Ghost graves

[deepdigger]

Didn't any of you see the film "Cool Hand Luke?"

deep

[tom wilson]

quote:Originally posted by sniper

I would argue against the graves containing babies that have disappeared. Troll's question was based on a conversation he had with me about this particular site, and i've been doing the bodies for it. There were 2 foetal/neonate individuals with fantastic preservation in little graves, and I disagree on principle with the suggestion that juvenile bone preservation is likley to be worse than that of adults, just not true on any of the many collections I've worked on. Juvenile bones don't just disappear

Of course, none of the other posters has any knowledge of this specific site and if you have preserved neonates and proportionally-sized graves, then I think we can discount my hypothesis in this instance.

However, I re-iterate that neonates degrade far faster than older skeletons.

I was very careful to refer to [u]babies</u> not juveniles. Even very young juveniles have considerably more calcium in their bones than neonates. I wouldn't call myself a bone specialist, but I have this on the authority of several osteologists and paediatricians of my acquaintance. Perhaps I am repeating an old orthodoxy that has been discredited; if so, I'd love a reference. Might I alternatively suggest, Sniper, that perhaps you have based your general point on the assemblages that survive to reach you (absence of evidence and all that)? Consider this: what are the levels of infant mortality in well-documented populations, like the Victorians? What proportion of the burial population from those periods are neonates? Are they the same? I don't think so. Where have all the babies gone?

I hope you'll appreciate that I am only following the debate, not making personal attacks.

Tom

'Have a good plan, execute it violently, do it today'.
General MacArthur

[sniper]

course I appreciate that you are just following the debate, I'm not taking it in any other way, but I still disagree that neonate bones degrade faster than older individuals. A lot of a neonate's body is still cartilage and doesn't survive but what is bone is bone and stays around as well as older individuals. I am very aware that archaeological cemetery populations are lacking in numbers of very young individuals, but I disagree that this is purely down to preservation. As I said before, very young individuals are likely to be totally removed by later activity, very young individuals are not seen, or recognised during excavation, particularly with commercial excavation time pressures, and they end up on the spoilheap rather than in the lab, young individuals may not have been accorded burial in the same place as older individuals...there are many reasons why there is a disparity between what is found and what should be there, and its a lot more complicated that the old get out clause of poor neonate preservation. Check the disarticulated bone from cemeteries for the very young, they usually turn up in there if nowhere else, and check the animal bone as well, it tends to be juvenile bones that are most commonly misidentified as non-human. I refer you to Scheuer and Black (2000)Developmental Juvenile Osteology (Academic Press), which says pretty much the same as I've said (I did write this before I went and checked in there, honest!) and states that juvenile preservation is just as good as that of adults

++ i spend my days rummaging around in dead people ++