Tag Archives: Forensic

In the Presence of Death at Pompeii

April 6, 2010

I once spent an entire a year flying to remote parts of the world to see mummies. I was researching and writing a book that became The Mummy Congress, and during this time I got to know the preserved dead exceptionally well. I watched them being unwrapped from their linens in Egypt, poked and prodded with fiber optics in Italy and haggled over in China. And I feel obliged to state something clearly. I have never seen a mummy that struck me as ghoulish or macabre or indeed anything other than what it was generally was–a dead human being who had been mourned, prepared, arranged and preserved.

I can’t say the same, however, of the plaster casts that archaeologists have made of Pompeii’s victims, a thought that occurred to me this morning as I read on the BBC website of a new exhibit of these objects at Antiquarium de Boscoreale, a short drive away from Pompeii.

Archaeologists produce these casts whenever they find skeletal remains lying in cavities in the volcanic rock that still blankets much of Pompeii. They pour plaster into the hollow and pry it loose when it hardens. And what often emerges is an object not quite human, and not quite artifact, something that captures in eerie detail the final moments of one of Pompeii’s inhabitants during the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Once seen, such casts are not easily forgotten.

I saw them for the first time a few years ago, when Cambridge University archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill took me to see the one of the grandest and most opulent homes in Pompeii, the House of Fabius Rufus. As I recall (and please correct me, someone, if I am wrong), this immense villa had never been open to the public, and Wallace-Hadrill and I spent nearly an hour admiring its exquisite frescos and its private bath.

At one point in this behind-the-scenes tour, I was climbing down a shadowy stairwell and I stumbled on something obstructing one of the steps. I stopped and peered down to see what I had nearly fallen on. It was a plaster cast of a human victim sprawled across the stair, a slave perhaps who had no chance to flee and who had literally perished on the spot. At that moment, I felt a deep, penetrating sense of the ancient tragedy, and although two thousand years had passed since the toxic volcanic gases had swept through the city, I could see all too clearly a life being snuffed out right in front of me.

As Wallace-Hadrill and I continued roaming the house, we came across several more of these casts lying on the floor, in various attitudes of death. The archaeologist, an expert on the architecture of Pompeii, paid no attention to them, as if he scarcely saw them any more. But a terrible chill came over me each time I found another huddled or splayed form, another a human life cut short.

All this came to mind today when I read of a new exhibit. The show marks the first time that museum goers will see such a large collection of the casts in one spot.

Francisco Pizarro’s Forgotten Army?

April 5, 2010

Who really conquered the Inca Empire? I found myself mulling over that question for the first time today, after reading a really fascinating new paper published online in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology by a team of American and Peruvian scientists. Led by Melissa Murphy, a physical anthropologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, the team has just pored over the skeletal remains of 258 Inca men and women, who perished from extreme violence sometime between 1470 and 1540.

First, let me very briefly summarize the conventional view of the Conquest of Peru. According to the Spanish chronicles (the only surviving written source of the invasion), Francisco Pizarro set sail from Panama in January 1531 with 3 ships and 180 men. Landing near the port of Tumbes in the midst of a civil war in the Inca realm known as Tawantinsuyu, Pizarro and his men journeyed inland. At the Inca provincial town of Cajamarca, they laid an ambush and captured the Inca king Atawallpa, whom they subsequently executed. In November 1533, Pizarro’s force occupied the Inca capital of Cuzco, bringing the empire to its knees.

I personally don’t recall hearing or reading much about indigenous Andean peoples fighting on the side of the Spanish invaders. But as the new paper by Murphy and her team points out, aboriginal people certainly seem to have played a part in the Conquest of Peru, and perhaps quite a large part.

Murphy and her colleagues examined human remains excavated from two large Inca cemeteries in the archaeological zone of Puruchuco-Huaquerones, 7 miles from the center of Lima. Many of these individuals likely died during the ill-fated siege of Lima, when Inca forces tried to expel the Spaniards in 1536. As expected, Murphy and her colleagues found ample evidence of severe injuries caused by medieval European weaponry–the top spike of a polearm, the beak of a war hammer, and possible gunshot wounds. (Intriguingly, evidence of slashing injuries from swords is missing from these victims.)

But what I found especially intriguing in this study was the evidence that team-members found for wounds inflicted by indigenous weapons, such as clubs and maces. Indeed, as the authors note, “the majority of perimortem injuries to the cranium were likely due to blunt force trauma, probably from native weaponry like maces or clubs, with only a few of the injuries caused by Spanish weapons.”

Now of course, Spanish soldiers might well have picked up native weapons and used them expediently. But some Spanish chroniclers do refer on occasion to indigenous allies and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that they were under-representing the numbers in order to make themselves look especially courageous to readers back home.

Moreover, we know that the Incas had made a host of enemies during their own conquests, particularly on the northern coast of Peru. And these dissidents might have seen Pizarro and his men initially as liberators, before they truly understood the rapacity of the Spanish forces. Certainly, this is what happened in Mexico, when aboriginal people rallied to the banner of Hernando Cortez, eager to rise up against their oppressors, the Aztecs.

