Every Bone Has a Story - Conference Program and abstracts

Colin Webster (UC Davis)

Osteology occupies an interesting place in the history of early Greek medicine and dissection. The bones provide the framework for the body, but the most common pathologies that affect them, such as fractures and dislocations, operate according to a logic outside of most major theories of disease (e.g., humors, pneuma, infiltration, blockage, flux, etc.). Comprehensive knowledge of the major bones and bone structures seems clear in early Greek medicine, including On Joints and On Fractures, but even a text like the Hippocratic treatise On Bones spends only scant time on osteology, turning to the body’s vessels after a quick numerical accounting. In general, the knowledge that these texts display about bones seems somewhat disconnected from other humoral texts. Yet even as dissection practices in the Hellenistic world focused their attention on the interior structures, rather than pathogenic fluids, osteology remains at least part of this new anatomical flourishing. For example, Clearchus of Soli, a Peripatetic of the late fourth and early third centuries BCE, wrote a treatise called On Skeletons [Περὶ σκελετῶν] that reportedly described and named the human bones and muscles (Clearchus fr. 111–114 Mayhew and Mirhady). By the second century CE, Alexandria had maintained its reputation as the site of anatomical education in the Mediterranean, and Galen recommends that physicians interested in learning about anatomy travel to Alexandria, where they can easily and effectively study osteology in particular (AA 1.2 Singer = 2.220–221K). This paper examines the role that osteology played in the history of dissection within Greek and Greco-Roman medicine, asking whether the study of the bones was seen as its own practice or the emblematic form of dissection. To do so, the paper analyses literary sources, made especially accessible through the recent publication of Bubb’s (2022) Dissection in Classical Antiquity, and places them alongside visual and material evidence. For instance, an engraved scarab from the Engraved scarab from 3rd–2nd c. BCE (British Museum 1814,0704.1312) depicts what appears to be Prometheus fashioning a human by starting with the bones. Not only does this seem to be a new way to represent how humans are manufactured, but the iconography is also reminiscent of a seated physician treating a patient, as seen in the Peytel Aryballos (Louvre CA 2183) and a Greek relief of the early fifth century BCE (Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, Basel, inv. BS 236). By drawing on evidence from multiple places – both inside and outside the medical tradition – it assesses how osteology fits into early medical theories and dissection practices.

Rebecca Flemming 

The osteological overview provided by Galen in “On Bones for Beginners” is entirely generic. This is an account of the human skeleton undifferentiated by gender, age, or anything else, reflecting in part Galen’s view of bones as the most solid, architectural feature of the body. Other medical summaries on the subject share the same approach, but there were alternative approaches available. Vindicianus, for example, and other writers who liked counting bones, provide different totals for men and women (and sometimes for less binary positions, too), amongst other moves of distinction.

This paper will explore the tension between these two approaches, between bones as generic and structural, or differentiated and flexible. It will also discuss the wider cultural phenomenon of enumerating bones in this context. Bones and numbers go together in multiple ways in the ancient world, after all, and there are interesting contrasts to be drawn between the current archaeological practice around skeletal differentiation and patchy past commitment to the same notion.

Emily Kneebone

Invertebrates comprise the vast majority of animal species – over 97%, according to recent estimates – yet our default conceptual norms of biological bodies often remain obstinately orientated around the idea of the backbone. Bones and spines, in turn, offer prevalent cognitive metaphors for structure, discipline, and even moral fiber, in Greco-Roman antiquity as in the contemporary world. This paper explores the theme of literal and metaphorical bonelessness in ancient texts by focusing on soft-bodied organisms that lack skeletons. Taking its cue from the riddling depiction of the ‘boneless one’ (ἀνόστεος) in Hesiod’s Works and Days, an image that foregrounds the relationship between human and non-human bodily vulnerability and self-sufficiency, my paper explores ancient evocations of worms, cephalopod and gastropod molluscs. Greco-Roman representations of these animals, I argue, reveal an abiding fascination with the supple fluidity and versatility of soft-bodied organisms, and with their metaphorical applicability to the dynamics of human life; yet images of literal and figurative bonelessness also frequently evoke an interest that shades into mistrust or horror at the perceived prospect of (moral and corporeal) slackness and bodily permeability or even dissolution.

