Excavations In North Elmham Park 1967-1972. Vol. 2 [2]

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PART V: HUMAN AND ANIMAL BONES

12. THE HUMAN BONES by Cal vin Wells and Helen Cayton

I.

DISCUSSION OF THE HUMAN SKELETAL REMAINS by Calvin Wells

INTRODUCTION This report on the human skeletal remains from North Elmham is divided into two parts. In this chapter there is a discussion of the skeletal remains and then in Chapter 13 a description of each inhumation is given, but this is very brief and is chiefly designed to draw attention to anomalies and abnormalities in the material. In order to display the general state and composition of the cemetery, insofar as it has been excavated, a thumbnail indication of what each burial contains has been included but no attempt has been made to compile a detailed catalogue of all surviving bones. In Part I of this chapter the inhumations are discussed with a view to identifying any pattern which may emerge from them and to make such inferences as appear to be justified by the evidence. Here a caveat is needed. Much, indeed most, of the remains are in very poor condition. Archaeologists are no doubt familiar enough with the grizzling of anthropologists who, all too often, have good reasons to lament the ravages which have been wrought upon potentially interesting skeletons by centuries, by soils and by the denizens of both. These ravages may be catastrophic and destroy virtually the entire burial and all the evidence it could have yielded. The situation at North Elmham is less disastrous but bad enough : no skeleton is complete and few are nearly so. This means that many conclusions which might have been firmly drawn can now be only tentatively ventured. The evidence can be treated, broadly speaking, in two ways: either the most rigid restraint may be imposed on any speculations based upon it or the imagination may be given freer rein to pursue more airy but less certain conjectures. The first approach reduces the likelihood of proffering absurd theories but at the expense of being imaginatively sterile. The second risks losing likelihood in fantasy but may kindle sparks of rewarding insight. This report does not hesitate to follow the second course. As a result, various suggestions will be found in it which have, so far, only slender evidence to support them. I hope that many of the inferences drawn here are valid but even if every one is wrong it would not matter provided it is always remembered that these are inferences, not logical deductions - still less observed facts. They are put forward in the hope that they will stimulate better ideas and encourage further research. They will do harm only if treated as axiomatic. It should be noted here that, because the descriptions of the inhumations in Chapter 13 do not contain a complete inventory of all bones, it may occasionally happen that fragments have been referred to (or taken accotmt of) in this Chapter which are not specifically mentioned or described in the next. In other words, the descriptions of the burials may not always be the sole source of information for details given in this section. It is important to note this lest it should appear that there are discrepancies between the two parts.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author's thanks go to Dr. Peter Wade-Martins for having invited me to examine these bones and for having been ever ready to discuss problems arising from them; to Miss Barbara Green for helpful comments and information; to Dr. G.D. Hart for having compassed the unenviable task of trying to establish the blood groups of these people; to Dr. Brian Maxwell for his radiographs of the pathological specimens and the Harris' s lines, and for having advised me on the diagnosis of dubious specimens; and to Mr. Hallam Ashley and Dr. Peter Wade-Martins for their e xcellent photographs of these uncomely bones. I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Miss Helen Cayton. Whenever I wondered if a skeletal hint might be blessed with textual support I turned to her for guidance, wartcunning and starcraft. She never failed to lighten my darkness, bearing my importunity with unruffled good humour. Without her help I would not have guessed that Percival Pott's ideas about how to set a fracture were already a thousand years old; still less would I have dared to import a negress from the Niger. There is much more of Helen Cayton in these pages than this meagre 'credit' would suggest. NUMBER OF BURIAL8

