Photo: Skeleton mosaic from Antioch, 3rd century AD, Hatay Archaeology Museum, Antakya, Turkey.
Source: Wikimedia Commons. 

Osteoarchaeology and the Ancient World Scholar’s Toolkit

by Adam Hope

 

Osteoarchaeology: What, Why, and How?

Osteoarchaeology uses bodily remains recovered in archaeological contexts to develop historical insights. The evidence base is the human skeleton, which, when complete, consists of 206 bones and either twenty “baby” or thirty-two “adult” teeth depending on age at death. The completeness of a skeleton hinges on various factors: naturally, burial is a must — meaning this approach is unsuitable for the study of societies which practice “sky burial,” such as pre-Islamic Iran or medieval Tibet — while looting and soil acidity determine the quantity and quality of surviving bone material. Upon detection, bone is excavated by careful troweling. Extensive records are then produced, detailing the anatomical features found, the stratigraphic level at which they were discovered, and features such as visible signs of damage or indicators of sex and age.1 Bones are handled with care to avoid damage and the arousal of ethical sensitivities, with the reburial of the majority of remains a common practice.2 The most vital material is taken to laboratories for more intensive examination through methods such as geochemical analysis, imaging and computer-based statistical surveys.3

 As living tissues responsive to biological stress, bones encode information about the bodily experiences of individuals. Their dimensions can indicate childhood nutritional intake, disease exposure, and physical workload burden, while observable features such as pronounced areas of muscle attachment, lesions, and fractures can reveal an individual’s occupation and exposure to violence.4 Early osteological studies conducted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often emphasized differences between population groups and fixated on the skull, a focus at least partly motivated by a desire to justify imperialism with reference to the so-called “natural hierarchy among the races.”5 From the mid-twentieth century onward, the discipline became more analytical, with skeletons seen as “sources” to be consulted to solve problems of intrigue.6 This necessitated the development and refinement of scholarly understanding of human remains.

In recent years, methodological advances in the sexing and aging of skeletons have increased the certainty with which bone material can be utilized for historical purposes. When a skeleton survives in fragmentary form, determining sex can be difficult: as women typically have a wider pelvic canal than men, this anatomical site is often consulted, but when this is an impossibility, statistical models which microscopically scan recovered material are used to identify and interpret granular differences as suggestive of one sex or the other. As such models rely on the existing global corpus of osteological data, they introduce a margin of error because male-female variation differs in extent between population groups. The modern development of “mixture analysis,” which uses data for multiple individuals found within the same population group as a reference point, has allowed osteoarchaeologists to sex individuals more reliably. Additionally, difficulties in determining the sex of children, whose pelvises tend not to be as sexually dimorphic as those of adults, are likely to be resolved through odontometrics, the study of tooth size.7 Advances have also been made in determining age at death, a process complicated by the modern medical discovery that chronological and biological age can diverge markedly. Early osteology classified observable changes according to skeletal “phases” and mapped these sequentially onto the human lifespan, allocating individuals a probable age range based on where they fell on this crude morphological scale. This methodology is now regarded as unscientific: instead, anatomical sites known to be particularly susceptible to the ravages of time, such as the pubic symphysis, are now consulted to determine age at death more rigorously.8 Modern historians, then, can rest assured that their voracious appetite for sex- and age-specific data can be satiated on methodologically sound grounds by osteology.

 

Osteoarchaeology in Practice I: The Skeleton and Biological Wellbeing

A major focus of modern osteoarchaeological scholarship has been the use of osteological data to explore biological stress. The application of anthropometry, the study of the dimensions of the body, to skeletal material has long provided insight into historical economic conditions and physical wellbeing. Scholars of antiquity lack written sources, ranging from convict records to passport applications, by which medieval and modern historians can access information such as height, so skeletons offer invaluable information. Modern biologists have shown that the non-genetic factors which determine an individual’s height are the nourishment which their diet exposes them to alongside the disease and the workload burdens they face prior to growth plate fusion. If the dietary energy intake is outmatched by the caloric burden imposed by battles with disease or laborious manual activity, the body diverts nutrition and effectively sacrifices potential growth in stature to maintain health.9 As such, scholars faced with particularly short skeletons can reasonably surmise that poor nutrition, extensive disease, and considerable toil in childhood may be at play; conversely, skeletons of great stature would appear to have been well-fed and unburdened. Generalizations of this sort enable scholars to learn about more than just the ancient diet, disease regime, and employment market, useful though these insights are. Answers to questions of power distribution and its relationship to biological stress are indeed suggested by, for example, the great heights to which elite Mycenaean men and women grew in comparison to Greeks of almost all other periods.10 Similarly, signs such as enamel hypoplasias — indentations in the teeth of individuals whose development is disturbed by malnourishment or infections — can indicate difficulties. Signs of iron-deficiency anemia are also morphologically detectable through tells on the cranium and in the eye sockets: these suggest an individual’s propensity to suffer comorbidities such as chronic pain, thus raising possibilities such as decreased work capacity.11 