This new research by Murphy and her colleagues is the first forensic-style study of the Inca victims who fell during the Conquest of Peru. I really look forward to reading more.

Heart Attacks, Strokes and the Ancient Egyptians

March 1, 2010

On the weekend, British researchers published an intriguing article in Lancet on a group of people whose cravings for fat-saturated junk food led to arteries packed with plaque. The individuals in question weren’t 21st century Brits fatally fond of crisps, chips and deep-fried Mars bars, however. They were ancient Egyptian priests who had regularly scarfed up left-over cakes and other offerings given by supplicants.

Rosalie David, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester and one of the world’s great experts on Egyptian mummies, headed the team. She and her colleagues examined mummies of Egyptian priests and their family members and discovered to their surprise signs of serious heart disease, including badly clogged and damaged arteries.

Intrigued by this, David studied inscriptions on Egyptian temples describing the rituals that priests performed and the offerings that supplicants left. High on the list of the offerings were cooked geese, whose meat contained up to 60 percent fat, beef, and an assortment of calorie-laden cakes made of animal fat and oil.

Moreover, the inscriptions and other texts revealed how priestly foodies at these temples refused to let all this fat-rich fare go to waste. After performing rituals with their offerings three times daily, they gathered up the leftovers and took them home to their families–hardly a heart-smart diet.

David and her colleagues now suggest that this fat-saturated diet and the arterial diseases that resulted could have cut short the lives of these priests. Studies of the mummies and other human remains suggest that this group did not often live past the age of 50.

It’s not surprising then that Egyptian physicians were well aware of heart disease, as attested to in the section on cardiovascular disorders in the Ebers papyrus. Indeed Bruno Halioua and Bernard Ziskind, the authors of Medicine in the Days of the Pharoahs, marvel at what they call the Egyptians’ “impressive grasp of cardiovascular function.” As the two authors point out, the Ebers papyrus even includes a description of what might well be a heart attack. An individual, notes the papyrus, “who suffers at the entrance to the inside (ib), when he has pains in his arm, his breast, and the side of his stomach (ro-ib)” is in dire straits. “Death is approaching.”

We never think of ancient Egyptians keeling over from heart attacks or strokes. Those are supposed to be modern diseases, but it would appear that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Exhuming Ancient Celebrities

February 17, 2010

I wasn’t planning to post today on Tutankhamun. Over the past twenty-four hours, journalists have spilled a cargo tanker’s worth of ink on news that the famous young king suffered from a host of serious ailments. I thought I would leave the story to the newspapers until I began browsing the coverage. Some reporters derided the Egyptian king as “malarial and inbred,” while others took lower aim. One online rag, for example, informed readers that “King Tut was a wreck, but his penis was ‘well-developed’.”

If you ask me, these exhumations and studies of ancient kings and other celebrities are becoming media circuses. All the high-tech poking and prodding quickly strips away the dignity and grandeur of great men and women, baring their physical frailties and secrets for all to see. In recent years, we’ve been subjected to several of these tawdry sideshows and I suspect there are more to come. I posted recently on the proposal to exhume Leonardo da Vinci. And two weeks ago, I spotted an article on a Danish team who will soon exhume a famous 17th century astronomer, Tycho Brahe.

None of the subjects, I might add, has given consent for such scientific study. And I sometimes wonder about the motives of the researchers. The scientists who propose to exhume Tycho Brahe, for example, want to determine whether the famous astonomer was murdered or whether he died of natural cause. This hardly seems reason enough to rifle through a tomb and disturb the sleep of the astonomer.

In future, I’d like to see researchers and reporters alike treat the ancient dead in the same way we treat the recently deceased–with respect and decorum. Few of us would consider prying open a recent grave and poring over newly buried remains just to satisfy a point of idle curiosity. So why is it ok to do that to a 17th century astronomer?

When I was writing my book, The Mummy Congress, I was really struck by the highly professional way that serious mummy researchers treated the ancient dead. They never made jokes at the expense of the dead or talked lightly or unfeelingly about their ailments. Indeed, during the examinations of the bodies, they often spoke as if the mummies themselves could hear exactly what was said.

Poor Tutankhamun. I’m glad he couldn’t hear what people were saying today.

Arsenic and the Beginning of Mummification

December 21, 2009

Archaeologists have long puzzled over the artistically preserved bodies of nearly 200 ancient humans found along the Pacific coast of northern Chile and southern Peru. The bewigged and clay-covered remains, known as the Chinchorro mummies, resemble statues and date back 7000 years, making them the earliest artificially mummified bodies in the world. Later societies who practiced mummification tended to be politically and socially complex and reserved the privilege for adult elites. But the Chinchorro were different. They lived in a relatively simple society of fishers and seal and sea- lion hunters, and they started out mummifying young children. Why?