Unlike many sites, where mass burials have taken place or chaotic and widespread disturbance of the inhumations has occurred, the number of skeletons excavated at North Elmham presents no great problem. Although post-inhumation soil erosion and other factors have left many of the skeletons incomplete, it is clear that, in general, what the excavator describes as a 'Burial' is, indeed, the remains of one individual and no more. In a considerable number of these 'Burials' some duplication of bones is present so that it is obvious that part of a second, or even third skeleton is mixed with the main inhumation. But this very seldom amounts to more than one or two duplicate bones or fragments thereof and these may easily be explained as the result of slight soil disturbance, the activities of burrowing animals or the closeness of adjacent inhumations. These odd, extra bones are assumed to have come from some nearby burial and are not counted as separate individuals, as if they were complete skeletons. Occasionally, the duplication of bones is much more extensive and may include re presentative fragments from most parts of two bodies. When this has occurred, clear duplication of individuals is obvious and the burial is assessed as representing two persons. Ten inhumations are of this type. The excavators have produced burials numbered from 1 to 197, minus e leven gaps in the series, i.e. 186 graves. When the ten double inhumations are added, 196 skeletons can be firmly identified. There are ten others which, for various reasons, are not located on the site plan 1, They are all extremely scrappy and none contains more than a handful of bones, yet they were not recognizably part of any other burials. As they have some slight interest in terms of the osteology of the group, they are included here and are distinguished by letters. This brings the number of 'skeletons' to a total of 206 and it is these which form the basis of this report.

SEX Usually the sex of Anglo-Saxon skeletons can be determined without great difficulty. This is another way of saying that sexual dimorphism in Anglo-Saxons was well marked and, therefore, that the metric and non-metric overlap between males and females was relatively low. To take advantage of such sexual dimorphism , however, it is necessary to have good preservation of the key anatomical pieces. These are, of course, the

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Discussion of the Human Skeletal Remains pelvis, the skull, the clavicles, etc. Unfortunately, some of the remains from North Elmham were either lacking these diagnostically important features or, if present, they were in such poor condition as to be ambiguous or valueless. In spite of this uncertainty, a diagnosis of the sex appeared to be justified in the great majority of adult inhumations. It is felt that with few exceptions, determination of sex under the age of twelve years is always uncertain and even under the age of eighteen it is often unreliable unless the skeletons are in perfect condition. Of the 167 identifiable adults here, nine (5 .4%) were unsexable. Eight (4.8 %) were assessed as 'probables', of which six were '?female' and two were '?male'. The remaining 150 individuals were given a firm sexing, eighty (53.3%) being male, seventy (46.7 %) female . (If the 'probables' are assumed to be correct there are 158 burials of which 51.9 % are male, 48.1%female). The more reliable figures of eighty males and seventy females give an incidence for the sexes which is not unusual. It implies a sex ratio which can be accepted as within normal biological limits for a small community, given the uncertainty which must always be inherent in sexing ancient and defective material. It is at least clear from these figures that, unlike some groups, no significant proportion of the men was dying and being buried away from their home area. Excess of male over female skeletons is sometimes explained as due to the greater resistance to post-inhumation erosion which is shown by the sturdier male bones, as contrasted with the lighter female ones. This has, perhaps, some limited validity and in this connection it is worth remembering that the North Elmham soil is very destructive to bone, a quality which it shares with most parts of East Anglia. But it is doubtful whether the sex ratio as found here can be wholly accounted for by differential disintegration. There were a number of juvenile deaths occurring throughout childhood, especially in the two to eight year period. There is also some evidence that girls were fed less well than boys and it is possible that these two findings are r e lated. The greater number of men in the community may be because of a higher death rate among girls in the first half of childhood. The distribution of the sexes is close to random scatter throughout most of the cemetery and does not indicate any sexual apartheid such as N. -Gejvall found at Wester bus. Several pairs of adjacent or overlapping graves occurred in which a male and a female were found. This might hint at the possibility of married couple s being buried together but, with approximately equal numbers of the sexes, groupings of this kind would often occur by chance. Their frequency at North Elmh am is not high enough to be unequivocally significant. One interesting feature is that towards the southern end of the cemetery (Fig .192) there is a concentration of males which occurs nowhere else in the burial ground. Of the twenty four sexable skeletons here, twenty two are males. This might imply that, at least in this part of the complex, there was an enclave reserved for monastic and priestly use or perhaps for men who were heads of distinguished families.

