So today was the day of the human remains practical in Environmental Archaeology. I've been looking forward to it for a while, just because it sounded cool. Not only was it cool, it was very very interesting.
We were presented with a set of bones from a few thousand years ago, Bronze Age I think and tasked with determining the age, sex and height of the person when they croaked. We had to look at things like bone fusion, wearing of the teeth, shape of the pelvis etc . . .
As cool and fascinating as it was, it was also a little creepy to be handling human remains. Leg and arm bones were fine, as were toes, knees and vertebrae. It was when handling the skull that the hairs started to twitch on the back of my neck. Upon turning it over and viewing it from the inside (like a mask) the hairs on my neck were fully erect and I started to wince as I noticed the brittlness of the eye sockets. Then came the part where we had to look for exposed dentine on the teeth. Holding a human skull and examining the teeth, watching them wiggle and shake around as I rotated the poor blokes loaf in my sweaty hands, sent shivvers up and down my spine and caused a tight knot to form in my gut. I soon put it down and moved onto measuring the far less creepy femur, thinking of how nice it would be for the dog to toss around the garden.
Despite the creepiness factor, it was fascinating and amazing to have the opportunity to work with something from so far back in history. A clay pot or an arrowhead would have been sufficient to give me the wow factor, but ancient human bones were something that I thought I'd only ever see on the Discovery channel. I'm actually quite looking forward to doing the write up for it and hoping to learn a lot more about the things that we can determine from thousands of years old remains. I'm hoping there is another archaeology based module that I can take next semester.
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