All That Remains

by Sue Black

  The exposure and loss of anonymity that comes with appearing on television is a mixed blessing. It is unnerving to be considered public property by total strangers, whether they are approaching you to praise or criticise. Most people just want to tell you how much they enjoyed the programme but there are those who are not shy to comment on your looks, or something you said with which they vehemently disagree, or, of course, to point out that you are not very bright.

  Three of the four presenters were women – something that was also remarked upon, and perhaps prompted more letters and emails of a personal nature than would be usual for the male of the species. Of the ‘three witches of Dundee’, as we were so aptly named, Xanthe Mallett, a forensic anthropologist and criminologist, was the target of quite a lot of inappropriate communications, but then, she is a very striking young lady. Caroline Wilkinson, our facial reconstruction specialist, would be sent gentle poems about the faces she restored and complimented on her skills as a sympathetic artist. As for me, I seemed to receive a disproportionate number of letters from inmates of HM prisons asking if I could help get them out, because ‘honestly, it wasn’t me who murdered my wife’. Our following within certain sectors of society also led to the programme being dubbed Lesbian Cold Case, which rather excluded poor old Wolfram Meier-Augenstein, our expert in isotope analysis, though I suspect the professor was not sorry to be overlooked.

  On the plus side, we had many more lovely emails and letters from viewers who simply enjoyed discovering new things, and the contact with the public served to remind us that people are genuinely interested in learning about what the bodies of our ancestors can tell us and how we can use the science designed for the courtroom to help us delve into the lives of the past. There were many sad and poignant moments when we really felt that bringing back the stories of ordinary people, not the kings, the bishops or the warriors, but the children and the working girls, demonstrated that they had not been forgotten. Their stories had just been written in a language that required interpretation by forensic anthropology.

  One sad case was the preserved anatomical specimen of a little boy of around eight years of age. This undocumented mummified child had been found in a cupboard in my department at Dundee University. His soft tissue had been dissected away, leaving only his skeleton and his artificially perfused arterial system. We knew nothing about him and didn’t know what to do with him, so we hoped that the research carried out for the programme would lead us somewhere interesting.

  It all started well but quickly became very dark. The child was not malnourished, and his death was not obviously medically explainable. The dating of his remains told us that he had died before the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act. Could we be looking at the victim of one of the infamous child murders perpetrated at a time when anatomists would pay for a child’s body by the inch? Or had he been stolen from his grave by the resurrectionists, the body-snatchers employed by anatomists to meet the demand for cadavers to train students and serve the interests of pioneering researchers? We know that the eminent anatomist William Hunter and the anatomist John Barclay were both performing vascular perfusions at that time and analysis of the chemicals present in the remains of our boy revealed them to be entirely consistent with those used by Hunter and his followers. The irony of anatomists uncovering the possible misdemeanours of previous anatomists was not lost on us.

  At the end of the programme we were left with a decision we had not anticipated at the outset. What should we now do with this little boy’s body? Should he remain within our department, go to a surgeon’s museum or be given a proper burial? We were unanimous in opting for the latter. I have an aversion to seeing human remains being displayed like curiosities in a shop window for the titillation of onlookers. There is a fine line between education and entertainment and, in our hearts, we know when something is right and when it is wrong. The obvious yardstick is to imagine this was your son. What would you want? Unfortunately, it proved difficult to gain the necessary permissions to have him buried and he currently resides in a surgeons’ museum, away from the public gaze, until his fate can finally be settled.

  Another tragic figure was ‘Crossbones Girl’, a young woman in her late teens, almost certainly a prostitute, found in a pauper’s grave in Cross Bones Cemetery in Southwark, south London. She had died horribly disfigured by tertiary syphilis, doubtless contracted through her occupation. Given the progress of the disease, we suspected that she couldn’t have been much more than ten or twelve when she was first infected, which provided a chilling insight into the world of nineteenth-century child prostitution. When we reconstructed her face, the devastation wreaked by this condition on such a young person was shocking to see. Caroline then did a second reconstruction, showing how she would have looked if she had been healthy or could have been cured by penicillin. It is inevitable that we view an anonymous archaeological human skeleton with a certain amount of detachment but seeing the face of the young, flesh-and-blood woman more or less as she was, and as she could have been if fate had dealt her a better hand, dramatically brought home to everyone that we were dealing with a real person who had her own hopes, dreams and character; with a life that could be reconstructed almost to the point where we might have been able to return her name to her. Almost, but not quite.

  The story that generated the biggest postbag concerned the skeletons of a woman and three babies excavated in Baldock, Hertfordshire, which dated from Roman times. The young woman had been found face down in a grave with the first set of newborn remains lying near her right shoulder. Further digging exposed a second neonatal skeleton between her legs. The third baby was still inside her pelvic cavity. What happened to her still happens today in many parts of the world where medicine is ill-equipped to deal with cephalopelvic disproportion (the disharmony between maternal pelvic dimensions and the size of the baby’s head). It can also occur when the baby fails to turn in the uterus and presents in a breech position. Intervention to assist a birth that cannot take place naturally is relatively easy and safe nowadays, in developed countries, at least. But not in Roman Baldock.

