Getting the Skeletons to Speak
If osteomancy might be considered as the art of divining the future from bone residue, paleo-osteopathology might be seen as the science of resuscitating the past out of much the same materials. In reading, for instance, paleo-osteopathological studies today in which human bone has been examined under sophisticated laboratory conditions, one is given a sudden, occasionally startling, glimpse into an otherwise inaccessible region of human history. Even more, one is allowed to “hear” what these pathetic, perfectly anonymous, vestiges might have to “say.”
Curiously enough, it’s the pathology of a given osseous member—the inflammation of a vertebra, for instance, or the fracture to a forearm—that reveals far more about an individual's history than, say, a perfect set of bones in anatomical connection that has undergone no discernible injury. For it's the injury alone, even a thousand years after the fact, that serves to perpetuate an individual’s signature. One comes to appreciate the value of so much evidence in reading a study such as Bertrand-Yves Mafart’s Pathologie osseuse au moyen âge en Provence. The result of microscopic, radiographic, and macroscopic examination of the osseous remains of more than two hundred and fifty subjects dating from the medieval period (fifth to thirteenth centuries), this somewhat forbidding work, couched in a plethora of anatomical terminology, abounds in testimony to the human condition. Concentrating on two areas, one eminently maritime, Marseille, and another profoundly agrarian, La Gayole (Var), Mafart’s book opens on a comparative study of repeated anatomical irregularities in each of these two communities due, presumably, to hereditary factors. If, for instance, evidence of spina bifida of the sacrum was found to be recurrent in Marseille, a far greater frequency of anomalies in the fourth and fifth sacral vertebrae manifested itself at La Gayole. Such evidence, of course, can only attest to the level of consanguinity in each of these given populations.
The study goes on to discuss bone injuries due, manifestly, to occupational hazards. Here, astonishing insights into the lives of those long-vanished individuals become increasingly apparent. Fractures of the hand and forearm, for instance, are far more frequent among the skeletal remains emanating from deposits in Marseille than from those in La Gayole. This might well be attributed to the fact that mariners and port workers have traditionally been exposed to accidents of exactly that nature. On the contrary, repeated evidence of subjects that had suffered from spondylitis (inflammation of the vertebrae), caused no doubt by brucellosis (undulant fever) arising from their contact with the afterbirth of lambs or the consumption of fresh cheese or milk from contaminated animals, testifies to the pastoral life prevalent at La Gayole.
Over and over, these analyses—both metrical and morphological—drawn from the frail, calcareous connective tissues of the millennially dead—astonish by their capacity to reconstitute a given circumstance. A split-second's inadvertence in the twelfth century, for instance, will be detected—thanks to such meticulous observation—in the latter part of the twentieth. As an example, a woman's fractured pelvis bone can be attributed to a fall she must have taken in which she landed on her left hip. Intense pain was then followed by an insufficient period of convalescence, given the extent of the callus that formed (eleven centimeters) about the fractured member. Perfectly legible today, this hypertrophy attests to the woman's impatience at being bedridden for so long or, more likely, the pressures brought to bear on her person to resume her activities.
In examining the skeletal remains of yet another female subject, the trapezium bone at the base of the wrist and the first metacarpal give every indication of severe rhizarthrosis. Indeed, the outer face of the trapezium had been worn to a smooth, shiny, ivory-like surface while its shaft has been rung—encrusted—in microgeodes. According to Mafart, this traumatism can be attributed to the "tapping of the thumb . . . frequent among many women after menopause. It generates pain at the very edge of the wrist due to this very gesture as well as a certain degree of crackling within the bones themselves. The pain gradually vanishes after several years but a deformation remains.”
Drawing on such mortuary deposits, the study repeatedly sheds light on the lives of the otherwise extinct. As a last example, one might consider, for instance, an individual of indeterminable sex but whose age, given a third molar still locked about its lower jaw, could scarcely have exceeded eighteen. If the limbs of this individual in late adolescence testify to a state of perfect nimbleness, the extreme curvature of its spine could only indicate an advanced state of kyphosis. The creature, thus, was a humpback, and must have suffered acutely from the seven impacted vertebrae that are still visible today. The accompanying scoliosis might well have provoked, as often the case, a massive pulmonary infection that brought this adolescent to such an early death.
From all these posthumous inspections, something, at least, can be said to have survived. Out of so much meticulously observed fracture, genetic deformation, and anatomic degeneration, the sparks of a certain enlightenment would seem to have arisen. Something, indeed, of these anonymously dead, their bones irreparably calcifying in their medieval sarcophagi, hasn't entirely died.
