06 • Profile


Adam Campbell chats with a former dental surgeon now palaeopathologist


WRITTEN IN THE BONES… AND TEETH


I


F THE eyes are the windows on the soul of the living, then the teeth, jaws and skeleton are, it seems, the keys to the physique, health and lifestyle of those who are long departed. Be they male or female, labourers or aristocrats, monks or military men;


whether (and when) they had suffered from TB, malnutrition or leprosy and even where they grew up – all this information and much more can be divined from the skeletal remains of humans going back deep into prehistory. “As far back as we have skeletons,” says Dr Alan Ogden, a palaeopathologist based in the Department of Archaeological Sciences at Bradford University. “In fact,” says the former dental surgeon, “I’ve just been involved with a human ancestor who precedes homo erectus.” A million-year-old “patient” is perhaps as far


away as it’s possible for Alan to get from the living ones he was used to dealing with over a long dental career, first in general and hospital practice for 12 years and then at Leeds Dental Institute as a clinical lecturer and specialist in restorative dentistry for another 20. But after hanging up his dentist’s drill and smock 11 years ago, this is precisely the subject he has dedicated himself to – using scientific and historical detective work to conjure an image of a person whose life once animated what are now skeletal remains. “They were real people, they felt the world


revolves around them much as we do now. My concern, as much as I can, is to bring them back to life,” says Alan.


Bony evidence The very first job in bringing these people back to life is for Alan and his archaeologist colleagues to try to establish the period from which the skeletons come, as this influences the way in which the information gathered subsequently is interpreted. The habits and diet – and therefore the teeth and skeleton – of a medieval labourer, for example, were considerably different from those of a Victorian factory worker. “We have a whole galaxy of chemical and analytical techniques to help us tell when the bones were buried,” he says. Although he sometimes works on


archaeological digs, Alan refers to himself as a “backroom boy”, and the painstaking task of examining the remains usually starts with the careful transport of the skeletal material back to his laboratory. There he begins by “eyeballing the bones, using magnification when necessary, and then using X-rays, which will tell us a lot about their internal structure.” He also uses CT scanning and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, among a host of other techniques.


A first clue as to the person’s status, says Alan, is the “robusticity” of the bones. “In other


Alan Ogden with his facial reconstruction of Gristhorpe Man. PHOTO: TONY BARTHOLOMEW


words how much they were using their muscles. We get quite characteristic swellings on bones which show that a muscle was pulling on it regularly. And so you get a big difference in build between people who were agricultural or building labourers and, say, monks who spent all their time writing manuscripts. And you’ll see signs of ulceration and inflammation in the legs if the people were very sedentary.”


Diet and origin Of course, build is just one of many parameters – after all, medieval noblemen, who were often military men, could be fit and strong too. Diet also leaves its imprint on the teeth and skeleton, with the poor during this period eating a much less refined, and therefore


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