Anthroplogy workshop to learn about skeletons...
This is from a website I made and was hosted by geocities. It was a long time ago that geocities deleted all the webpages from the early days of individual internet. Historically it’s a desaster.
This pictures are about 20 years old. They had been taken by student and given to anybody, who wanted to remember the practical course. That’s way before today, where everybody makes snapshots with their phones. I’m glad I have them.
I did a tumblr post about it and now host it here.
This is a collection of photographs of a practical course of biological Anthropology. From way back…
The Skeleton
First lesson was to make a complete analysis of a skeleton.
The students had to identify the bones, sort them and place them on the table. The sex and the age had to be determined and injuries and health problems during the life, if possible the cause of death.
The male skeleton was from a grave field of Neuburg an der Donau, about 14. century. It turned out to be an older man, about 60 years old, 6" tall, who once broke his leg, the tibia, and probably had a stiff leg from atrosis. His teeth were completely ground of and he had paradontosis.
The other skeleton was from our partner group. The old bones are rather delicate and the skull is always placed on a sand cushion.
The Ossuary
This is a bone pile found in a grave hole. This was secondary burial - in other words, the bones had been placed later in that hole. Most them were broken or lost. We had to determine how many people where buried in that grave, their age, gender and maybe cause of death, in case of violence.
Everybody searched for a different kind of bone and sorted them on his desk. Mine were hip bones. In the end they were all counted and the number written on the black board. It turned out that they were from 21 adults and 8 children.
Boxes with the bones were just dumped on the table and a busy search began. With a bit of training you can recognize even from a fragment what part of the skeleton you are holding in your hand, or if it is from an animal.
The pile is already considerably smaller. The little pieces are the most difficult, until you have only crumbs left over.
My place is on lower left side. Several rows of hip bones, sorted by gender and age. The row on lower left are kids bones from 1-8 years old. It is always sad to deal with kids’ skeletons.
Upper left is skull bones, female are thinner than male. Upper and lower right are femurs and tibias.
Here are shoulder blades and bones from the arm.