This Month at Forbes - Skull Coin, Citizen Archaeology, Gladiator DNA, Scurvy, Bundy Militia, La Jolla Fishermen, and Bronze Age Disability
Here are the things I wrote about in January on my Forbes blog:
- 4 January - Here's the Anatomical Story Behind That New £2 Shakespeare Skull Coin. A super cool new coin (sadly, not an American one) has a skull with a metopic suture on it. I went behind the scenes to find out why.
- 12 January - Young Woman with Disabilities Found in Artifact-Packed Bronze Age Burial. A neat new article by a colleague details an arm deformity in a young woman from Dilmun, in contemporary Bahrain.
- 13 January - Florida Archaeologists Condemn Proposed 'Citizen Archaeology' Permit. This terrible bill would allow people to take artifacts from Florida waterways if they register for a $100 permit. Pretty much all archaeologists in the state have panned this proposal.
- 19 January - DNA Confirms Headless Roman-Era Gladiator Not from Britain - And Probably Not a Gladiator. New DNA work on the "headless Romans" produced some interesting results. Including the possibility that these people are not gladiators after all.
- 21 January - Earliest Case of Scurvy in Ancient Egypt Detected by Archaeologists. Good work from another colleague, who found probable scurvy in a one-year-old kid from Pre-dynastic Egypt.
- 21 January - Bundy Militia Compared to ISIS for Pawing through Native American Artifacts, Destroying Sites. This ended up being a pretty popular post, as the militia folks recorded themselves looking at artifacts stored in the basement of the wildlife reserve.
- 30 January - Two 9,500-year-old Skeletons Found at UC San Diego President's House Will Return to Tribes. After being excavated in the 1970s, it looks like these two palaeoindian skeletons will be returned to tribes soon.
Comments
So, do we have any reason to believe that these people ate *very* low levels of vegetables and fruits, or cooked everything very thoroughly?
Alternatively, I recall reading that many of the awful symptoms that the (upper-class) 18th-century English attributed to teething were in fact scurvy -- due to the practice of weaning, at about one year, to exclusively cooked grains.
Any thoughts? Do we have other evidence of infantile scurvy in various cultures?
At any rate, the palaeopathology of scurvy is a growing interest in the field, and researchers like Megan Brickley and Sian Halcrow have done considerable work on it around the world and in various time periods, particularly in children. If you're interested in the topic, I'd highly recommend checking out their respective articles and books on the topic. I don't pretend to know everything about infantile scurvy, and they're the ones I'd consult for any questions I had!