The Ins and Outs of Death in the Iron Age: Complex Funerary Treatments at Broxmouth Hillfort,East Lothian

Evidence for Iron Age funerary treatments remains sporadic across Britain and formal cemeteries are especially elusive. One important exception is Broxmouth hillfort, East Lothian, excavated during the late 1970s but not yet published. New analysis of the human remains from Broxmouth provides evidence for three distinct populations: a formal cemetery outside the hillfort, isolated graves within the ramparts, and a scatter of disarticulated fragments from a range of domestic and midden contexts. The latter group in particular provides significant evidence for violent trauma; isotopic evidence suggests that they may be the remains of outsiders. Together the human remains shed light on complex and changing attitudes to death and the human body in Iron Age Britain. The material from Broxmouth is considered in the light of emerging evidence for fluid and pluralistic treatments of the dead in the Iron Age of south‐east Scotland.     

STATE COMPLIANCE WITH WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION RECOMMENDATIONS

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 established the National Commission on State Workmen's Compensation Laws. The National Commission was directed to “undertake a comprehensive study and evaluation of State workmen's compensation laws in order to determine if such laws provide an adequate, prompt, and equitable system of compensation”. In 1972 the Commission issued its report, and “criticized many aspects of state workmen's compensation programs”. In its report the Commission made eighty–four recommendations for a “moder” workmen's compensation program and designated nineteen of these as “essential”. This research traces state progress in complying with each of these nineteen essential recommendations. Between 1972 and 1977 many states made significant improvements in their workmen's compensation programs and overall there was a 34 percent increase in compliance during this period. Higher levels of compliance were found to be related to two factors: changes in industrial diversification and the involvement and activity of vitally concerned interest groups.     

Dental pathology and diet at Apollonia,a Greek colony on the Black Sea

Dental pathology has the potential to provide insight into the composition of the diet and to reveal dietary differences based on age, sex and social status. Human skeletal remains from the Greek colonial site of Apollonia (5^th to 2^nd centuries BC) on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria were analysed for various forms of dental pathology in order to: assess the prevalence of dental disease in the population; compare the dental pathology data from Apollonia with dietary data derived from ancient literary texts and from previous stable isotopic analysis of the colonists' remains; explore variations in dental disease with respect to age and sex; and compare the prevalence of dental pathology in the Apollonians with that of other Greek populations. The composition of the diet, as indicated by the dental pathology data, is consistent with the stable isotopic evidence from Apollonia and with the ancient literary texts, both of which indicate the consumption of a relatively soft, high carbohydrate diet. The higher frequency of dental caries, abscesses, calculus, and antemortem tooth loss in older adults compared with younger ones reflects the age‐progressive nature of these conditions. The lack of significant sex differences in caries, abscesses, calculus and tooth loss corresponds with the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data derived from bone collagen, which indicate no significant sex differences in the consumption of dietary protein. In contrast, these findings conflict with the ancient literary texts, which refer to distinct dietary differences between males and females, and with the stable carbon isotopic values derived from bone carbonate, which indicate sex differences with respect to the overall diet. Despite the lack of marked sex differences in dental pathology, overall trends point to subtle dietary differences between males and females. A greater degree of tooth wear in males also hints at possible sex differences in the use of the teeth as tools. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lying and deception in the Biblical and post‐Biblical Judaic tradition

Abstract

A great variety of cuneiform texts have been found within the precincts of the high priest's building complex in ancient Ugarit. Some of the texts are letters, others are lexical texts and others again are ritual texts. The great epics of aqht and krt are best described as literary texts. Some of the texts, however, do not unambiguously belong to one group only: Some scholars would construe the Baal‐cycle as a ritual text or at least a text somehow connected with the cult performed in the temples; others would describe the Baal‐cycle as pure literature. Similarly the enigmatic text about Shachar and Shalim (abbreviated SS) apparently contains cultic and literary elements. Is this text then a cult‐text or a piece of literature? The aim of the article is to investigate if from the archaeological evidence we can add an argument to the on‐going debate about the Sitz im Leben of the Ugaritic Baal‐cycle: Were the clay tablets in the high priest's building distributed according to their content? The answer seems to be yes. The Baal‐cycle was in fact stored with other literary texts in the high priest's building whereas SS has been kept in the room of the ritual texts. This fact might give us a hint as to how to interpret these two texts.     

