̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - grave

Revealed: face of ‘ordinary poor’ man from medieval Cambridge

fpjl2 — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 16:23:59 +0000

̽��ֱ��audience of an event at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival found themselves face-to-face with a fellow Cambridge resident – one who had spent the last 700 years buried beneath the venue in which they sat.

̽��ֱ��13th-century man, called Context 958 by researchers, was among some 400 burials for which complete skeletal remains were uncovered when one of the largest medieval hospital graveyards in Britain was discovered underneath the Old Divinity School of St John’s College, and excavated between 2010 and 2012.

̽��ֱ��bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which the College takes its name. ̽��ֱ��hospital was an Augustinian charitable establishment in Cambridge dedicated to providing care to members of the public.

“Context 958 was probably an inmate of the Hospital of St John, a charitable institution which provided food and a place to live for a dozen or so indigent townspeople – some of whom were probably ill, some of whom were aged or poor and couldn't live alone,” said Professor John Robb, from the ̽��ֱ��’s Division of Archaeology.

In collaboration with Dr Chris Rynn from the ̽��ֱ�� of Dundee’s Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, Robb and Cambridge colleagues have reconstructed the man’s face and pieced together the rudiments of his life story by analysing his bones and teeth.

̽��ֱ��work is one of the first outputs from the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘After the plague: health and history in medieval Cambridge’ for which Robb is principal investigator. ̽��ֱ��project is analysing the St John's burials not just statistically, but also biographically.

“Context 958 was over 40 when he died, and had quite a robust skeleton with a lot of wear and tear from a hard working life. We can't say what job specifically he did, but he was a working class person, perhaps with a specialised trade of some kind,” said Robb.

“One interesting feature is that he had a diet relatively rich in meat or fish, which may suggest that he was in a trade or job which gave him more access to these foods than a poor person might have normally had. He had fallen on hard times, perhaps through illness, limiting his ability to continue working or through not having a family network to take care of him in his poverty.”

There are hints beyond his interment in the hospital’s graveyard that Context 958’s life was one of adversity. His tooth enamel had stopped growing on two occasions during his youth, suggesting he had suffered bouts of sickness or famine early on. Archaeologists also found evidence of a blunt-force trauma on the back of his skull that had healed over prior to his death.

Click on images below to enlarge:

“He has a few unusual features, notably being buried face down which is a small irregularity for medieval burial. But, we are interested in him and in people like him more for ways in which they are not unusual, as they represent a sector of the medieval population which is quite hard to learn about: ordinary poor people,” said Robb.

“Most historical records are about well-off people and especially their financial and legal transactions – the less money and property you had, the less likely anybody was to ever write down anything about you. So skeletons like this are really our chance to learn about how the ordinary poor lived.”

̽��ֱ��focal point of the ‘After the Plague’ project will be the large sample of urban poor people from the graveyard of the Hospital of St John, which researchers will compare with other medieval collections to build up a picture of the lives, health and day-to-day activities of people living in Cambridge, and urban England as a whole, at this time.

“ ̽��ֱ��After the Plague project is also about humanising people in the past, getting beyond the scientific facts to see them as individuals with life stories and experiences,” said Robb.

“This helps us communicate our work to the public, but it also helps us imagine them ourselves as leading complex lives like we do today. That's why putting all the data together into biographies and giving them faces is so important.”

̽��ֱ��Old Divinity School of St John’s College was built in 1877-1879 and was recently refurbished, now housing a 180-seat lecture theatre used for College activities and public events, including last week’s Science Festival lecture given by Robb on the life of Context 958 and the research project.

̽��ֱ��School was formerly the burial ground of the Hospital, instituted around 1195 by the townspeople of Cambridge to care for the poor and sick in the community. Originally a small building on a patch of waste ground, the Hospital grew with Church support to be a noted place of hospitality and care for both ̽��ֱ�� scholars and local people.

New facial reconstruction of a man buried in a medieval hospital graveyard discovered underneath a Cambridge college sheds light on how ordinary poor people lived in 13th century England.