Celia Campbell

This paper examines the role that bones occupy in the elegies of Propertius, an author who fixates on the stealthy creep of love’s incursions beyond the boundary of death. As his vision and version of love negotiate these boundaries between the living and the dead, it also consequentially negotiates the borders of memory and brushes against the opportunities and limitations of the impulse for memorialization offered by poetic monumentation. Within his corpus, bones, as physical remnants of the dead, therefore become markers of a specifically elegiac identity within his corpus, beyond markers of a historical or ancestral record. The way that the physicality of bones expresses a retained, sustained elegiac identity also speaks to a paradox of how elegiac love is experienced: within the essential inner marrow (medulla) of the bone. The Propertian experience of elegiac love, generated within the bone and yet ultimately leaving only bone, becomes as much an index of self-destruction as a monument to love’s success, revealing the extent to which Propertius needs death to define love.

George Kazantzides

The sepulchral epigrams of the Palatine Anthology are incredibly beautiful little pieces of poetry, but they can also be notoriously and relentlessly shocking when it comes to their deployment of details concerning the disintegration of the human body – a reminder of the frailty of human existence. In this paper, I will focus on such instances of graphic descriptions of rotten/eaten/incomplete bodies, looking at how the bones of the dead might serve on occasions as a counter-balancing and solid – as it were – point of reference in a post-mortem world that is otherwise dominated by the threat of sheer and absolute extinction. What I will try to argue, in other words, is that the bones – the only surviving material evidence of a body that used to function as a continuing point of reference for the living ones; they offer consolation since they resist obliteration (at least in the sense of total destruction suffered by the flesh), and they might even function on occasions as a testimony to a different plane of existence which the shadowy (boneless) dead continue to inhabit.

Ioanna Moutafi

Human bones are, without doubt, the most direct and tangible evidence of past people – it is the people themselves. As such, human bones comprise the most peculiar and versatile form of archaeological material, something between biological and cultural evidence, or actually both. On one hand, skeletal remains are the subjects of their own “osteobiographies,” reflecting their biological identities and lived experiences. On the other, they are the objects of the acts of the living, as the human body gets manipulated at the time of death and beyond. Therefore, to come closer to the true human experience and to an emic understanding of the past, we must study bones through a dual prism: both as subjects and objects – not as opposing dualities but as fluid and permeable concepts.

Looking closely at both aspects and their interactions is the goal of social bioarchaeology, an interdisciplinary field of research that concerns the holistic study of human remains in their archaeological context with the aim to reconstruct past lives and mortuary activities, and thus to approach the social dimensions of both. This holistic approach provides a new path into mortuary evidence. For a long time, the study of bones was absent or only secondary in mortuary analyses despite theoretical advances in this field. As a result, a great amount of information was lost, and crucial aspects of funerary activities, such as the treatment of the dead body, were minimally addressed.

Fortunately, this has increasingly changed in recent years, with the bones slowly gaining the central place they deserve in mortuary studies. This is mostly evident in prehistoric Aegean archaeology, where the lack of written sources forced a more diligent use of all other available evidence. Based on examples from the prehistoric Aegean, this paper aims to stress the multi-dimensional character of bone evidence and the vast array of biosocial information they can provide, from the microscale of individual lived experiences to wider sociopolitical notions of mortuary activities. The time has come to bring this wealth of information into the historical periods as well.

Lilia Diamantopoulou

"El Greco" is the name given to the oldest humanoid fossil, dated to 7.175 million years, which recently (in 2017) was re-discovered by a paleontologist from Tübingen proposing a new hypothesis about the origin of humans and challenging the Out-of-Africa theory. According to this hypothesis, the cradle of humanity is not in Africa as previously believed but in Europe, specifically in Greece.

The circumstances surrounding how the fossil came to Germany are dubious. In 1944, during the hasty retreat of the German Wehrmacht from Greece, a military geologist discovered the bones in Pyrgos Vasilissis, the former garden area of Queen Amalia. However, he mistakenly classified the bones as belonging to the same species of apes as the fossils brought to Munich in 1838 by a Bavarian soldier who had served under Otto I of Greece. Both discoveries are among the most significant paleontological findings of our time.