Ancestral memories and early medieval landscapes: the case of Sierra de Ávila (Spain)

This paper focuses on early medieval funerary practices from a landscape perspective in central Iberia. Rock‐dug graves constitute the most conspicuous remains in this region, but their informative potential has not yet been realized. The preliminary outcomes of an ongoing research project are presented here. This aims to contextualize such funerary cases by examining a mid‐altitude mountain study‐area. Through the use of intensive archaeological surveying and geographic information systems, the paper characterizes two basic funerary types: isolated graves and rural disordered cemeteries, which responded to two social strategies led by local households. By recalling ancestorship, they constituted effective mnemonic resources, contributing to claiming rights and forging identities among these dispersed and predominantly small‐scale herding communities.     

Infant taphonomy

In almost all living creatures, in Primates as well as in seventeenth–eighteenth century human populations, a high infant mortality is the rule; therefore, the scarcity of children's bones in cemeteries is suspicious from a demographic point of view. Though possible in some cases, sociological causes appear less important than the peculiar behaviour of infants' bones in the tomb. This paper examines the physico-chemical properties of infants' bones and their consequences for the preservation of archaeological samples; it proposes a new way of approaching distributions at death in the past. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Gebel Ramlah—a Unique Newborns’ Cemetery of the Neolithic Sahara

Post-Pleistocene climatic improvement in the Northern Hemisphere after ca. 9550 BC allowed human populations to recolonize large parts of North Africa in what is today the Sahara Desert. In the Egyptian Western Desert, the beginnings of human occupation date as early as ca. 9300 BC. Occupation continued until the middle of the third millennium BC when final desertification of the area no longer afforded human occupation. The settlement of the Neolithic cattle and sheep/goat herders developed along with the rhythm of alternating wet and dry climatic oscillations. One of the areas occupied intensively during the early and middle Holocene was Gebel Ramlah. Pastoral populations established their settlements around the shores of a paleo-lake adjacent to a rocky massif, to exploit the local savannah environment. During most of the Neolithic, they buried their dead dispersed outside of their settlements. Only during the Final Neolithic (after ca. 4600 BC) did they place them exclusively in cemeteries. Of six Final Neolithic cemeteries investigated at Gebel Ramlah to date, one is entirely unprecedented, not only in North Africa but also globally at such an early date. For just under 200 years (ca. 4500–4300 BC), it served exclusively for the inhumation of infants who died around (perinate) or shortly after the time of birth (neonate). Thirty-two burial pits contained skeletal remains of 39 individuals, not only infants but also at least two adult females accompanied by perinates/neonates. Older children (>?3 years) were interred at a nearby cemetery that primarily comprised adults.     

Markers of activity patterns in some populations of the Iberian Peninsula

A study was undertaken of musculoskeletal stress markers in the human remains of several ancient populations of the Iberian Peninsula. Frequencies by age group, sex, and side were recorded and compared among the different populations. Results of the study coincide with the available historical and archeological data. The differences observed among these populations are probably due to ecological and socio‐cultural factors. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater: Estimating fertility from subadult skeletons

Recent research interest has focused on the bioarchaeology of children. Although paleodemography is essential for accurate reconstructions of lifestyle and health in past populations, currently there is no published technique for estimating fertility and life expectancy at birth for skeletal populations in which adults are under‐enumerated. This paper provides a formula to predict Gross Reproductive Rate (GRR) from the proportion of young infants to subadults in a skeletal population. The formula was developed from 98 of Coale and Demeny's Female Model West Life Tables, which represented diverse fertility and mortality rates. The formula's accuracy was examined using independent samples from historical and archaeological cemeteries. Estimates of GRR from the subadult fertility formula were compared with estimates from Bocquet‐Appel and Masset's juvenile:adult ratio. Results indicate that the subadult fertility formula predicts GRR with consistent accuracy (R² = 0.98) and precision (± 1 offspring) in the model life tables, across diverse subadult age structures and demographic characteristics. The formula is useful for subadult populations with a proportion of perinates:subadults between 0.12 and 0.45. The adult component of the sample is not included in the analysis and thus the formula is similarly useful in cases where adults are under‐enumerated, or not. When applied to historical and archaeological populations, estimates for GRR are similar to previous estimates from the juvenile:adult ratio. Because crude birth rate and life expectancy at birth can be calculated from GRR using established fertility centred approaches to demography, the subadult fertility formula allows skeletal populations of diverse composition to be included in demographic research, essential for understanding of how mortality and fertility are affecting the morbidity profiles of subadult samples and for comparative bioarchaeological analyses. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Degenerative Joint Disease and Social Status in the Terminal Late Archaic Period (1000–500 b.c.) of Ohio