Skeletons like this are really our chance to learn about how the ordinary poor lived

John Robb

Chris Rynn, ̽��ֱ�� of Dundee

̽��ֱ��facial reconstruction of Context 958

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��body snatchers: corpse and effect

lw355 — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 08:40:30 +0000

When you bury family members in a cemetery, you expect them to stay there. Not so 200 years ago, however, when body snatchers prowled the nation’s burial grounds looking for subjects. This lucrative cottage industry was driven by an acute shortage of bodies that were available for dissection by the growing number of medical students.

Now, a new book has amassed, for the first time, archaeological evidence for what happened to the corpses, from dissection and autopsy through to reburial and display. Many of the new findings have never been published before.

̽��ֱ��book reveals how the macabre activities of the body snatchers helped to further the progress of medicine and science by improving understanding of how the human body worked.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researcher Dr Piers Mitchell and colleagues from around the UK have assembled evidence from excavated human skeletal remains from the 1600s to the 1800s. ̽��ֱ��remains were buried close to workhouses, prisons, private anatomy schools and medical schools in Newcastle, Worcester, Oxford and sites in London.

̽��ֱ��archaeological evidence provides a vivid image of what it must have been like to cut up a corpse in order to study its constituent parts.

Moreover, it shows how anatomy was a key area of scientific investigation 200 years ago. “Thanks to the discoveries of the early anatomists,” said Mitchell, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, “we have come to move towards our modern knowledge of how organs work and what normal anatomy is all about.”

Some of the remains show evidence of amputations performed as training exercises, probably equipping students with the ability to perform the surgery in living individuals. In one instance, the same cadaver had had multiple amputations, as well as their skull and chest opened.

Skeletons of adolescent males, believed to be the remains of executed criminals, had undergone craniotomies to open up the skull to give access to the brain, middle ear and other structures of anatomical interest. Fine cut marks on some skulls showed where the muscles had been carefully peeled away from the bone.

̽��ֱ��bones of dogs, rabbits, cats, cattle, horses, monkeys and even tortoises were also found. Many of the animal bones had saw cuts in the same position as those found in the human skeletons – highlighting the quest to understand comparative anatomy.

One skeleton had been decapitated through the spine with a saw, and several of the skeletons were incomplete, suggesting that dissected limbs were buried elsewhere.

“ ̽��ֱ��fact that different bodies were dissected by different medical students at different times means that the same parts of the same body weren’t always available to be recombined together,” said Mitchell. “So we may have a coffin of arms or a coffin of legs, or sometimes the upper part of the body would be present and the lower part of the body would be missing, and they would put material in there such as dissected animal bones or even rocks to balance out the coffin.”

Some anatomical specimens were preserved and retained for future reference, and form part of pathology collections that continue to be used for teaching medical students to the present day.

̽��ֱ��book Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: autopsy, pathology and display provides unprecedented evidence of dissection and autopsy practices – and the economical use of corpses – as Mitchell explained: “ ̽��ֱ��bodies were physically sawn up and divided, presumably so that different medical students could dissect different parts of the same body before it would have decomposed.”

Perhaps the most infamous providers of corpses to the medical establishment were Burke and Hare, two characters from Edinburgh who took the industry one stage further and murdered their victims to sell their corpses for dissection by the doctors teaching anatomy in the city. Their grisly occupation was exposed on 31 October, Halloween, 1828.

“This sent a signal out to the rest of the country,” said Mitchell. “It created a field change in attitudes as to what people should do with the bodies of the dead. Everyone decided what was more important was that the living got the best treatment from their doctors and that that was given a higher priority over the corpses of the dead.”

̽��ֱ��result was the 1832 Anatomy Act, when it became legal for the corpses of those who died in poorhouses and hospitals who were not claimed by friends or relatives to be used by the private anatomical teaching institutes. “No-one needed to be dug up from the graves anymore and the cemeteries could rest in peace,” added Mitchell.

̽��ֱ��research described here has been published in 'Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: autopsy, pathology and display' (2012), edited by Piers Mitchell, Ashgate Publishing Company.

For more information, please contact Louise Walsh (louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Corpses sold for dissection by body snatchers helped improve understanding of how the human body worked, according to a new book that brings together archaeological evidence from their remains.