AGE As with the diagnosis of sex, the determination of the biological age at death from a skeleton depends upon the availability, in good condition, of certain key osseous elements. Throughout childhood and adolescence, a narrowly accurate assessment is easy to obtain provided the teeth are present and the extent of epiphyseal union is observable. After the epiphyses have fused it is much more difficult to estimate age a nd the results be come progressively more inaccurate as age advances. The best known traditional method is that which depends on the extent of fusion in the cranial sutures and, in the past, determinations within very narrow limits were often made us ing thi s criterion . Today, this method is much discredited. It is now known that extensive, or complete,

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North Elmham Park suturalfusionmayoccur in quite young adults and also that negligible synostosis, or none at all, may be found in the skulls of senile persons. At present the most reliable feature for estimating the age of adults appears to be the symphyseal surface of the pubis (Todd 1920). Unfortunately, this is a structure which is often unavailable owing to damage or decay. The wearing away of the enamel and dentine of human teeth is now accepted as a biological phenomenon, its degree being correlated to a marked extent with increasing age. Hence, the amount of dental attrition may be used as a rough estimate of a person's age at death. By comparing the degree of attrition on each of the molar teeth (that is, by establishing an attrition gradient) A. E. W. Miles (1962) has greatly refined this technique. A disadvantage of dental wear as an indicator of age i s that it varies in different populations depending on diet, the use of teeth as tools and other factors. The molar gradient method needs to be used against an established pattern for each population which is being considered. Many other indicators of age are available, but each is imprec ise and even when all are available in one skeleton, no great accuracy is obtainable. These indicators include: the appearance of the scapula, the radiographic state of the proximal end of the humerus, sternal and rib changes, modifications of the cranial vault, various pathological or involutional changes, e.g. in the vertebrae, and alterations in the microstructure of bone. In estimating the age of these North Elmham individuals the greatest weight has been given to the state of the pubic symphysis. "Whenever an estimated range narrower than seven or eight years is recorded for an adult older than twenty five years, it will usually be based on this feature. In the absence of the pubis the estimate will be a broader one, increasingly so if dental evidence is also absent and especia ll y with advancing years . Sometimes almost nothing is available except cranial sutures. "When this is the case they may still be used provided their limitations are understood. As noted above, for any individual skeleton they are likely to be unreliable. However, it remains true that there is a well marked general tendency for increasing sutural fusion to proceed with increasing age. An assessment based on this feature in a group of 100 skeletons gives, therefore, more approximately correct estimates than wildly wrong ones ... and this by a substantial margin. Estimates of age have been made for 206 individuals at North Elmham. Of these, thirty nine (18 .9 %) were found to be children or adolescents under the age of eighteen years. This is not an exceptional figure and it strongly suggests that we are dealing with a normal biological population which has not been artificially selected in any way. This proportion of children, almost a fifth of all burials, contrasts marked ly, for example , with a group of seventh-ninth century inhumations from Martyrs' Bay, Iona (Wells in press) . At that site, from about 110 burials, only one adolescent bone was recorded: all the rest were fully adult. This together with the fact that females greatly outnumbeTed males, left no doubt that it was a population which had been artificially selected in some way and bore no resemblence to a normally balanced biological group. At North Elmham, of the 167 adults, forty one (24 .5%) were so defective that their ages could be assessed only as 'Adult' . Of the remaining 126, two could be estimated only as '25+'. This left two '?males' and siAi;y two male s, one '?female' and fifty nine females to whom narrower but various age ranges were ascribed. It is on the basis of these 121 firmly sexed skeletons that the mean age at death has been estimated for the group. "Where an age range has been given to an individual (i.e. virtually every bur ial) the mean of the two extremes has been taken as the age at death for calculating the group average. For example, Inh. 86 was estimated to have died betwee n forty and sixty yea r s but, for calculating the average for the group, the mean of thes e ages (fifty years) has been allotted to him. In the case of Inh. 69, recorded as dying in the twenty fo ur to twenty seven year range, 25i has been used. Inevitably this method has defects. It

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NORTH ELMHAM PARK THE CATHEDR AL CEMETERY

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