  The first child would have been successfully delivered, although we can never know whether it was born dead, or born alive and died shortly afterwards. The second triplet, who caused the problem, probably remained stuck in the birth canal, either because it was in the breech position (which was consistent with the arrangement of the skeleton) or because it just wouldn’t fit through. It is likely that the mother died trying to give birth to this second child and was buried alongside her first baby. As she and the second triplet began to decompose there would have been a build-up of gases in her body which, assisted by a decompression of the baby’s skull, finally succeeded in expelling the infant long after both their deaths in what is known as a ‘coffin birth’. The third child never left the womb and died there, its exit blocked by the sibling stuck in the birth canal. What a heartbreaking outcome to an event that should have been a happy one but which instead resulted in four deaths.

  More recently, my team at Dundee University assisted with a fascinating archaeological case in Ross-shire after a human skeleton turned up during the excavation of a cave at Rosemarkie, on the Black Isle just north of Inverness, a place suffused for me with memories of family days out in my childhood – especially that picnic when Uncle Willie got stuck in his beach chair. I like coincidences, and I really like it when times or places you have known in the past re-emerge in your life.

  We agreed to undertake a study of the remains, using our forensic understanding of trauma analysis to uncover what had befallen this chap, for the Rosemarkie Caves project, a partnership set up between the North of Scotland Archaeology Society and the local community to investigate the archaeology of the caves, who used them, why and when.

  The skeleton had been found under the sand at the back of what is known locally as Smelter’s Cave, to the north of the Highland village. Radiocarbon-dating revealed that in all likelihood the man had lived during the Pic
tish period, before the arrival of the Vikings, in the late iron and early mediaeval ages. He was lying on his back in a ‘butterfly’ pose. His hips were flexed and his ankles crossed, splaying his knees. Between the knees a very large stone had been placed. His hands were on his waist or hips and stones had been placed along his arms. Another stone had been laid on his chest. The theory was that perhaps these were intended to keep the body weighed down to prevent it rising up in anger or retaliation, or perhaps just to ensure that he didn’t float away on the tide.

  Judging by the extent of the trauma to his skull, it was clear that he had met a violent end. There were no injuries to the rest of his body, and in all other respects he was a healthy, fit young man, probably in his thirties.

  Trauma analysis is a logical deductive process that requires an appreciation of how bone behaves, how that behaviour alters when the bone is disrupted and subsequently suffers additional traumatic incidents, and how these can be sequenced. A possible implement, or implements, can then be identified. By looking at the position of the fractures and their relationship to each other, we can come up with a likely timeline of events showing the order in which the injuries were caused and what was used to inflict them.

  It seems that the first assault on Rosemarkie Man was made to the right side of his mouth, where his teeth were smashed at the front as a result of being struck hard by some projectile, perhaps a spear or a lance or pole of some kind: it made a relatively neat and tidy entry and didn’t penetrate all the way through to his vertebral column or appear to cause any further damage. He had definitely been alive when this occurred as the crown of one of his teeth was found in his chest cavity – in all likelihood he inhaled it after the impact.

  Next came a very powerful wallop to the left side of his jaw, maybe from a fist, or perhaps the leading edge of a fighting stick, which would also fit with the circular shape of the fractures to the teeth on the right. This caused fractures to the main body of the jaw and at both joints where it articulates with the skull. The fracturing continued internally into the sphenoid bone at the base of the skull. The force of the second blow probably knocked the man backwards and, as he fell, his head made contact with a hard surface – perhaps the stones on the beach where he was buried. This set in motion multiple fractures that spread across his skull from the point of impact, which was slightly to the left-hand side of the back of his head.

  While he lay on his right side his assailant, or assailants, evidently bent on making sure he didn’t get up again, drove a rounded weapon, similar in size and shape to the one that fractured his teeth, into his skull through the temple behind his left eye. It exited in the same position on the opposite side, behind his right eye. The coup de grâce was a large, penetrating wound to the top of his head, delivered with such violence that it shattered the remaining parts of the cranium.

  I was invited to Cromarty to present our findings to the local historical society. The skeleton had been found on the very last day of the excavations and the team decided to keep it under wraps to give the community an exciting surprise. Being from Inverness, I am quite well known in that part of the world, so there was a buzz of speculation as to why I was going to be attending their meeting. When, in the final slide of his presentation, the team leader unveiled a photograph of Rosemarkie Man in situ, an audible gasp went around the room. I then stood up, talked the audience through who our man was and what had happened to him and, finally, revealed a beautiful facial reconstruction created by my colleague Chris Rynn. The audience were thrilled.

