Rose Drew (University of York, UK)

It is time to integrate the work of ‘bio-archaeologists’ and physical anthropologists into study of the past. We need to ‘re-place’ bodies into the society in which they lived, died, and were buried, hardly a new idea. Twenty-five years ago, the seminal text The Archaeology of Disease opened with the words, “….Paleopathology…looks at how humans adapted to changes in their environment. It provides primary evidence… of our ancestors and [by] combining biological and cultural data….has become a wide-ranging holistic discipline.” (Roberts and Manchester 1983, 1). Despite repeated calls for multi-disciplinary approaches (Powell et al 1991, Gilchrist and Sloane 2004, Sofaer 2006), the limited perception of skeletal analysis is largely unchanged. More than listing demography and disease, bioarchaeology examines culture, biomechanical adaptation, and other aspects of human experience encapsulated in the body.

My work investigates the long-term effects of extreme, strenuous activity on the internal architecture of bones, an attempt to recognize professional soldiers (long bow archers) from medieval and Tudor contexts, with the potential to extend this identification back into earlier times. Other projects have involved medieval remains from monastery cemeteries, with a dearth of contextual information a typical impediment to analysis. Which individuals were buried where? Unlabeled, vague ‘lollipop’ figures will not shed light on an overall cemetery assemblage, and neither will excavation observations limited to ‘north of nave’ versus ‘south of nave’ or strata.

Other challenges facing osteologists revolve around reburial versus retention. Most osteologists are aware it is an honour to examine human skeletal remains, and treat their charges respectfully. Often, the popular media transmits the impression we are either disinterested numbers crunchers who measure the dead, relentlessly, focused only on recording bone lengths, age and sex, and evidence of gruesome disease; or that we operate with the same breathless efficiency as the worker-bees on CSI. In conferences my colleagues present papers detailing progress in linking lifestyle to disease, or bone shape to activity. But this research does not reach the media, or the public, or the bulk of working archaeologists who remain unaware of our progress and our challenges.

Whilst science became privileged over belief with the advent of New Archaeology and indeed from the Enlightenment onward (Trigger 1989), now it seems spiritual beliefs and the rejection of science as cold and biased has begun to endanger the study of human remains. Burials are intentional deposits, and must be integrated into the examined region and society to provide context. Physical anthropologists and human bone osteologists need to explain our aims in clear and unambiguous language.