New technology opens up new worlds for historians and archaeologists. Tooth Enamel, sawed bones and ancient bacteria tells a different story than the grave goods and written sources.
When the Romans left England around the year 400 also disappeared cash economy, urban life, state and literacy. Therefore, we have no document that explains what happened. The written sources that are authored 500 years later, and is about men: kings and warriors invade the country.
– But most tangible evidence we have from the 400 and 500s associated with girls in their late teens and adult women, says Robin Fleming, professor of history at Boston College in Massachusetts in the United States.
She was one of the speakers at the major science conference AAAS in San Jose, Calif week.
theme of the conference was to make the invisible visible. Although girls and women are completely invisible in recorded history contains the graves many more things than men.
– This indicates that women played a central role. They should also be at the center of our story about the first centuries after Rome’s collapse. They are the people we can see best. Therefore, it is them we should write about, says Robin Fleming.
The graves are beads, brooches, buckles, bowls, remnants of clothing and sometimes weapons. But they do not always tell the story archaeologists have imagined. It shows skeletons teeth.
Tooth enamel is built up when we are small, and the atomic forms, isotopes of oxygen and strontium that is there talk about where a person drank water and ate bread as a child. Girls with jewelry and clothing that seems to be Germanic or come from Scandinavia proves immigrated west. Children and adults who are buried according to local practices and more British clothing has in fact spent his childhood in the Baltics.
– The women were not so interested to see where they came from. In contrast, they were really interested in experimenting. Partly out of necessity during a period of great change and population movements, but also because they were living in a new world where the old way of life was no longer possible, says Robin Fleming.
According to Robin Fleming is necessary To archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and chemists collaborate more so that we get a chance to understand what happened in the past.
– But most historians are afraid of science, she says.
Jenna Dittmar at Cambridge University who studies the history of medicine was not happy with what she found in written sources. Instead she studied skeletons from cemeteries, hospitals and prisons across the UK. Their bodies are buried between 1600 and 1900 and bears all the obvious signs of having been examined and dissected after death.
– It was during this time it was discovered much of the knowledge of the anatomy that we have today, Jenna says Dittmar.
She examines marks on the legs with the electron microscope and can see how the tools developed from rough wood saws to finer tools. Although methods vary. Around 1880 learns anatomists to cut open the skull so that the brain remains intact.
– Many of the techniques developed in the 1700s and 1800s used in medical education today, says Jenna Dittmar.
In 1826 came 700 young men to London to study to become a doctor. In the same year was executed 50 people. Because the dead criminals were the only corpses were legal to dissect there was a deficit of bodies to investigate.
– We see that the skeleton may have been cut apart and divided by up to ten different students. In addition, people became rich by stealing bodies from new graves and selling them to schools. In one documented case murdered a person 16 people to sell their bodies, says Jenna Dittmar.
Clark Spencer Larsen, professor of anthropology at Ohio University in Columbus, leading an excavation at the church of San Pietro a Pozzeveri Altopascio in Tuscany, Italy. The cemetery has been used as a burial ground since the 900s. Scientists can then examine how living conditions have changed over almost 1000 years.
In one part of the cemetery were buried victims of a cholera epidemic in the 1850s.
– Pour liquid lime over the bodies that the disease would not spread. It did not work particularly well, but you tried, said Clark Spencer Larsen.
Thanks chalice is the DNA of bacteria and other organisms preserved. The researchers are now trying to obtain genetic material from cholera bacteria to compare with today’s bacteria and see how they have evolved.
The skeletons Jenna Dittmar investigating traces of infections, chronic diseases, and sometimes what may be unsuccessful attempts to surgery. In the tombs of Tuscany, the dead have osteoarthritis of the spine and joints at a young age. It is a sign that they worked hard physically. Marks on the inside of the front teeth show that they are used as a tool. They also have stripes in the enamel – a lasting memory of that they were sick or malnourished as a child – and caries.
– Overall, this was not a nice place to stay, says Clark Spencer Larsen.
The skeletons from 400 century England also bears traces of injury, disease, malnutrition, and a really unhealthy life, according to Robin Fleming.
– But they actually lived longer than people did before The Fall of the Roman Empire. When they no longer had to pay taxes, they had simply more food left to eat.
AAAS conference, organized since 1848 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s largest scientific associations.
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