This research presents an analysis of the inferred Late Archaic social structure in Ohio based on degenerative joint disease (DJD, also known as osteoarthritis) and mortuary practices. We tested the hypothesis that mechanical loading involving physical activities is differentially distributed in a population along levels or types of social stratification. This hypothesis was investigated via statistical treatment of DJD as a skeletal stress marker of activity, its occurrence by age and sex, an association with grave goods, and spatial distribution in terminal Late Archaic cemeteries. The skeletal samples used in this study came from three cemeteries, the Boose, Kirian‐Treglia (KT), and Duff sites, dating to the Ohio terminal Late Archaic period. In general, the high overall prevalence of DJD in these people indicates that this population led a rigorous life. This study hypothesized that the burials in the Late Archaic period in Ohio might be socially patterned as evidenced from the unequal distribution of grave goods and skeletal variability in DJD. Nevertheless, the analyses suggest that there is no statistical association between DJD and mortuary practices including grave goods and burial location in a cemetery. As observed in numerous hunter–gatherer populations, the societies in our sample were also characterized by the absence of a marked social stratification. The results suggest that there were only ‘natural inequalities’ in Late Archaic societies due to biological factors, such as age and sex. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

HANNIBAL GONE ASTRAY? A CRITICAL COMMENT ON W. C. MAHANEY ET AL.: ‘THE TRAVERSETTE (ITALIA) ROCKFALL: GEOMORPHOLOGICAL INDICATOR OF THE HANNIBALIC INVASION ROUTE’ (ARCHAEOMETRY, 52, 1 [2010] 156–72)

For a long time now, historians have considered the way across the Col de Clapier as the most likely invasion route of Hannibal's army across the Alps. Mahaney et al. challenge this view by introducing a two‐tier rockfall into the discussion, which they believe is mentioned in the ancient texts and has gone unnoticed by modern scholars. Since a deposit of this kind can only be found at the Col de la Traversette—and there alone—Hannibal's crossing of the Alps, so they reason, must have followed this alternative route. However, a critical reassessment of the ancient texts and a closer look at the geomorphological situation clearly show that this interpretation is unwarranted.     

Ethnoscaping Canada's boreal forest: liberal whiteness and its disaffiliation from colonial space

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.     

Scratching beneath iconographic and textual clues: A reconsideration of the social hierarchy in the Dian culture of Southwestern China

The use of historical texts to interpret archaeological data is a common practice in Chinese archaeology. The selective use of archaeological material as evidential support to textual accounts can however project a limited view of ancient societies, where social behavior from distinct contexts are conflated to produce a single coherent narrative. This paper addresses this prevalent interpretational approach to the Dian polity, a Bronze Age culture located in southwestern China, through a systematic analysis of the mortuary evidence from four cemeteries. Results from the multivariate analysis are contrasted against the textual and iconographic materials to provide a more comprehensive understanding of Dian social organization and to demonstrate social patterning that challenges conceptions about the nature of Dian social hierarchy.     

Evidence for “Celtic migrations”? Strontium isotope analysis at the early La Tène (LT B) cemeteries of Nebringen (Germany) and Monte Bibele (Italy)

Strontium isotope analysis on human remains from the Iron Age (4th/3rd century BC) cemeteries of Nebringen, Germany and Monte Bibele, Italy were carried out to investigate the role of residential changes during the period of the historic “Celtic migrations”. From an archaeological perspective, the location of the cemeteries in the Celtic core (Nebringen) and expansion area (Monte Bibele), and the distinctive development of their material culture, suggest that the buried populations had differing mobility rates. On the contrary, the strontium results indicate that only few individuals were mobile or non-local. There is, however, a difference in variation of strontium isotope ratios between the two studied cemeteries, presumably caused by differing geological conditions. In Nebringen changing use of cultivated land in a geologically heterogeneous environment most likely caused varying strontium isotope ratios even within the same jaw, while individual mobility over longer distances can also not be excluded. In Monte Bibele the range of strontium isotope ratios is narrow, and this may be explained by a community living in the same village and using the same agricultural resources. For various prehistoric time periods it has been suggested that some population groups were more mobile than others, for example because they had special social roles. In the two cemeteries studied here, males have slightly more often a non-local birthplace or moved during childhood. In contrast, females had isotope signatures which are more consistent with the local geological environment. Male mobility is, however, not correlated with burial as a warrior, and patrilocal residential patterns were not observed among females. Foreign and local items are found with isotopically local and non-local individuals and objects per se do not indicate descent. The motives for residential changes were, therefore, varied and not constrained to a specific area or population group. The presented dataset provides details on the way of life and land-use in the Celtic communities, for which information is otherwise absent.     

