Written in Bones: How Human Remains Unlock the Secrets of the Dead - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552976599 ISBN 13: 9781552976593

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2003

Synopsis

Written in Bones brings together a team of international experts to show how the careful study of bones reveals a compelling picture of the lives, cultures, and beliefs of ancient societies from around the world.

This compelling and scientifically-accessible book:

Provides 38 case studies examining the discoveries at archeological sites
Introduces readers to ancient peoples
Includes more than 350 color photographs

Human remains tell us much about how our ancestors lived and died. In Written in Bones, significant discoveries are carefully brought together and analyzed. Readers learn how experts use modern scientific techniques to piece together the stories behind the bones. The data is used to create a picture of cultures and ritual beliefs. There are such astonishing discoveries as:

Han Dynasty aristocrat preserved in an unknown red liquid
Bog bodies in Europe
The riddle of Tomb KV55 - where a male body was found inside a female coffin
World's oldest dwarf
The headless men and giant wolves of the Mesolithic cemetery in Siberia

About this title

About the Author:

Paul Bahn, Ph.D. studied archeology at Cambridge University. For this book he worked with a team of 16 contributors from universities around the world. His numerous books, written alone or with a co-author, include Ancient Places, Images of the Ice Age, Journey through the Ice Age and The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology, Tombs, Games and Mummies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
by Paul Bahn

Human remains have always been an important source of information about many aspects of the past -- and one of the most popular When this book was being put together, no fewer than three series on British television focused on the archaeology of human remains, and the media were inundated with coverage of a necropolis of 2,000 Inca mummies found under a shantytown in Peru; the National Geographic Society screened a TV documentary on this find, which was preceded by sensational articles and photographs in numerous publications.

Mummies are big news. They sell books, such as journalist Heather Pringle's The Mummy Congress, an entertaining account of the often eccentric folk who devote their lives to these preserved corpses. They inspire writers of fiction -- ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Tennessee Williams and Gustave Flaubert, who kept a mummy's foot on his desk. They arouse wonder, like the 500-year-old mummy of a Chinese of the Ming Dynasty discovered in 2001, a 60-year-old man with supple skin and mustache that was nearly a foot (30 centimeters) long; or a bejeweled elderly female Ming mummy, also found in 2001, who wore a wig to cover her baldness. They draw crowds; when the National Geographic Society put the Andean "Juanita" on show, 100,000 people turned up and waited in lines around the block. Of course they sell movies, particularly the recent The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. And it is no coincidence that the most popular computer game is called "Tomb Raider."

Mummies have even become the focus of fakery and perhaps even foul play - as in the case of the "Persian mummy" that came to light in Pakistan in October 2000 and was offered for sale on the black market for $20 million. An elaborate fraud, the mummy, with its beaten gold decorations, was in an ornate wooden box and a stone sarcophagus. Hieroglyphics stated that the body belonged to Rhodugune or Ruduuna, the daughter of Xerxes, the great king of the Persian Empire - but Persia is not known to have practiced mummification. It all proved the work of highly skilled artisans led by a specialist scholar; executing the ruse required a goldsmith, a stonemason, a cabinetmaker, a team of embalmers and an expert on Persian history who knew its ancient language. Obviously, all this painstaking work must have cost a great deal of money. In the end, however, radiocarbon dating proved that, instead of being 2,600 years old, the mummy was at most 45 years old. It was, in fact, the mummified body of a woman who died in the mid-1990s of a broken neck and a massive back injury, and who may have been murdered or whose body may have been stolen shortly after burial.

The British Museum recently created the first virtual reality Egyptian mummy, which has allowed researchers to see detailed three-dimensional (3-fl) images of an important priest called Nesperennub, who died in Thebes around 800 BC, without unwrapping him. The body was reconstructed with a medical scanner and computer graphics technology of a kind used in making the movie The Lord of the Rings. The 1,500 two-dimensional cross-sectional scans were pieced together by visualization software to create a complete 3-D fly-through image that can be viewed from any perspective on a computer It resembles a hologram and shows that the priest was buried with flat, almond-shaped glass eyes, while the top of his head was covered with a strange, unfired clay bowl - for 40 years, nobody at the museum could tell from X-rays what that object could be. The pictures eventually will be used to make a model of the skull, from which an accurate reconstruction of the face will be produced. Meanwhile, visitors to the museum can use virtual reality headsets or polarized glasses to zoom in on the mummy's wrappings or even look out through its eyes. In short, in a few decades science has progressed from the destruction and unwrapping of mummies to the ability to study them thoroughly without touching them.

In another recent study, this time of a Neanderthal skull from St. Césaire, France, about 36,000 years old, scientists detected a healed fracture of the cranial vault, apparently the result of the impact of a sharp implement. This simple wound has revealed a great deal. First, in order to penetrate the bone, the blow must have been inflicted with great speed, probably by a stone tool attached to a shaft. This could not have been an accident or a wound from an animal. Second, the victim recovered, so others in the group must have provided food and shelter while the wound healed. This confirms the evidence we already have from other sites such as Shanidar (Iraq) that Neanderthals were compassionate, caring and supportive to the disadvantaged in their society. As this volume shows, this attitude continued into the late Ice Age and beyond in many cultures.

Finally, In May 2002, a remarkable discovery was announced in France. Close to Clermont-Ferrand, an Iron Age tomb was unearthed containing eight people and eight small horses. Only 328 yards (800 meters) away is the impressive rampart of the unexcavated oppidum (Iron Age town) of Gondole. No tomb like this has ever been found before; multiple burials of Gauls have been discovered, and also buried horses, but never the two together, and certainly never such a spectacular array of both. The seven men and one adolescent were laid out dramatically in two rows, as were the eight horses. All 16 bodies were on their right side, head to the south, and the humans gazing east. Each man has his left arm on the man in front. What is puzzling is that there are no grave goods -- no weapons, ornaments, pots, offerings or harness equipment -- and no discernible cause of death. So, as yet, nobody knows if these are ritual sacrifices or victims of warfare between tribes or against Romans. What's more, two more tombs have already been detected in the immediate vicinity.

In short, there is no lack of major and exciting finds of human remains coming to light, and the extent of what we can learn about our ancestors never ceases to grow. This book intends to give the reader a mere taste of this field of study, covering the widest possible range of periods -- from fossil hominids to Napoleonic troops -- and of subjects, from mummies to mayhem. And yet in 50 or 100 years, even the most sophisticated of our current analyses will doubtless seem crude and primitive, such is the pace of scientific development. Our ability to read what is written in bones is constantly improving, and these new discoveries show that plenty of texts still await us.

About this edition

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1552976599
• ISBN 13: 9781552976593
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Bahn Paul