Classes were hard. I soon discovered I was about the only person who didn't have a background in osteology, whether that be in pre-med, previous archaeological osteology classes, or zooarchaeology. This was somewhat terrifying, especially as the amount of information being dumped on us (that for most were simply a nice refresher) was staggering, complex and confusing to someone without the first clue about human anatomy.
I ordered some extra textbooks, happily instantly hit it off with another american girl called Jenessa in my class that hadn't been on the field trip, and thus picked the brains constantly of two extremely intelligent individuals who already knew all this stuff - win! If nothing else, I made two amazing friends that year.
I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the lab, using the reference collection to try and learn my stuff. Osteoarchaeology requires a lot of knowledge, and thus theory, however first and foremost, it is a hands-on class. To really know bones, you have to hold them, study them, turn them over, look at different examples as the range of differences within each element (bone) is surprising. Here's one example I prepared earlier!
Class usually went like this: The first part was a lecture, for my human osteology class this involved an all to brief run down on the part of the skeleton we were focusing on that day (for example, legs and feet) we would be given the name of each bone, and then the name of each part of the bone we needed to know (for some such as the humerus, there were perhaps only ten, for others, such as the cranium, there were well over a hundred).
Then we were let loose on the reference collection, pull out drawers full of each specific element. Adolescents were kept in separate drawers due to the fragility of their bones, but variation was still pretty obvious between examples, due to age, sex, illnesses or breakages.
This, for example is a sternum which felt abnormally light, the lack of bone density may have been due to osteopenia - this could be due to malnutrition, however due to a number of other indicators from this individual, I eventually concluded the most likely diagnosis was Tuberculosis.
Bioanthropology ran along the same lines, except the lecture would focus on things such as osteological sex, age-at-death, or pathologies. Each table would then be given a full (real) skeleton in a box to assemble onto the table.
This was helpful in two ways, firstly, it was brilliant practice at how to correctly assemble a skeleton, especially for practicing which bone is the left and which is the right (difficult). Each box we were given was specially picked as a good example of whatever we had discussed that day, so for example if we had discussed leprosy, tuberculosis and syphilis (it was a good day) we would have to do a differential diagnosis on our skeleton to try and find physical evidence of pathologies and diagnose the possibilities of what it could be. (Pictured, a naturally healed rib break)
This, it was stressed to us, is not an exact science and one should never say it is certain that the individual had a specific disease. Instead, we rule out every disease possible, then analyse what evidence there is for whichever pathologies left are possible, and indicate which is the most likely based on the specific indications (and of course, people often suffered from multiple problems at once, just to complicate the picture).
To make it even more difficult, most pathologies don't even show up on skeletal remains. The pathology must be chronic so that the bones have enough time to be altered (such as in this case, where the individual suffered from angular kyphosis (just look at that bent spine).
And then there were the bone tests, my most hated enemy, and the reason I spent semester one genuinely terrified I was going to fail. It didn't help our professor specialised in primates, and it was her favourite thing to mix both primate and human bones into the test, to see if we could tell the difference (they are more similar than you might expect). I would enter the room and a large table would be set up, with 20 'stations' each one holding a single bone. I had exactly 1 minute to look at the bone decide if it was human, and if it was human was it an adult or an immature, whether it was the left or the right bone, name the bone, and then often name the labelled element on the bone (so for example, I might have to write adult left humerus, the label is pointing at the lateral epicondyle) and then move on to the next bone.
The last bone on the table was in a bag, and no, you couldn't look in the bag. You had to reach your hand in, and feel the bone, and try and work out what it was simply by touch, because you know, if I ever go blind and still want to be an osteoarchaeologist.. (I never managed to get the correct answer even once). It was pure evil I tell you, the suffering was real. Did I mention these tests made up half of our grade?
But to cheer you up, I've included this snazzy photo of some poor soul who lost three of their teeth antimortem (before death) and had advanced caries and abscesses (nasty nasty things). It would have hurt. A lot .
And that's not even mentioning the zooarchaeology component, where ALL THE BONES WERE DIFFERENT. Is it surprising to now tell you I actually enjoyed all this, in a I-had-breakdowns-every-week-for-the-first-month sort of way? But there were good things too - more on that in the next post!
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