At about the same time, on the same estate of Queen Amalia's Pyrgos Vasilissis, an Abyssinian child purchased in Cairo, grew up. He initially worked as a stable boy but later became the queen's adoptive child. When the royal couple was expelled from Athens to Bamberg in 1862, he went with them. According to an eyewitness account, after his death, his skeleton and the skin of his right hand were displayed in a showcase in the anatomical collection of the LMU (Ludwig Maximilian University) in Munich. In the same collection, the skeletons of two other enslaved boys brought from Cairo to Munich by Max in Bayern, the father of Sisi, are still exhibited today; their brains were used for a racially motivated study.

The lecture focuses on examining the treatment of human or humanoid remains of African origin in university collections and their use to support Eurocentric and (sometimes) racist theories. It aims to contribute not only to the history of science (Paleontology, Anthropology, Ethnology) but also shed new light on German-Greek-African relations, the handling of human remains, and provenance research.

Kimberley Patton

Four hundred years to the day of his death on April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare made extra news when the University of Staffordshire scanned his grave in the stone chancel floor of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The goal was to investigate a 19th-century newspaper report that his skull had been stolen in 1794 by a local physician and sold for £300 to the Bard’s acolyte, Horace Walpole. Shakespeare’s self-authored epitaph was also auto-detonating: “Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare,/to dig the dust encloased heare./ Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,/ And curst be he yt moves my bones.” The living-dead Bard speaks from his own grave, blessing the respectful mourner but prophylactically cursing the relic-hunter, with whom Europe was still awash. This charged language in Jesus’ name expresses the persistent, pre-Christian fear of the revenant whose corpse has been dishonored. It also implies that charismatic power was still believed to imbue bones – power that could be appropriated by the living. The scan detected remains beneath the floor, but – shocking only to those who dismiss popular tradition – the skull was indeed missing.

The results of the scan, and the chronic Euro-American ambivalence around what in Neolithic archaeology is called “the partible skull,” epitomize a deeper tension in the cultural history of bones. I suggest that this is due to what Derrida called “haunting” (1993), i.e., a spectral persistence of a pattern of thought from the past that impacts the present, sometimes subtly destabilizing dominant values. This “temporal and spatial sedimentation of history and tradition” (Blanco and Pereen, 2013) is perhaps nowhere so evident as in the fraught stagecraft of Hamlet’s address to Yorick’s skull – more than once notoriously played by a real human cranium.

It is a mistake to think of this tale of two skulls as a folkloric “one-off.” It is more like a symptom. The specter haunting Shakespeare’s grave is a Neolithic funerary practice, with roots in the Mesolithic. From Windmill Hill to the Franchthi Cave to Çatalhöyük to Tel Aswad, physical death was the end of corporeal life, but only the start of the new life of bones, subject to a range of secondary treatments that curated particular bodies into ancestors.

On the one hand, in Shakespeare’s England, officially Anglican and Reformation-influenced but still crypto-Catholic in many families (possibly including his), bones were meant to stay together and stay buried. “Bones” and its counterparts were interchangeable with “remains.” Bones were saturated with ideas of rot, stasis, inanimateness, and the pathos of eventual obscurity. Theologically, even backlit by the Christian expectation of the Resurrection and Last Judgment, bones have traditionally stood for death’s quintessence, the end product of what it means to be mortal. From 1530 on, St. Jerome is shown with his Cogita Mori skull close to hand on his pile of books. There was also religious pressure to keep the buried corpse intact so that the person could be resurrected whole. This remains true in traditional Jewish and Islamic beliefs. The skeleton was thus a kind of blueprint for regenerating the parameters of human identity in the Eschaton. Bones should “rest in peace.”

On the other hand, precisely because of this regenerative potential, forbearance was by no means a given. Shakespeare knew that his bones because they were his, might be a future object of mimetic desire. Biologically, living bones are anything but static – constantly dissolving, remodeling, and regenerating bone matrix through osteoclastic and osteoblastic processes. Many religious traditions exhibit the same tension. Doctrinally, death and the material body are transcended. In ritual practice, however, these traditions continue to disarticulate, curate, venerate, and sometimes circulate human bones, especially skulls of the “special dead.” Bones are constantly on the move, in circles of influence extending far beyond their original graves.