Osteological measures of biological stress — especially stature – are blunt instruments. Though the relationship between nutrition, disease, and work burdens as factors governing stature is undisputed, modern anatomical studies have revealed a need to nuance historical judgements based on “final” height. The discovery of the “catch-up growth” mechanism has been highly damaging: this biological adaptation allows individuals who have experienced periods of intense physical stress to compensate for their lack of growth through compensatory development, if they receive sufficient nutrition before their growth plates fuse. As this can obscure episodes of deprivation, ill-health, and excessive workload, it lessens the certainty with which osteologists can comment on the stressfulness of a given adult’s childhood based on their height at death. It is well established that Soviet children whose pubescent years were between 1941–1945 grew to lesser heights than preceding and succeeding generations; however, had survivorship bias in the archaeological record preserved a disproportionate number of children who experienced catch-up growth, it is entirely possible that the osteological data, addressed in isolation, would have led scholars to entirely miss an episode of precarity as considerable as World War II. Additionally, the cultural factors which often dictate biological stress in childhood — that is, factors which determine exposure to nutrition, disease, and labor — are not always easily accessed by the historian. It is true that the presence of public health measures reducing the disease burden in the cities of the Roman empire are observable archaeologically, but factors such as dietary preferences and working patterns are much more obscure, especially with increased distance from accompanying textual, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental evidence.12 Ultimately, bone, though useful in evaluating biological stress, should not be used in isolation from other forms of historical evidence but rather integrated within a broader corpus of relevant material.

 

Osteoarchaeology in Practice II: The Skeleton and Biography

Other scholars have used osteological material to learn about the activities of historical individuals. The body’s “wear and tear” due to exertion can be reconstructed through skeletal analysis, often involving the search for bone growths along joints: Woolf’s Law dictates that repetitive motion thickens the bones involved. This leaves a record of frequently performed tasks, in turn revealing routines and likely occupations of individuals. Physical trauma to the skeleton can be used to identify soldiers and to indicate levels of social discontents or domestic dispute.13 Paleodietary studies use stable isotope analysis to reconstruct diet: strontium and barium traces found in bone provide information about cholesterol levels, dairy consumption, and the like.14 Application of this technique to remains found in elite graves at Grave Circle B at Mycenae has shown that these individuals’ large physiques can likely be attributed to their highly nutritionally dense diet, which included rare seafood.15 Such details have enabled scholars such as Kirsi Lorentz to construct osteobiographies of past individuals, charting their life course on the basis of evidence contained within their bones and in doing so enriching our understanding of the societies in which they lived.16

 

Osteoarchaeological Opportunities I: Widening Scholarly Horizons 

A major advantage of osteoarchaeological inquiry is that in comparison to other sources such as texts, massive volumes of human remains have been found from a vast array of chronological and geographical settings. Remains are available for men, women, and children alike, in contrast to the textual “silence” imposed by elite men’s general monopolization of the written word in antiquity.17 Women, for example, are ideal candidates for osteobiography: insights into women’s medical care and employment in ancient Cyprus have been garnered through accounts which pay minute attention to details elite authors did not write about.18 Osteoarcheological material, then, offers scholars a means of appreciating the experiences of groups marginalized in more traditional sources.

