User:JHaupt46/Paleopathology

Trauma Analysis in Paleopathology
Trauma

Few diseases leave evidence on skeletal remains, however, osteological analysis of remains has the benefit of being able to describe and diagnose skeletal remains without the presence of soft tissue (White, Black and Folkens 2022, 432) and paleopathologies are divided into seven suggested categories for analysis by (Miller et al 1996):


 * 1) Anomalies
 * 2) Trauma repair
 * 3) Inflammatory/Immune
 * 4) Circulatory
 * 5) Metabolic
 * 6) Neuromechanical
 * 7) Cancers

Skeletal Trauma
Skeletal analysis of one of these main categories, trauma repair, is broken down further by (White, Black, Folkens 2022) into the types of trauma present:


 * 1) Partial or complete break
 * 2) Abnormal displacement or dislocation
 * 3) Disruption of blood supply
 * 4) Artificially induced abnormal shape or contouring
 * 5) All these different types of trauma may be the result of accident, interpersonal violence, cultural practice or therapeutic treatment.

Fractures are the result of enough force being applied to bone to mechanically alter it. These forces:  tension, compression, torsion, bending or shearing, each leave its own characteristics on skeletal remains. The type, severity, number, timing and location of fractures are important for delineating between accidental and violent trauma and the data recovered from analysis can help inform about the meaning of that violence (Grauer, 2023, 503) Fractures present substantial problems for the skeletal areas located around the point of initial trauma and may leave accompanying secondary pathological evidence due to tissue death, deformity and arthritis.(White, Black and Folkens 2022, 433).

Types of trauma encountered during analysis might include: blunt force trauma(BFT), sharp force trauma(SFT), projectile, heat and chemical. Evidence of trauma in skeletal remains can vary depending on the type of bone being impacted, for example, blunt force trauma from a club will present differently than sharp force trauma inflicted by a sword (White, Black and Folkens 2022, 433).

During analysis, evidence of antemortem (before death) healing of a fracture allows it to be compared with both perimortem (around time of death) and postmortem (after death) trauma. Antemortem healing will present as a callus at the location of the fracture. As White notes, “The rate of fracture repair depends on alignment, amount of movement at the site of fracture and the health, age, diet, and blood supply of the individual.”

Violence

Differentiating skeletal trauma as the result of violence compared to that caused by accidental or other causes is achieved by integrating the skeletal analysis of mechanical injury to bone with the sociocultural context (Walker,1996 575-576) Intertwining the biological analysis with the sociocultural factors presented by not just the individual but also the larger group context has allowed bioarchaeologists to identify numerous types of violence including as Grauer cites (Martin and Harrod 2016; Redfern 2020) in noting, “...warfare, ritualized combat, hand to hand fighting, raids and ransacking, massacres, torture, executions, witchcraft, captive taking, slavery, anthropophagy, intimate partner and child abuse, scalping and human sacrifice (Grauer Without this synthesis of the biological analysis and social theory Klaus notes that trauma studies are reduced to, “...simply descriptions of trauma found on bone.”(Klaus, 2012)