In the Neolithic period, skulls of a few were removed postmortem from particular excarnated skeletons and, in some contexts, re-enfleshed with plaster and painted with red ochre. Eye sockets were replaced with cowrie shells. The skulls of the dead were arranged in circles or baskets in marked spaces. Re-animating the skulls by re-creating their flesh and eyes may have been a way of manifesting or even catalyzing their powers in their lives after death. Bones were buried in the foundation holes of newly built houses and beneath the floors of grain storage areas. Neolithic bones were not simply “quintessentially dead” matter that needed ritual help to guard communal memory. They may have been more like seeds or batteries that could make houses grow, grain replenishes, and the dead live again into greater power than they had in life.

The semiotic afterlife of bones has persisted in the ancient Mediterranean world, from ancient Greek hero cult and classical polyandria to God’s resurrection of the “very dry” bones in the valley in Ezekial 37:1-14 to early Christian martyrology and the centuries of relic veneration to monastic koimeteria. Eastern Orthodox icons of the Crucifixion show Jesus’ blood dripping down onto the skull of Adam below, redeeming it where it lies in the darkness of Golgotha, “the place of the skull” in Aramaic (Mt. 27:33 et al.) The “death’s heads” found on very early Puritan graves in New England grimly witness to mortality. But in the decades that followed, the skulls sprout wings, no longer memento mori, but a sign of the reward for a godly life – eternal life in heaven. In this iconography, the phase of incarnation is erased, and the skull takes flight.

The history of religions is filled with analogies. Most proximately to the ancient Mediterranean, the head as the centrifuge of destiny (Yoruba ori) plays out in Northwest and West African traditions: the entombment of the skulls of griots in Senegalese baobabs; the Kota collection of ancestral skulls in reliquary baskets guarded by janiform cephalic bronze guardians in Gabon; and many others. The mandate to retrieve and curate special bones drives the epic adventures of Junajpu and XB’alamkiej, the Maya Hero Twins of the Popol Wuj, conceived by their father’s skull while trapped in Xibalba. When retrieved, One Junajpu’s skull will be reburied in the ballcourt above, allowing for the rebirth of the cosmos in the form of maize. The foundational texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism relate how, after the Buddha’s body was cremated, “only the bones were left” (Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta 6.23). By the Tathāgata’s own premortem instructions, his fire-born bones were divided and enshrined by his disciples in monumental stupas throughout India, creating a network of amplified sacral power.

To siphon the genius of Shakespeare, one needed his head. Now that his skull appears to be missing, just as he had feared, his epitaph is not only prophetic but also diagnostic – “haunted” by conceptualizations of bones that are so ancient, in the words of Derrida, as to “set heads spinning.”

Barbara Carè 

The contribution focuses on the results of research in the press concerning the functions and meanings of astragali in Greek archaeological contexts. The interpretation of these bone remains has historically relied on documentary sources, mainly dating to the Roman period, pointing at their main role as game tools and dice-like objects used both in games and divination. The direction taken by modern scholarship has not moved significantly away from this conventional approach. In fact, the game practice is still believed to be so popular to justify the abundant archaeological and visual evidence coming down to us from antiquity. By revisiting documentary evidence, this study challenges these biased scholarly assumptions; it also directs attention to the shifting roles of astragali, which are first and foremost physical remains of a once-living being and addresses how these roles change and are renegotiated through time, in different spaces and social contexts. Looking also at depositional features and ritual-specific behaviors, the study provides a more holistic viewpoint aimed at proposing a better-informed offering on the subject and gaining a deeper understanding of this ancient cultural artifact.

Maya Muratov 

Representations of human skeletons were rather popular throughout antiquity. Although not particularly numerous during the Classical period, they gained popularity and became ubiquitous in the Hellenistic and Roman pictorial traditions. Stand-alone statuettes of skeletons, as well images found on carved gems, mosaics, numerous vessels, and oil lamps, were traditionally understood as images meant to endorse the Epicurean belief that life is short and must be enjoyed while it lasts, for death ends it all.

