Unearthed skeletons reveal tough lives of Early Medieval women
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Archaeologists working at a site in south Wales have uncovered dozens of skeletons – mostly women – which offer a 'window into a really poorly understood period of history.'
Dating from the Early Medieval era, which ran from 400 to 1100 AD, the skeletons are from 'a period which is very poorly documented in historical sources, and for which we have comparatively few archaeological sites,' project leader Andy Seaman, a reader in early mediaeval archaeology at Cardiff University, told CNN on Wednesday.
A total of 41 skeletons have been excavated so far, the majority of which belong to women who appear to have had a tough existence working in agriculture, he said.
They were buried in individual graves and lived around 500 to 600 AD.
'Their daily life appears to have been quite hard,' said Seaman, adding that researchers have uncovered evidence of arthritis and degenerative joint diseases, as well as broken bones and healed fractures.
'They weren't a very healthy bunch of individuals, but they were caring for each other,' he said, citing evidence of healed leg fractures and one instance of a broken neck, believed to have resulted from agricultural accidents.
Other findings include the fact that these people don't appear to have eaten fish, despite the site's close proximity to the sea, and also that people would have lived close to the site, perhaps even eating and drinking within the cemetery, Seaman said.
Despite the injuries and disease detected on the remains, researchers also uncovered evidence that some of the people within the graves were high-status individuals who would have had contact with mainland Europe.
For example, there were fragments of very fine glass drinking vessels that would have been imported from southwestern France, Seaman said.
'The contrast between the high status material and the poor health of the individuals is not too surprising,' he explained.
'This was a period in which the difference between the rich and the poor wasn't very great, and it seems like everybody was involved to a greater or lesser extent in agriculture,' said Seaman.
'It's high status activity happening within the cemetery, that doesn't need to mean that every individual is necessarily a high status person,' he added.
Next, the team plans to research whether people, as well as goods, would have traveled between Wales and southwestern France, as well as excavating the rest of the site, which is estimated to be home to the remains of around 80 people in total.
Bioarchaeologist Katie Faillace, also based at Cardiff University, said work at the cemetery is progressing well.
'We're at a really exciting stage now, where we're starting to build up a fuller picture of the people buried at the cemetery. Our initial isotopic work suggests many of the people have local origins,' she said in a statement published by the university on Wednesday.
'DNA tests have been taken so our lab work will reveal more details in the coming months.'
Once all of the remains have been excavated and analyzed, they will be reinterred at the cemetery as they would have been when they were first buried, and the site will be opened to visitors, Seaman said.
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The scientists rated the results as 'realistic' or 'unrealistic,' based on their own paleographic experience, and found that Enoch had given realistic results on 79% of the samples. Some of the manuscripts in the study were found to be 50 to 100 years older than formerly thought, Popović said. One sample from a scroll known to contain verse from the Book of Daniel was once believed to date to the second century BC. 'That was a generation after the original author,' Popović said, 'and now with the carbon 14, we securely move it (further back) to the time of the author.' Another manuscript, with verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes, also dates older, Popović added. 'The manuscript was previously dated on paleographic grounds to 175 to 125 BCE, but now Enoch suggests 300 to 240 BCE,' he said. Eventually, artificial intelligence could supplant carbon 14 as a method of dating manuscripts, Popović suggested. 'Carbon 14 is destructive,' he said, 'because you need to cut off a little piece of the Dead Sea Scroll, and then it's gone. It's only 7 milligrams, but it's still stuff that you lose. With Enoch, you don't have to do any of this. This a first step. There are all sorts of possibilities to improve Enoch further.' If the team pushes forward with Enoch's development, Popović believes it could be used to assess scripts such as Syriac, Arabic, Greek and Latin. Scholars who were not involved with the study were encouraged by the findings. Having both AI and an enhanced carbon 14 dating method allows a level of calibration across both methodologies that is helpful, according to Charlotte Hempel, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. 'The pronounced pattern seems to be that AI offers a narrower window within the Carbon 14 window,' she said via email. 'I wonder whether this suggests a higher level of precision, which would be extremely exciting.' The study represents a first attempt to harness AI technology to extend existing scientific knowledge from carbon 14 dating of certain manuscripts to other manuscripts, said Lawrence H. Schiffman, Global Distinguished Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. 'To some extent, it is not yet clear whether or not the new method will provide us with reliable information on texts that have not yet been Carbon-14 dated,' he added via email. 'The interesting comments regarding revision of the dating of some manuscripts that may be expected through further development of this approach or new carbon-14 dating, while not new to this study, constitute a very important observation about the field of Dead Sea Scrolls in general.' Commenting on the computational aspects of the study, Brent Seales, the Alumni Professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, said the approach taken by the authors seems rigorous even if the sample sizes are small. Using AI to completely replace carbon dating may be premature, however. '(AI) is a useful tool to incorporate into the broader picture, and to make estimates in the absence of Carbon-14 based on the witness of other similar fragments,' Seales wrote in an email. 'Like everything with machine learning, and like a fine wine, it should get better over time and with more samples. The dating of ancient manuscripts is an extremely difficult problem, with sparse data and heavy constraints on access and expertise. Bravo to the team for this data-driven contribution that takes a massive step forward.'
