A few months ago, the news media carried a story about "Bones of Leper Warrior found in Medieval Cemetery" in central Italy. The publication by Mauro Rubini and Paola Zaio was in early view at the time and was just published in the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science (see citation below). I noticed that Katy Meyers blogged about it today over at Bones Don't Lie, but I'm afraid I can't be as charitable as she is in pointing out the flaws.
|8th c Avar Warrior|
(credit: Wikimedia commons)
The authors offer no evidence to back up their claim that the cemetery was the burial place of people of different geographical origins, aside from the off-hand statement that "the multicultural context of the necropolis is shown by the presence of Lombard, indigenous, and Asian grave goods" (p. 1552). Sure, different populations may have different artifacts, but the presence of, say, "typical Avar stirrups" does not prove an individual's ethnicity or background, nor does the similarity of the graves to "Pazyryk burials in the placement of the horse, body and grave goods" (ibid.). As every bioarchaeology student knows from reading The Archaeology of Death and Burial (Parker Pearson 1999), a grave and its associated goods is much more likely to represent the values and mores of the group burying a person than of the person himself. It's rather curious that Rubino and Zaio include a lengthy explanation of the fact that the Avars were not a distinct ethnic population but rather were "a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic population [... and] a union of multiple cultural patterns" (p. 1551) immediately before talking about the distinct "Asian" (whatever that means) presence in the Campochiaro cemetery.
Especially problematic is Rubini and Zaio's claim that the Lombard/Avar/indigenous classification is "supported also by the preliminary anthropological study of the skeletal sample" (p. 1552). The study is not specified here, but in the authors' later description of the three graves of interest, the questionable analysis becomes clear (pp. 1554-6):
Grave n. 20 (see Fig. 3) Individual of male sex, with age at death over 55 years. Height was estimated at about 161.5 cm. The skull shows, according to the suggestions of Corrain (2002), characteristics of Mongolic type: dolicomorphous with a superior profile of ovoid shape, flat face and large, low orbit.
[...] Grave n. 102 (Fig. 5) Individual of male sex, with age at death 50-55 years. Height was estimated at about 169.7 cm. According to the suggestions of Corrain (2002), the skull shows characteristics of the Dinarico-Adriatic type: brachimorphous with superior profile of ovoid shape and narrow frontal.Just as biological anthropology in the U.S. in the 19th century was influenced by Samuel Morton's racist ideology in the construction of biological "types" and "races" (q.v. yesterday's post), biological anthropology in 19th century Italy was influenced by Cesare Lombroso's theory of atavism and "born criminals." Morton interpreted his data on skull shape to fit his preconceived notions of race, and Lombroso did the same to fit ideas of "criminals," who all too often included the economically disadvantaged south Italians (Killgrove 2005).
[...] Grave n. 108 (Fig. 7) Individual of male sex, with age at death over 50 years. Height was estimated at about 161.1 cm. The skull shows a mesomorphous shape with a long and narrow face.
Within biological anthropology in the U.S., we have worked hard to move on from Samuel Morton, Carleton Coon, and the use of the cephalic index in general. So it always disheartens me when clearly archaic terminology is used to discuss skeletons. Mongolic and Dinarico-Adriatic types? Dolico-, brachi- and mesomorphous? These terms have no place in today's biological anthropology, which is focused on understanding the diversity of the human population, both modern and ancient. Skulls are not pots - we can't create a typology of cranial features and expect to be able to pick someone's head out of a lineup. When we do this, we inevitably learn by using alternate methods that inter-population variation is low and gene flow was considerable (e.g., Killgrove 2009). Classifications such as Dinarico-Adriatic are based on Coon's The Races of Europe (1939), and we've pretty clearly posthumously castigated Coon for advancing segregation in the U.S. in spite of the lack of scientific data to support clear "racial" differences.
There's absolutely no evidence within the Rubini and Zaio article that the three individuals of interest were from another geographic area - skull morphology doesn't cut it, and "ethnic" artifacts in the grave don't convince me either. Were these "warriors from the East" as the article title implies? Maybe. But I'll need to see some aDNA or isotope data to consider the claim to be plausible.
|Skull of the Leper Warrior|
(credit: Rubini and Zaio, fig. 8a)
While I don't want to take away from Rubini and Zaio's fascinating discovery of the leper warrior, I do want to point out their employment of problematic and archaic terminology in discussing skeletal remains. It surprises me that in the 21st century, anthropologists are still using these racially-tinged terms, and it surprises me even more that the authors claim they've found "Eastern" people with no real evidence of it.
M. Rubini & P. Zaio (2011). Warriors from the East. Skeletal evidence of warfare from a Lombard-Avar cemetery in central Italy (Campochiaro, Molise, 6th-8th century AD) Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (7), 1551-1559 : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.020
- C. Coon (1939). The Races of Europe. The Macmillan Company.
- K. Killgrove (2009). Rethinking taxonomies: skeletal variation on the North Carolina coastal plain. Southeastern Archaeology, 28 (1), 87-100.
- K. Killgrove (2005). Bioarchaeology in the Roman World. M.A. thesis, Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
- M. Parker Pearson (1999). The Archaeology of Death and Burial. Texas A&M University Press.