In her seminal work from 1986, entitled “The Skeleton in Graeco-Roman Art,” Katherine M.D. Dunbabin examined a multitude of skeleton-related imagery. Interestingly, the majority was found within a convivial realm – that is, in the contexts associated with the symposia and dining, whereas fewer representations of skeletons were related to the funerary sphere.

My own interest in skeletal figures stems from two scholarly pursuits: a study of Greek and Roman articulated figurines – including Roman articulated bronze skeletons that were likely meant to be handled and contemplated; and an ongoing investigation of a late Hellenistic – early Roman group of large clay figures – also articulated – that either served as models for marionettes or were actual puppets; one of those figures features a skull-like head.

In this paper, in addition to introducing some of the understudied and hitherto unknown objects, I would like to propose and explore the notion of a human skeleton as a stock character within the realm of popular entertainment. Why depictions of skeletons and of skeletal-emaciated human bodies are less often associated with death and decay but instead become a visual topos linked to laughter, amusement, and performances?

Kelly Shannon-Henderson

This paper will examine moments in Greek and Roman literature when people encounter fields littered with unburied bones and assess how the authors describing such scenes use autoptic motifs to engage the reader. Two types of bone-field scenes will be the focus of my attention: encounters with the bones of unburied war-dead on the sites of past battles, and encounters with the bones of giants or other unusual animals. In both types of scenes, bones, because of the enduring nature of their materiality, allow the observer (and hence the reader) to access memories of loss and feelings of wonderment that otherwise could not persist through time.

In the battlefield-type scene, bone fields can produce an emotional response of horror, fear, and dread by inviting the viewer to relive the deadly battle. When Tacitus describes Germanicus revisiting the site in the Teutoburg Forest where Varus’ legions were slaughtered, seeing the bones of their comrades strewn over the fields allows Germanicus’ troops to reconstruct the course of the battle and to contemplate their own potentially similar fate (Annals 1.61-62; see Woodman 1979; Pagán 1999; Pagán 2002; Shannon-Henderson 2019 82-84; Reitz–Joosse 2019). Ammianus’ description of the scene of a battle with the Goths in 377 CE similarly notes that “even now” (31.7.16 nunc usque) in his own day, the plains white with bones can show observers not only where the battle happened, but also how gruesome it was (cf. 31.7.14) and that many of the dead were not buried. This scene is very literary and bears strong intertextual markers pointing back to Tacitus and Vergil (Kelly 2008: 13–30; Ross 2016: 40–45), but it may also suggest Ammianus visited the battlefield in person (den Boeft et al.: 139). In these episodes, bones allow much later visitors to battlefields – and the people reading about them – to experience the more immediate phenomenon that Pagán 2000 has identified in “aftermath narratives,” in which “the reader sees the aftermath through the eyes of those who return to the battlefield” and view the fresh corpses on the day after a battle (424). Thus, the historiographical trope of autopsy is evoked via bones to extend the reader’s emotional response to bloody military defeat through time, extending the potential timescale of the memory of what it was like to be on that battlefield.

Viewing a field of animal bones, however, produces a response that is less emotional than intellectual, and the aim of the autoptic motif is to persuade the reader of the true existence of an otherwise unbelievable phenomenon. Examples include Herodotus’ self-described visit to a field of the bones of winged snakes at Buto in Arabia (2.75; see Schepens 1980: 56–58); Aelian’s discussion of the bones of giant serpents that once lived on Samos, which can still be seen (NA 17.28 δείκνυσθαι); Phlegon of Tralles’ firsthand experience of fossil deposits in Egypt (Mir. 15, with Shannon-Henderson 2020 and Shannon-Henderson 2022 ad loc.); and Augustine’s discovery of giant teeth at Utica (Civ. Dei 15.9). Applying the autoptic trope to this type of bone fields engages the reader firsthand in the practice of reconstructing natural history via scientific enquiry, even after the animals that left the bones behind no longer exist. It also allows the possibility for the reader to go view the bones themselves and experience firsthand the same sense of wonderment felt by the authors who describe them.