Research from an international team led by anthropologist Bernardo Arriaza of the University of Tarapaca in Arica, Chile, currently sheds new light on the Chinchorro people and supplies a possible explanation. By analyzing hair samples from 46 mummies from northern Chile, the team found that the Chinchorro ingested toxic levels of arsenic—a poison known to produce high rates of miscarriages and infant mortality—in their drinking water. Arriaza now theorizes that world’s oldest mummies were created by grief-stricken Chinchorro parents who suffered repeated losses of their children and who wanted to preserve their infants’ bodies and keep them above ground in shrinelike areas. This very early mummification practice, says Arriaza, “is an emotional response to an environmental contaminant.”

Excavators stumbled on the first Chinchorro mummies in Arica, Chile, in 1917, and subsequent studies by paleopathologists and physical anthropologists have revealed much about their preservation. The Chinchorro created their earliest mummies of children, including fetuses, by removing bacteria-ridden internal organs, packing body cavities with soil, strengthening limbs with sticks, coating the face with reddish-black clay, and adorning the head with a human-hair wig. Moreover, analysis has shown that they repeatedly repainted some of the clay masks to cover nicks and dents, strongly suggesting the mummies remained above ground, most likely in a shrine, for years after death. Eventually Chinchorro morticians extended the practice to adults, until they stopped making mummies in this distinctive style around 1700 B.C.

Arriaza began examining the possibility of arsenic poisoning among the Chinchorro in 2007, after reading about the toxic effects of this poison on human fetuses and infants. Arsenic occurs naturally in geological formations in many parts of the world, and as water weathers these strata, it carries the poison into local rivers. This hazard came to public attention in Chile in the 1960s, after the city of Antofagasta started drawing much of its water from a river that turned out to be laced with 860 micrograms of arsenic per liter— 86 times higher than World Health Association’s current provisional guideline. During the peak exposure from 1958 to 1965, infant mortality rates in Antofagasta soared by an estimated 18 to 24 %.

Arriaza suspected that the Chinchorro had suffered a similarly high infant mortality for exactly the same reason. The four earliest Chinchorro mummies—all children—came from the Camarones River Valley, where water tested as high as 1300 micrograms of arsenic per liter. So Arriaza collected hair samples from both Chinchorro and Pre-Inca mummies excavated from ten sites in northern Chile with the help of heavy equipment for sale collected by mutual international support, – whose water all tested above the WHO guidelines for arsenic, and then sent the samples to Dulasiri Amarasiriwardena, a chemist at Hampshire College in Amherst, for mass spectrometry testing. The mean arsenic values in hair from all ten sites pointed strongly to the chronic poisoning of the Chinchorro and other ancient peoples.

Many researchers may have assumed that environmental contamination was a major problem only for later industrial societies, but the new findings strongly suggest that this is far from true. “You can’t smell arsenic or taste it,” says Arriaza. “So the Chinchorro had no way of knowing they were being poisoned.”

Dogs for the Dead

November 30, 2009

Six years ago, the Department of Transportation in Washington State stumbled upon a huge, unforeseen problem on the Port Angeles waterfront. The department was in the midst of constructing a major new dry dock in the city when its workers suddenly began turning up ancient human bone. Subsequent investigations by archaeologists, historians, and elders of the Lower Elwha tribe revealed that a Klallam village known as Tse-whit-zen once stood on part of the prop0sed dry-dock site.

But here was the real sticking point. The site also contained a major burial ground brimming with Klallam graves: nearly 335 people had been laid to rest there. Moreover, some had clearly perished between A.D. 1780 and 1800, when diseases such as smallpox, measles and influenza carried by Spanish mariners swept through the region for the first time, decimating Native American villages. As David Rice, a senior archaeologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, later told The Seattle Times, a number of the graves contained more than one skeleton and bore signs of rare forms of ritual treatment, “which would be a spiritual attempt at trying to stop this event.”

In the end, the Department of Transportation did the right thing. It decided to abandon construction of the dry dock, after sinking nearly $60 million into the project. But the department clearly learned a crucial lesson from the disaster, and now it’s trying out a very new approach to its archaeological surveys of proposed development sites along the Port Angeles waterfront. It has brought in dogs–not just the garden-variety Fido, but four animals trained at the Institute for Canine Forensics in Woodside, California. These are corpse-sniffing dogs.

This was the first I had heard of such canines being used to detect human remains in archaeological sites. But I think they could potentially save developers, archaeologists and Native Americans a whole world of grief. According to the staff at the Institute for Canine Forensics, dogs can smell human remains that are buried as much as nine feet below the surface. And they can detect remains as old as 2000 years. “Human remains have a scent that never, ever goes away, especially a bone, even after it dries out,” one of the institute’s staff members told The Peninsula Daily News.

As the owner of a Labrador retriever, I’ve witnessed time and again the astonishing olfactory prowess of dogs, and I don’t doubt they could be trained to sniff out very ancient remains. If the Port Angeles project pans out–and I can’t imagine why it won’t– I think bringing in such trained dogs should become a standard procedure when North American archaeologists are surveying proposed development sites for possible ancient Native American cemeteries.