Contributions of GIS and Satellite-based Remote Sensing to Landscape Archaeology in the Middle East

This article explores the coevolution of landscape approaches and geospatial tools in Middle Eastern archaeology. From the first aerial reconnaissance programs, archaeologists recognized the value of a view from above to address overarching human–environmental questions that underpin regional historical narratives. The diversity and density of visible remains in the landscape of the Middle East has required an integrative approach, encompassed in the perspective of landscape as a static artifact, landscape as built features, landscape as a system, and landscape as a dynamic construct, which cuts across modern political boundaries. Recent advances in geospatial tools and datasets have enabled archaeologists to make significant progress on four long-standing questions of how to (1) best document and manage rapidly disappearing ancient landscapes, (2) understand landscape formation processes, (3) identify and interpret economic, environmental, and social influences that result in long-term settlement and land use patterns, and (4) recognize and contextualize the interplay between environment and human agency in the evolution of ancient economies and transformations in socio-organizational complexity.     

Prevalence rates of spondylolysis in British skeletal populations

As an activity‐related pathological lesion, spondylolysis and its prevalence rates are indicative of relative diachronic activity levels in different populations. In this paper we document the prevalence of spondylolytic defects in a series of time‐successive populations with special reference to the recording methods employed, and compare the findings with modern clinical studies. We identify epidemiological trends in expression of the condition through 1500 years in a series of skeletonised human remains from England. This includes a 5th–6th‐century settlement, a 15th‐century mass grave, a 14th to 17th‐century rural parish, a medieval Dominican friary, a medieval leper hospital and an 18th to 19th‐century crypt collection. These skeletal populations sample human groups experiencing considerable social change from an agrarian, non‐centralised early medieval period through the development of the medieval state to the earliest phases of industrialisation in England. A detailed study of all lumbar vertebrae in one of the assemblages highlights discrepancies between clinical prevalence rates for spondylolysis established through radiography, and those resulting from direct osteological analysis of the lumbar region of the vertebral column. Current prevalence rates cited in the osteological as well as the clinical literature are greatly dependent upon the recording methods employed, and the effects of several methods for osteological remains are considered in this treatment. For the populations reported on here, prevalence rates vary from considerably less than 1% to as much as 12%, depending on the method selected. A standardised recording method for spondylolytic lesions is suggested to facilitate accurate prevalence reporting and comparison of activity levels between different populations. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DNA FROM HUMAN ANCIENT BACTERIA: A NOVEL SOURCE OF GENETIC EVIDENCE FROM ARCHAEOLOGICAL DENTAL CALCULUS

We report a molecular methodology to obtain and analyse ancient bacterial DNA from archaeological dental calculus. Recent and archaeological DNA samples, as old as 4000 bp , were successfully extracted and amplified with species‐specific PCR primers. We propose this approach in order to: detect the presence of specific bacterial species infecting past human populations; compare the composition of ancient oral microbiomes among human populations; and analyse the genetic variability and covariation of bacteria and human host populations. Genomic analysis of bacteria from dental calculus is a promising source of evidence for palaeopathological and micro‐evolutionary studies, focused either on micro‐organisms or their human hosts.     

Original DocumentsNotarial Instrument,Dated A.D. 1322, Relating to Saint Nectan’s Chapel,in the Parish of St. Winnow,Near Lostwithiel,Cornwall

Our demographic knowledge of early Anglo-Saxon cemetery populations is highly valuable. This paper will present new demographic data from the Elsham and Cleatham cemeteries, both located in North Lincolnshire. These population structures will be compared with those recorded from contemporary cemeteries, including Sancton and Spong Hill. The observations made in this paper illustrate that the demographic profiles of cremation practicing groups are largely similar in nature. Two intriguing trends are verified by the Elsham and Cleatham assemblages, both of which include the under-representation of infants and males. This enlarged body of osteological data highlights that large amounts of information can be extracted from burned skeletal remains and can enhance our understanding of the demographic structure of cremation practicing groups in early Anglo-Saxon England.     

Changes in the size and shape of fallow deer—evidence for the movement and management of a species

The European fallow deer (Dama dama dama) is native to the eastern Mediterranean and whilst it is clear that its dispersion from this region was the result of human transportation, the timing and circumstances of its post‐glacial diffusion are still uncertain. Archaeological fallow deer remains offer perhaps the best opportunity to understand the deep history of the species, with measurements of ancient bones providing important information about an individual's sex and size. Unfortunately, the fragmentary nature of archaeological remains means that metrical samples are usually too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. Biometrical scaling techniques can increase the size of the sample available for comparison and in this paper log ratios are used in combination with traditional metrical analysis to provide new information about archaeological fallow deer populations, in particular highlighting the size variations across time and space and shifts in hunting and management practices. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.