Kenneth Yu

This paper examines the cultural valences of giants’ bones in an array of Imperial Greek authors, including Pausanias, Philostratus, and Phlegon. These authors thematize the discovery of bones as wondrous events that stirred enthusiasm, mobilized communities, and elicited a range of political, religious, and scholarly responses. Gargantuan bones, often attributed to mythological heroes, were construed as variously enigmatic, talismanic, and key epistemic objects that tested the limits of knowledge and credibility. I will argue that giants’ bones, as represented in Imperial Greek literature, were treated as a proxy for debating the merits of competing models of paideia, advancing alternative modes of affect for engaging the Greek past and calibrating the complex relationship between objectivity and empathy in cultural and historical inquiry. In the eyes of Second Sophistic writers, I suggest, the bones of giants belonged to an interesting category of objects in the way that they straddle religious and medical discourses without being sublimated into either.

Susane Gödde

This paper aims to define the role of bones in ancient Greek sacrifice. The reliability of bones for determining the species of a slaughtered animal has made osteology an important subfield in research on sacrifice, and archaeological finds have also confirmed that burnt bones were part of the famous ash altars, which sometimes reached immense heights. But bones are also of particular interest in anthropological approaches to sacrifice. Seen from this perspective, animal bones can be interpreted as a defining criterion for the division between men and gods in ritual. Bones – ostea or mêria – are usually wrapped in the fat of the sacrificial animal and then burnt for the gods, but the reason for this is far from evident. In some sources, the smell of the fat that rises to Olympus is mentioned; in others, such as Hesiod’s story about Prometheus’ deception of Zeus, the bones constitute the less valuable part of the animal in comparison with the meat. A third, modern approach understands the bones as an attempt to reverse the killing of the animal by putting together its bones in order to allow, at least on a symbolical level, for new life. This last thesis was first proposed by the German anthropologist Karl Meuli and later taken up by Walter Burkert in his famous book Homo Necans (1972). Both attempted to reconstruct the rituals of prehistoric hunters and attributed feelings of guilt to the hunters for the death of the animal; the same Unschuldskomödie, argued Meuli and Burkert, could also be seen in Greek sacrifice.

The paper takes its starting point from these obviously inconsistent explanations of the meaning and value of sacrificial bones. It attempts to reconstruct different narratives and their respective interests and examines whether and to what extent ascribing ritual power to the bones changes our understanding of ancient sacrifice.

Michael Puett

This talk will explore how bones fit into the ritual practices of early China. I will focus, in particular, on divination, sacrifice, and self-cultivation techniques. I will also discuss how these early Chinese practices compare with those seen in early Greece as well as in the larger anthropological literature.

Amit Shilo

Skeletons entombed with the symbols of power are briefly returned to light and then actively repurposed. In ancient Greek narratives, these bones are repeatedly assimilated to the Greek heroes of myth, a palimpsest of potentially Mycenean burials. We have 13 stories of disinterment and reburial, most of them political in nature. These include the Spartans appropriating the bones of Orestes (Hdt. 1. 65-68; Paus. 3.3.6), the Athenians those of Theseus (Plut. Vit. Thes. 36.1–4; Vit. Cim. 8.57; Paus. 1.17.6, 3.3.7), and the Thebans those of Hector (Paus. 9.18.5; Schol. AB ad Il. 13.1; Schol. ad Lykrophon 1194). Since the Delphic Oracle is most often the instigator of these reburials, and they result in shrines, the primary power of these heroes is understood to be cultic. Secondly, our ancient sources sometimes and scholars often seek the effects of these reburials in the origins and genealogies of the named heroes. The geography of their living past seems to (re)exert political influence on the state that claims them.

However, two major aspects of heroic reburials have been neglected in modern scholarship. First, the most famous stories of encountering ancient bones, Herodotus (1. 65-68) and Plato (Rep. 2.359d-e), depict their enigmatic and wondrous discovery. Such moments, in turn, model the reception of their power, potentially even after reburial. Second, are the inexpungeable phantoms of the named heroes themselves. Specifically, their often-transgressive actions in myth remain shrouded in hero cult. Nevertheless, there is always a remainder, for the name of the hero continues to evoke their stories. More particular to reburial, however, are the bones as symbolic remainder. They are physical links to a dimly understood past and suffer a forced removal from the place of death. Let us begin to build a fuller picture of the power and pathos of these bones, through the tales of their appropriation and their resistance to easy rewriting.