̽��ֱ��bodies were physically sawn up and divided, presumably so that different medical students could dissect different parts of the same body before it would have decomposed.

Dr Piers Mitchell

̽��ֱ��Body Snatchers: Corpse and Effect

Andrew Chamberlian.

Craniotomy of the skull.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Was the fox prehistoric man’s best friend?

ns480 — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:53:55 +0000

Researchers analysing remains at a prehistoric burial ground in Jordan have uncovered a grave in which a fox was buried with a human, before part of it was then transferred to an adjacent grave.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge-led team believes that the unprecedented case points to some sort of emotional attachment between human and fox. Their paper, published today, suggests that the fox may have been kept as a pet and was being buried to accompany its master, or mistress, to the afterlife.

If so, it marks the first known burial of its kind and suggests that long before we began to hunt foxes using dogs, our ancestors were keeping them as pets - and doing so earlier than their canine relatives.

̽��ֱ��cemetery, at Uyun-al-Hammam, in northern Jordan, is about 16,500 years old, which makes the grave 4,000 years older than the earliest known human-dog burial and 7,000 years earlier than anything similar here involving a fox.

Writing in the open-access journal, PLoS One, the researchers also suggest that this early example of human-animal burial may be part of a bigger picture of growing cultural sophistication that has typically been associated with the farming societies of the Neolithic era, thousands of years later.

Sadly for fox-lovers, however, the relationship between man and that particular beast was probably short-lived. ̽��ֱ��paper also says it is unlikely that foxes were ever domesticated in full and that, despite their early head start, their recruitment as a friendly household pet fell by the wayside in later millennia as their human masters took to the more companionable dog instead.

" ̽��ֱ��burial site provides intriguing evidence of a relationship between humans and foxes which predates any comparable example of animal domestication," Dr Lisa Maher, from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said.

"What we appear to have found is a case where a fox was killed and buried with its owner. Later, the grave was reopened for some reason and the human's body was moved. But because the link between the fox and human had been significant, the fox was moved as well, so that the person, or people, would still be accompanied by it in the afterlife."

̽��ֱ��research focused on the contents of two particular graves at Uyun-al-Hammam, which is situated on an ancient river terrace in the small river valley of Wadi Ziqlab. ̽��ֱ��site has been one of major interest for archaeologists since the first graves were opened in 2005 because it provides a rich source of information about the so-called early Epipalaeolithic period, 16,500 years ago.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge-led team spotted a connection between Grave I on the site and Grave VIII, which lies beside it but was only opened more recently. In the first, they identified the remains of two adults, probably a man and a woman.

̽��ֱ��man had been buried earlier than the woman, and alongside him were the skull and humerus of a fox, as well as other grave goods.

It was only when Grave VIII was opened, however, that the researchers found both human remains that may have belonged to the same man, and the skeletal remnants of what was, almost certainly, the same fox. ̽��ֱ��fox skeleton was complete apart from its skull and right humerus - which is exactly what they had already found in the adjacent grave. Further studies indicated that the remains were indeed those of a red fox.

̽��ֱ��movement of the body parts is believed to be highly significant. If the human body is the same in both cases, then none of the other grave goods except the fox were considered worth moving, strongly suggesting that the fox had some sort of special relationship to the human.

Other such cases are very rare. Many of the next earliest involve dogs, including one site in Israel where a woman was buried with her hand resting on a puppy, but even they are about 4,000 years younger than Uyun-al-Hammam.

" ̽��ֱ��very first evidence of dog domestication in the Near East involves a burial of a puppy with a human," Dr. Jay Stock, also from the Leverhulme Centre at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said. "It's easy to imagine that the similarly-sized fox was also viewed by prehistoric people as a potential companion in the same way. Clearly, it had significant social status."

Studies carried out on foxes suggest that they can be brought under human control, but that the process is not easy because they are skittish and timid by nature. Perhaps for that reason, the researchers suggest, dogs ultimately achieved "best friend" status among humans instead.

Early humans may have preferred the fox to the dog as an animal companion, new archaeological findings suggest.

̽��ֱ��burial site provides intriguing evidence of a relationship between humans and foxes which predates any comparable example of animal domestication.

Dr Lisa Maher

fox

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes