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Osteoarchaeology: The Truth in Our Bones

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Universiteit Leiden

Osteoarchaeology: The Truth in Our Bones

268 ratings

This course is about what we can learn from examining the human skeleton, and how we can use this knowledge to reconstruct the lives of people who lived in the past. In archaeology and anthropology, human skeletal remains can provide unique insights into the past and the present; insights that cannot be gained otherwise. These insights are explored in five main themes spread out over five weeks of learning. First, it is shown how age-at-death, sex and stature can be estimated by the close examination of (archaeological) skeletal remains. In subsequent modules it is shown how human bones can provide information about the diseases and injuries that people suffered from and what they ate. Also, it is shown how the human skeleton provides information about the kinds of activities that people engaged in and about how they migrated and moved around their landscapes. In this course, you will examine all aspects of the human skeleton that can provide us with information about these different facets of life. Together we will explore the scientific field that is known as human osteoarchaeology. - Human, because it is about us and our ancestors, - Osteo, because it is about our bones, - Archaeology, because we use this information to better understand the behaviors and events experienced by past people. During the course, you will decipher the clues left behind in the skeletons of past peoples with the methods and techniques that are presented. You may also discover some clues hidden in your own skeleton and what they reveal about the life that you are living. Want to know more? You can take a look at the course trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJi22TxzpRw

From the lesson

Bones to Activity

Welcome to module four! This week is all about activity. What activities did people perform in the past? How did they move about, and how much? We will be answering these questions by studying many different aspects of the skeleton, like long bones, joints, the spine, and even teeth. We will be showing you what all these marks mean, and what they can tell us today about activities performed in the past.

Activity: Introduction5:43

Activity: the Musculoskeletal System6:23

Activity: Entheseal Changes11:16

Activity: Joint Degeneration13:38

Activity: Teeth as Tools9:22

Activity: Discussion3:47

Meet the Instructors

Andrea Waters-Rist
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Archaeology

Welcome back.

We're pleased you're joining us for the fourth weekly module of this course,

The Truth in Our Bones, How Human Skeletal Remains Tell Us About Past People.

This module is about some of the ways we can detect physical activity

from the skeleton and what types of activities we might be able to see.

Marks left in both your bones and

your teeth can leave clues about the activities you commonly engaged in.

Two terms you'll hear us use often need to be defined.

Those are robust and gracile.

Robust refers to a structure or feature that is heavier and bulkier.

In the case of marks in the skeleton, a considerable part of the cause of

robusticity is large and heavily used muscles and gracile is the opposite.

It refers to a light and slender structure feature

associated with correspondingly smaller and less intensively used muscles.

These days you may categorize the range of one's activities into something like

occupations or your job versus what you do in your leisure time, or for fun.

In much of the past, and indeed for many people living today,

such a strict division didn't really exist,

at least not in regards to something like a five day a week, nine to five job.

And I bring this up to put the concept of activity into a useful framework

whereby we keep in mind that, in a lot of cases,

the idea of every person having a specific job or

occupation doesn't necessarily fit that well with the way life worked in the past.

And this is why it's more appropriate in many cases at least,

to speak of solely physical activity rather than occupation

in terms of what we can detect from your skeleton.

We are able to see a long term average,

the result of years of repetitive physical activity, not occasional or brief bouts.

So people worked when it was necessary to obtain the food and

materials needed to survive.

Throughout the year and, indeed, throughout one's entire lifetime,

that took varying amounts of time depending on numerous variables

including access to resources, group cooperation, and the division of labour.

The extent of class division and inequality in a society.

And individual factors that bolstered or impeded one's ability and

desire to work at certain tasks and many, many more variables.

There's an online question in the discussion forum that asks you about this.

What motivates you to work?

This includes academic work like this MOOC,

or maybe not work as the case may be.

And whether this work is partially or primarily physical.

Maybe you spend far too much time sitting at a desk like I do.

And think about how this would have been different in the past,

particularly before the commercialization of labour and market economies.

The physical activities that you engage in over the course of your life mould and

shape your bones and can lead distinctive marks on your bones and teeth.

Osteoarchaeologists are very interested in using this phenomenon

to reconstruct aspects of what people did in the past.

For example, we can discern what muscles were the most heavily used and

consider what activities would cause that pattern.

We can investigate the similarities and differences between males and

females in regards to markers of physical activity.

And then, use that to investigate the gendered division of labour

in a past society.

This can vary quite a bit between populations.

We can look at how these activity markers develop with age,

to see at what age subadults began engaging in grown up tasks.

It's often at a younger age than what we see today,

as the Western concept of childhood is itself a rather recent invention.

And we can track the rate of activity marker development

to infer how intensively an activity was conducted.

So that should give you a better idea of what we do and

do not mean by physical activity.

We're not referring to the couple of times last year that you went to the gym.

That's not going to show up in your bones.

We are referring to something,

maybe you spent many years of your life digging holes in the ground.

Say if you're an archaeologist, or a construction worker, or gardener, or

maybe you've spent several decades chewing on pens when you study and work.

There are a lot of possibilities as you might imagine.

Stick with us to learn more.

In this introduction to physical activity video,

you've learned about what we mean by physical activity and osteoarchaeology.

That it's not necessarily the same thing as occupation and

that we see evidence of long-term, repetitive behaviours.

We want you to think about how the physical activity you personally engage in

or perhaps don't engage in, will be reflected in your bones.

Coming up next is a video on the musculoskeletal system.

In order to set you up to understand how your muscles and bones interact to

create the marks on the skeleton we can use to infer activity patterns.

See you there.

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