Written in Bones

by Bahn, Paul G.

• ISBN13: 9781552976593
• ISBN10: 1552976599
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Firefly Books Ltd

Summary

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 photographsHuman 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

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	6	(3)
A Way of Life	9	(36)
Natural Deaths	45	(38)
Deliberate Deaths	83	(52)
Burials	135	(30)
Mummies and Mummification	165	(21)
Index	186	(2)
Bibliography	188	(3)
Picture Credits	191	(1)
Contributors	192

Excerpts

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