  Afterwards, one of the ladies told me she was so exhausted she was going home to have a lie down. Instead of the dry lecture on archaeological finds she had been expecting, she had been taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions by the story of the brutal murder of a local man. She had even looked into the eyes of the victim, and at a face so lifelike that, though he had been dead for 1,400 years, it would not have been out of place on the streets of Rosemarkie that day. I just love the fact that humans cannot fail to be affected by the stories of other humans, even those who lived centuries ago, and how they embrace these forerunners as part of their neighbourhood because they once occupied the same patch of earth on our planet. People from Rosemarkie and the surrounding area even started sending us photos of their sons and grandsons, pointing out their resemblance to our Pictish man and suggesting that they might be related to him.

  Such ancient archaeological studies bring huge satisfaction in terms of unravelling the complexities of the presentation of a body, but from the perspective of a forensic anthropologist they are frustrating, too, in that, no matter how certain we may be in our minds about how a person came to grief, there is nobody who can confirm whether we are right or give us any guidance as to where we might have gone wrong. As I first discovered as a young student while working on my Beaker culture project, it is the lack of evidential proof that is most vexing. For me, then, the more recent any foray into the archaeological world, the more rewarding it is likely to be as there is a greater chance of finding some documentary evidence that can help us to piece together more accurately the lives we are investigating and rebuild them on more solid foundations.

  That is probably why I became so preoccupied with a quirky little nineteenth-century Irishman I encountered in 1991, when we excavated the crypt of St Barnabas Church in west Kensington, London. The ceiling of the vault was starting to crack and there was a genuine fear of collapse if the problem was not addressed. We were involved because the crypt had been used for burials and the bodies would have to be removed before the builders could come in to shore up the walls. We were given permission by the Archdiocese of London to carry out a recovery mission that would allow the coffins to be emptied, the bodies cremated and the ashes returned to consecrated ground.

  The burials were in triple coffins typical of the early 1800s for those who could afford them. These multi-layered receptacles were like Russian Matryoshka dolls. There would be an outer wooden coffin, sometimes covered with fabric and featuring ornamental handles and other fittings in addition to a plate bearing the name and date of death of the occupant. Inside this was a lead coffin shell, sealed by a plumber and decorated with his bespoke patterning, also carrying a nameplate giving the details of the deceased. These lead coffins were designed to retain body fluids and were often lined with bran to soak up the foul decomposition liquor. They also ensured that the smell was contained and did not escape and waft upward into the church to offend the delicate noses of parishioners during their Sunday devotions.

  Finally, there was a more perfunctory inner coffin made of cheaper wood, often elm, which functioned simply as a lining for the lead casket. Within this last box the deceased would lie in full repose, head resting on a pillow stuffed with horsehair, surrounded by cotton punched with holes to resemble more expensive broderie Anglaise fabric and usually dressed in their finest clothes.

  By the time we arrived to excavate the remains, the outer coffins had all but disintegrated, leaving only remnants of wood and coffin furniture. The durable sealed lead coffins were another matter. We had to open these hugely heavy containers, like giant preserving tin cans, to get at the inner wooden coffins and remove what was left of the deceased. We had been granted permission to study and photograph the remains as a record of who had been interred there. The purpose of our research was to determine whether DNA could be extracted from these nineteenth-century burials. Could the genetic code survive lead coffin interment?

  The answer, unfortunately, was no. As the body decomposes the fluids are slightly acidic. Because they had nowhere to drain, they had reacted with the wood of the inner coffin to form a weak humic acid, which strips the bonds between the base pairs (the building blocks of the DNA double helix) and the helical backbone. So the genomic information had dissolved into a thick, black soupy deposit at the bottom of the coffins, resembling a rich chocolate mousse (anatomists are prone to using food analogies to describe substances they encounter – not terribly appro
priate, perhaps, but effective).

  Given the number of early nineteenth-century burials and the proximity of the church to Kensington Barracks, it was not surprising that many of the coffin plates suggested strong military connections. Thanks to the various wars going on in Europe at this time, records from the period are exceptionally comprehensive. We had invited staff from the National Army Museum in Chelsea to keep a watching brief on our activities and to advise us on any incumbents who might be of historical note.

  One burial in particular was of great interest to them. It was not the interred lady, Everilda Chesney, herself who caused the excitement but her husband, General Francis Rawdon Chesney of the Royal Artillery, celebrated for many achievements but especially for his epic descent of the Euphrates river in a steamer – a journey that demonstrated the possibilities of a new, shorter route to India that could cut out the long, treacherous voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. We left Everilda’s coffin until last, just in case we got behind schedule, in the hope that the interest in her would buy us some extra time if necessary. We had only ten working days to open, record and transfer the incumbents of over sixty lead coffins.