in fear: Terms of engagement for funerary remains

At present, there is no accepted standardised lexicon in English to describe burials and the position of buried human remains. Terms have tended to vary with the investigator and rely on loose, but often ill-defined systems of previous use. As a consequence, there are myriad terms used to describe the same phenomena or, as the case may be, no single well-defined term to do so. This means that new terms are continually invented – and sometimes re-invented bearing different nuances – that hinder use of published work and make comparisons across works difficult. In France for the last 40 years, Duday, his colleagues and students have published a series of papers employing a standard burial terminology that, until recently, was only available in French and in French language publications. Due to limited language competency of English-language scholars and a desire of French scholars to publish in their own (very precise) native language, these seminal works have not influenced English-language use. They clearly lead the way to the development of a standard vocabulary. What follows is a critique of previous non-standard terminological use and a series of suggestions to remedy this situation. This contribution’s debt to French language scholarship is clear, but it does not reproduce a mere translation of terms. Rather, it tries to synthesise French use with English-language scholarship. Its weakest point is that it does not integrate terms from other European languages that also have a long legacy of regional and time-specific application, nor can it claim to do so in other world languages. This is work for the future. This treatment concentrates on adult remains, with archaeothantological study of infant and children’s remains being at only a very anecdotal level to date.

Warfare and Violence in Prehistoric Europe: an Introduction

At the moment, one trend in both North American and European archaeology has been to un-pacify the past. The study of warfare and violence in past societies has long been problematic. The debate has been thrown into much sharper focus during the 1990s by a series of publications, notably Keeleys own War before Civilization (1996) in which he proposed that the past had been effectively pacified by modern anthropologists for broadly ideological reasons. Modern state societies may have an unparalleled ability to organise destructive mass violence; yet both ethnographic studies of groups, such as the Gebusi (Knauft 1987) and the Yanomamo (Chagnon 1968), and archaeological studies, like recent Anasazi reinterpretations, have shown that non-state societies are equally capable of using deadly force, sometimes with rates of homicide and war casualties exceeding any known in the modern West. Keywords: archaeological studies; European archaeology; Keeleys War before Civilization ; modern anthropologists; North American archaeology; warfare; Yanomamo

Bioarchaeology: a synthetic approach

When one reads archaeological publications on funerary remains, one might think that the deceased was sacrificed to accompany the burial of a pot [34]. One could easily blame archaeologists for this predicament, but it also has its roots in a research tradition within biological anthropology that tends to provide biological data to the archaeologist who provides the social and cultural meaning. Due to empirical divergence this approach encourages archaeologists and anthropologists tend to address parallel rather than synthetic questions. Burials are often only used to develop a notion of time-successive funerary traditions that support a chronological framework. This means that the event represented in the burial is left underdeveloped or erroneously identified as a tradition. Bioarchaeology addresses archaeological questions through a contextual approach combining the biological identity of the deceased with their cultural and archaeological context. It therefore aims to synthesise the biological and cultural aspects of the funerary record to address archaeological questions and better place burials in their cultural, social, and political context. The goal of this treatment is to introduce bioarchaeology, its origin and purpose, and to attempt to place such studies within French archaeological and anthropological scholarship.RésuméÁ la lecture des publications qui concernent l’archéologie funéraire, il est souvent possible de penser que le défunt était sacrifié pour accompagner une vaisselle céramique [34]. On pourrait reprocher aux archéologues cette situation difficile et ridicule, mais on peut aussi lui trouver des racines dans une tradition de recherche au sein de l’anthropologie biologique dans laquelle l’anthropologue fournit les données biologiques afin que l’archéologue leurs rende un sens culturel ou social. Du fait de cette approche empirique divergente, les archéologues et anthropologues ont tendance à formuler des questions en parallèle et non de façon synthétique. Les sépultures sont souvent essentiellement utilisées pour développer une esquisse chronologique des traditions funéraires successives. Cela signifie que le geste funéraire n’est pas assez apprécié pour son information sociale ou pire, identifié comme une « tradition funéraire » de manière erronée. La bioarchéologie s’intéresse aux questions archéologiques au travers d’une approche qui combine l’identité des défunts et leur contexte culturel et archéologique. Son but est de synthétiser les aspects biologiques et culturels du domaine funéraire pour mieux s’intéresser aux questions archéologiques et anthropologiques et mieux comprendre les sépultures dans leurs contextes culturelles, sociales et politiques. Cette contribution a pour but d’introduire le concept de bioarchéologie, son origine et son objectif, et de tenter le positionnement de ces études au sein de l’école française d’archéologie et d’anthropologie.

Cleaning the dead: Neolithic ritual processing of human bone at Scaloria Cave, Italy

Abstract Detailed taphonomic and skeletal analyses document the diverse and often unusual burial practices employed by European Neolithic populations. In the Upper Chamber at Scaloria Cave in southern Italy, the remains of some two dozen individuals had been subjected to careful and systematic defleshing and disarticulation involving cutting and scraping with stone tools, which had left their marks on the bones. In some cases these were not complete bodies but parts of bodies that had been brought to the cave from the surrounding area. The fragmented and commingled burial layer that resulted from these activities indicates complex secondary burial rites effecting the transition from entirely living to entirely dead individuals.

Brief communication: When Adam delved. An activity-related lesion in three human skeletal populations†

A rare, activity-related lesion, the clay-shovellers fracture, was identified during osteological analysis in three human populations dating from the Roman to the later Medieval period in England, circa fourth to 14th centuries A.D. The prevalence of this fracture in these populations suggests an osteological indicator for several possible manual activities, but also one that may be the result of a long-standing human subsistence adaptation requiring digging in the soil. Since males as opposed to females appear to be preferentially affected, the occurrence of such injuries has the potential to provide an insight into the sexual division of labor in earlier human populations.

Gristhorpe man: an early bronze age log-coffin burial scientifically defined

A log-coffin excavated in the early nineteenth century proved to be well enough preserved in the early twenty-first century for the full armoury of modern scientific investigation to give its occupants and contents new identity, new origins and a new date. In many ways the interpretation is much the same as before: a local big man buried looking out to sea. Modern analytical techniques can create a person more real, more human and more securely anchored in history. This research team shows how.