 

Osteoarchaeological Opportunities II: Interplay of Bone with Traditional Sources

The impact of osteological findings on existing scholarship rooted in textual and archaeological sources has been beneficial for historical understanding. There are instances in which osteoarchaeology has produced findings which match ancient texts to a striking degree: for example, analysis of bones buried in fifth-century Athens indicate that a deceased young athlete was cremated in precisely the same way as Hector and Patroclus are in Books 23 and 24 of the Iliad, respectively.19 In other cases, osteological analysis has substantiated long-held scholarly theories: palaeodietary analysis of material from Corinth and its Illyrian colonies has shown decreased biological stress amongst post-colonization inhabitants of the city, supporting the argument that population pressures were indeed a driving force behind overseas Greek foundations.20 Elsewhere, osteoarchaeological material has argued against the prevailing view, using bone analysis to dispute arguments based on archaeological evidence. Susan Smith has shown that in the vicinity of Athens, Mycenaean elite men, typically conceived of as warrior-aristocrats because of their burial alongside military grave goods, appear to have done less fighting than individuals buried in far less conspicuous circumstances, suggesting that the paraphernalia of military service was used to project elite martial power in death which had not actually existed in life.21 Osteoarchaeology can also aid in the identification of material-cultural objects; for example, an early Iron-Age skull recovered at Kavousi on Crete bears the marks of a successful trepanation, indicating that unclassified iron tools found nearby were probably surgical implements.22 These examples indicate the ways in which osteological evidence can create dynamism in historical scholarship, confirming and contradicting pre-existing interpretations as well as suggesting new avenues of future inquiry.

 

Osteological Opportunities III: “Enlightened Presentism”

Kelly Knudson and Christopher Stojanowski argue that bone material can be used to shed light on the artificiality of contentious constructs such as ethnicity and gender.23 Osteoarchaeology, alongside ancient DNA analysis, has been involved in scrutinizing instances of ethnogenesis such as that of the modern Japanese; such studies have found that they, like all other peoples, are ultimately a composite group with mixed ancestry about which ethnonationalism is scientifically unjustifiable.24 Similarly, osteoarchaeological analysis of skeletons of various periods from across northern Greece has found that male and female individuals appear to have participated equally in physically demanding manual labor, disproving the idea that it is “unnatural” for women to occupy such roles in the modern economy.25 Pamela Geller, then, looks justified in her argument for an “enlightened presentism” in which osteoarchaeologists bring to light evidence undermining overly simplistic narratives about ethnicity and gender “norms” by highlighting the diversity of past human societies and behavior.26 In this way, the study of osteological material derived from archaeological contexts can contribute helpfully to contemporary discussions around such issues.

 

Sampling Issues — A Fatal Flaw?

A significant challenge to osteoarchaeology as a method for historical analysis is the persistence of serious sampling issues, which make population-level studies based on generalizing from surviving bone material extremely difficult. The urban-rural divide is instructive. The reliance of modern archaeology on rescue excavations in which archaeologists are drafted onto building sites to address remains uncovered by construction work means that there is a bias towards finding skeletons from urban settings.27 Anthropometric data suggest that before 1900, most cities were unhealthy places to live; residing here entailed an “urban penalty” due to sanitary difficulties and increased levels of infectious disease such that, for example, nineteenth-century Swedish urbanites were around five centimeters shorter than countrydwellers.28 As a result, the extant osteological datasets for antiquity likely underestimate stature and biological wellbeing. Similarly, attempts to reconstruct life expectancy at the level of whole populations are massively undermined by survivorship bias: when babies and young infants die, they leave behind extremely fragile bones prone to disintegration in archaeological contexts, leading to underestimations of birth rates, which in turn lead to overestimations of life expectancy at birth.29

More broadly, efforts at conducting population-level paleopathological studies based on osteoarchaeological findings must reckon with the fact that the factors determining the propensity of a given individual to suffer acutely from biological stress, ranging from genetic susceptibility to proximity to environmental hazards, render aggregate data highly suspect.30 Ultimately, burial sites reveal information only about the individuals that they contain; it is difficult to generalize about a given society at large using only the evidence found here. It is not that the enterprise is wholly futile, but that multi-site studies which utilize comparative data and integrate the osteoarchaeological evidence with the relevant textual, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental material are necessary.31

 

Conclusion

The capacity for osteoarchaeology to inform historical study is considerable. The sub-discipline has become increasingly sophisticated over time, reducing the uncertainty around given skeletal remains. Especially when combined with a broader body of attestation — textual, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental — it supplies the historian with information about biological stress and the physical histories of individuals. Its capacity to transcend the strictures of conventional sources by reaching out toward marginalized groups unaddressed by texts is an asset, as is its usefulness for testing pre-existing hypotheses and formulating new interpretations. The early signs that osteoarchaeology can contribute constructively to modern debates which reference the past are positive. Sampling issues render the method far more reliable for individuals than for large groups and compound the importance of integrating bone analyses with other forms of evidence. 

 

 Adam Hope is a Final-Year undergraduate student of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. 

