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For
the previous 9 seasons at SHARP the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon
cemetery (c.750 - c.950 AD) on Boneyard has been the major focus of
our excavations.
As we enter our tenth year it is a fitting time for us to
reflect upon what has been achieved in previous years and to plan how
our work will progress in the coming seasons. What follows below is
not intended to be a comprehensive survey of what we have done but is
designed to answer the most frequently asked questions based upon our
findings to date. One of the most frequently asked questions is, ‘how many skeletons have you excavated?’ As the table below shows this currently stands at 238.
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| This is, however, a little misleading. The table above is based upon how many ‘skeleton numbers’ the Human Remains Team have decided to give out during a particular summer season. We do not automatically give all human bone that we find a ‘skeleton number’. The decision to give a skeleton number to human bone is based on the level of skeletal articulation that is present. By articulation we mean, that the bones are laid in the correct anatomical positions in the ground– e.g. that the femur (thigh bone), for instance, should lie closely at one end to the pelvis (hip bone) and at the other to the tibia and fibula (lower leg). It may seem that the decision as to whether a collection of bones are articulated or not should be very easy but this is not always the case. Sedgeford’s Boneyard is a sloped site which has seen numerous instances of disturbance including hill wash, flooding, moles, the inter-cutting of graves and the disturbance of the site by later human intervention including ploughing and ditch digging. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Trying to decipher where one burial ends and another begins is not always an easy task. It is also necessary to point out that any group of articulated bones can be given a skeleton number and we do not just assign such numbers to whole skeletons; it is, for instance, not unusual for just a upper or lower half of a skeleton to be given a skeleton number. The picture below show examples of two burials both of which were given skeleton numbers although one is far more complete than the other. |
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The total skeleton figure of 238 should therefore not be taken to imply that we have 238 complete skeletons although it does give us a minimum of 238 known burials. These burials are orientated east west and we rarely find anything within the graves although we do find the occasional shroud pin and coffin hinge (why a coffin should need a hinge is an ongoing matter of debate). |
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An
obvious question following the above is ‘where are all the other
parts of these skeletons?’ Excavations
on Boneyard uncover a lot of human bone and a large quantity of this
is not articulated and cannot, therefore, be given a skeleton number.
All of this bone is known as ‘disartic’, short for
disarticulated, and it is simply assigned the same number that is
given, by the archaeologists, to whatever context (e.g. a ditch or a
pit) that it is found in. For
most of the disartic it is impossible for us to even try and
re-associate it with any of the known, but incomplete, articulated
skeletons and it would be irresponsible of us to attempt any
simplistic ‘best-fit’ reassigning of disartic bones to articulated
skeletons. We do not,
however, simply just disregard such bones and we have an ongoing
programme of disartic cataloguing which takes place at Easter and
which, dependent upon relevant experience, you are keenly invited to
attend. The aim of this cataloguing is for us to eventually reach a
much clearer idea of exactly how many individuals were buried in the
areas under excavation. If
we solely took the figure of 238 as the number of people buried it is
likely that we are severely underestimating the amount of people who
were originally buried here.
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As
you can see from this picture the skeleton below (and inset right)
S0172 is
complete but when it was buried the grave diggers cut through an
earlier burial and it is the articulated portion of this other
individual S0173,
mainly its left-hand side, that can be seen lying to the left of
S0172. Around skeleton
S0172 we uncovered quantities of disartic bone much of which, through
a process of siding and measuring could be confidently reunited with
skeleton S0173.
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The right side of S0172 overcuts S0173 |
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Skeletons S0172
(top) and S0173 (bottom) |
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Some other
frequently asked questions include how many males compared to females
there are, how long the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Sedgeford lived and
whether we recover the skeletons of many children.
Sexing a skeleton involves looking for specific characteristics
on the skeleton that are located on the skull and pelvis. We cannot, therefore sex skeletons that do not have these
bones and if they only have either a skull or a pelvis we are usually
only able to sex them with caution (and they will be recorded as
either ?M or ?F which means ‘probable male’ and ‘probable
female’). Poor
preservation of bones can also make it difficult for us to carry out
sexing. It is also not
possible, using such techniques, to sex children as they will not have
had a fully developed skeleton at their time of death and would have
had none of the traits used for sexing which usually start to appear
during puberty; the skeletons of children on most archaeological sites
are therefore left unsexed and this is the case at Sedgeford.
Bearing these difficulties in mind we are obviously not able to
sex all of the skeletons but the table below illustrates our current
findings.
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The
mathematicians amongst you may realise that this amounts to 228 not
238 skeletons this is because at the time of creating this information
some of the skeletons excavated in the season of 2004 are awaiting
recording. As the figures
above show we do not have a clear bias either towards males or females
but we do have quite a dearth of children.
Assuming that it is not simply the unlikely case that hardly
any children died there are a number of reasons for this.