 

Endnotes: 

1. J. Kenneth Eakins, “Human Osteology and Archaeology,” The Biblical Archaeologist 43, no. 2 (1980): 89–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/3209627.

2. Jerry O’Sullivan, “Ethics and the Archaeology of Human Remains,” The Journal of Irish Archaeology 10, no. 1 (2001): 125–127. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30001673.

3. George J. Armelagos and Dennis P. Van Gerven, “A Century of Skeletal Biology and Paleopathology: Contrasts, Contradictions, and Conflicts,” American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 53. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.53.

4. Richard H. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons That Might Interest Economists, Historians, and other Social Scientists?”, The American Economic Review 93, no. 2 (2003): 213–214. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282803321947074.

5. Rebecca Watts, “Contemporary Perspectives on Current Research in Human Bioarchaeology,” Antiquity 93, no. 372 (2019): 1677, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.177; Salima Ikram, “An Overview of the History of the Excavation and Treatment of Ancient Human Remains in Egypt,” in Archaeological Human Remains: Legacies of Imperialism, Communism and Colonialism, ed. Barra O’Donnabhain and Maria Cecilia Lozada (Springer, 2018), 46–47.

6. Efthymia Nikita and Sevasti Triantaphyllou, “Human Osteorarchaeology in Greece: Research Themes, Challenges and Potential,” Archaeological Reports 63, no. 1 (2016–2017): 63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0570608418000066.

7. Kelly J. Knudson and Christopher M. Stojanowski, “New Directions in Bioarchaeology: Recent Contributions to the Study of Human Social Identities,” Journal of Archaeological Research 16, no. 1 (2008): 401. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-008-9024-4.

8. Knudson and Stojanowski, “New Directions,” 402.

9. Richard H. Steckel, “Biological Measures of the Standard of Living,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22, no. 1 (2008): 136–139. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.22.1.129.

10. Sherry C. Fox, “The Bioarchaeology of Women in Greek Antiquity,” in Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, ed. Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean Macintosh Turfa (Routledge, 2016), 652.

11. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons,” 214–215.

12. Steckel, “Biological Measures,” 136.

13. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons,” 213.

14. Jane Buikstra and Anna Lagia, “Bioarchaeological Approaches to Aegean Archaeology,” Hesperia Supplements 43, no. 1 (2009): 19–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759954; Knudson and Stojanowski, “New Directions,” 405.

15. Buikstra and Lagia, “Aegean Archaeology,” 17–18.

16. Kirsi O. Lorentz, “Real Bones, Real Women, Real Lives: Bioarchaeology and osteobiographies of women in ancient Cyprus,” in Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, ed. Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean Macintosh Turfa (Routledge, 2016), 351–353.

17. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons,” 213.

18. Lorentz, “Real Bones,” 354–356.

19. Philippe Charlier, Joël Poupon, Murielle Goubard, and Sophie Descamps, “‘In This Way They Held Funeral for Horse-Taming Hector’: A Greek Cremation Reflects Homeric Ritual,” Hesperia Supplements 43, no. 1 (2009): 51–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i27759951.

20. Nikita and Triantaphyllou, “Human Osteoarchaeology in Greece,” 64.

21. Susan Kirkpatrick Smith, “Skeletal Evidence for Militarism in Mycenaean Athens,” Hesperia Supplements 43, no. 1 (2009): 108. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759959.

22. Maria A. Liston and Leslie Preston Day, “It Does Take a Brain Surgeon: A Successful Trepanation from Kavousi, Crete,” Hesperia Supplements 43, no. 1 (2009): 57–68, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759957

23. Knudson and Stojanowski, “New Directions,” 399.

24. Knudson and Stojanowski, “New Directions,” 414; Florian Clemente et al., “The genomic history of the Aegean palatial civilizations,” Cell 184, no. 10 (2021): 2567–2568, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.03.039.

25. Buikstra and Lagia, “Aegean Archaeology,” 17.

26. Pamela L. Geller, “The Fallacy of the Transgender Skeleton,” in Bioarchaeologists Speak Out: Deep Time Perspectives on Contemporary Issues, ed. Jane Buikstra (Springer, 2019), 234–238.

27. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons,” 217.

28. Steckel, “Biological Measures,” 141.

29. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons,” 216.

30. Buikstra and Lagia, “Aegean Archaeology,” 15.

31. Steckel, “What Can Be Learned from Skeletons,” 217.