It could be due to poor bone survival as juvenile bones are
more susceptible to deterioration in the ground, it could be because
the children were buried elsewhere – although the fact that we
currently have at least one child in all the age groupings from
newborn to puberty would seem to contradict this, or it could be due
to excavators not recognising the bones of the particularly young
although SHARP does make a keen effort to debrief all of those working
on human remains about what to look for.
Certainly one factor for the lack of children is the
above-mentioned inter-cutting of graves.
Where we do find the intact graves of children they quite
frequently lay between or very close to graves of larger adult burials
and would have been very vulnerable to disturbance when another person
was buried on top. In
support of this theory is the fact that it is quite common for us to
find one or two pieces of disarticulated bone that are from immature
individuals in the soil packed around later adult burials. Given the problems we have in recovering skeletons of the young it is not possible for us to say anything about the incidence of death during childhood in middle Anglo-Saxon Sedgeford but we can say something about the longevity of the adults. One feature we use for ageing the adults is their teeth. Teeth are useful for ageing within a population due to the wear patterns on them. Anglo-Saxons used stones for grinding their grain, which meant that small particles of grit became included in their food and as they ate it eroded the enamel of their teeth with some regularity and is therefore – despite wider criticism - a good indicator of relative ageing, when taken alongside other methods, within our population. When we analyse the skeletons a large proportion of them fall into the 35-45 years category but it is certainly not unusual for us to place our adults in the 45-55 years category. It is difficult to precisely age skeletons beyond this because the skeletal markers become unreliable and many of the individuals have lost most of their teeth and in some cases have none left. In the case of one lady with no teeth at all, we simply had to assign her to the category of ‘old age’ as it was impossible to be more precise.
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Another
question that is frequently asked is ‘what did they die of?’
In the vast majority of cases the answer is simply that we do
not know. Most causes of
death do not leave any markings on the skeleton and solely affect the
soft tissue about which we can know nothing.
A few of the skeletons at Sedgeford can, however, tell us
exactly how some of the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants met their end. |
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This reconstruction drawing is based on sword cut wounds that were found on the skull of skeleton S1018. This is one of around 12 skeleton’s that had clear evidence of weapon injury (see undergraduate dissertation by Ben Stillwell) which in the majority of cases was certainly the cause of their death. For further examples of the: reconstruction artwork of Dominic Andrews please follow this link.
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Following on from questions about causes of death are usually enquiries into the general health of this population. We have no cases of vitamin D deficiency (Rickets) that would cause the limb bones to appear bowed and there are only a few cases of possible iron deficiency (anaemia) which causes specific areas of the skull to become porous although it is just as likely that anaemia could be induced by illness or trauma as it is by eating an inadequate diet. On the whole the general robustness of the skeletons at Sedgeford and the low incidence of observable nutrient deficiencies has led us to conclude that the inhabitants of Sedgeford were both well-fed and active individuals – something that supports the wider theory that this cemetery served the needs of a farming community. Lorna Corr, a research student at the University of Bristol has carried out a study into the quantities of fish and meat consumed by this population and her findings seem particularly intriguing in light of the proximity of Sedgeford to the sea. Aside
from the occasional broken bone the main health concerns of the
Sedgeford people seems to have been the age old problems of toothache
and aching joints. The
cause of their tooth problems has already been noted above and in
extreme cases of tooth erosion certain individuals developed serious
abscess problems some of which may have contributed to their deaths.
We
mainly find evidence for aching joints, or more correctly
osteo-arthritis, where we see that extra bone has grown on the joint
surfaces of bones – in other words on the area where one bone meets,
or rather articulates with, another.
At Sedgeford we have many examples of this and it ranges in
severity from slight to excessive. In excessive cases it can be so severe that it would have
disabled movement in the joint. One
skeleton, S0091, excavated in 2003 displays an excessive amount of
extra bone growth, which is particularly notable on the heads of both
femurs (thigh bones). We hope that the above has answered some of your questions and that for some of you it may inspire you to come and visit SHARP. Each summer we run week-long courses on a Basic Introduction to Human Remains. If you have already taken this course or you have previous experience of working with human remains then we would encourage you to put your skills to good use by volunteering to help us with the processing and recording of newly excavated skeletons. If you fancy tackling a bigger challenge you might like to opt to carry out a piece of research on the skeletal collection. If you have a research idea or would like us to help you in deciding upon one that is viable (perhaps even to fulfil part of a university course) then we would encourage you to contact us. Some of the research projects that have been carried out in former years are listed below and include studies that range from 3-day projects to PhD level study. If
you are interested in joining us either at Easter for disartic
recording or during the summer as a volunteer or on our course, please
see the prospectus
pages. Charlotte Burrill, January 2005 |
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Dissertations and Projects based on SHARP's Human Remains M.
v. Twest: Study of Identity of an Anglo-Saxon Population |
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