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Danes Run Entire Urn Burials Through CT Scanner

By aardvarchaeology on October 30, 2009.

The jaw-drop moment of the conference came for me when osteologist Lise Harvig off-handedly showed us pictures of what she is doing. She's a PhD student with Niels Lynnerup at the Dept of Forensic Medicine at Copenhagen. Remember the crumbling Neolithic amber bead hoard that the Danes ran through a CT scanner instead of excavating and stabilising the thing? Now Lise is putting entire Bronze Age urn burials through that scanner. She knows where every piece of bone and bronze is in those urns before she even cuts open the plaster they've been encased in since being lifted out of the ground. She has perfect 3D digital models of urns that fall apart when you remove the plaster. And she has demonstrated that a lot of the bone fragmentation, that has commonly been assumed to be due to dedicated crushing and grinding by the mourners, is actually simply due to the brittleness of burnt bones whose organic component has leached away over the millennia. Big bones are sitting in the urns, each fragment in place, and fall apart when you try to lift them. As Lise put it, "The one who does the ritual crushing is me, when I empty the urns".

So, how can a PhD student in archaeology afford to use this sort of hi-tech equipment? Turns out, the technology is developing so fast that the hospitals frequently swap their CT scanners for newer models. The used one at the Dept of Forensic Medicine makes one slice every three millimeters. Not good enough anymore for brain surgery. But perfectly useful for archaeology.

Other issues covered in today's presentations were:

  • Correspondence analysis of Gotland's stone ships.
  • The landscape situation of sacrificial sites in the Lake Mälaren area (me).
  • An Early Bronze Age magnate farm excavated recently near Halmstad.
  • Human sacrifice and corpse rituals in Lithuania.
  • The unusually late introduction of animal husbandry in Finland.
  • Bone pins in the Baltic states.
  • Copper in Fennoscandia before the Bronze Age.
  • Bronze ring casting sites on Saaremaa and elsewhere in the Baltic states.

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archaeology
bronze age
Denmark

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One of the nice parts about tech is that it can be used to confirm or reject old ideas and theories. Thanks for posting this Martin it will certainly help all of us understand past cultures and their practices.

By Mike Olson (not verified) on 30 Oct 2009 #permalink

The unusually late introduction of animal husbandry in Finland.

I assume the conclusion was that they had already invented distilling, and were too drunk to, um, errr...

Cool news about the CT scans.

"The used one at the Dept of Forensic Medicine makes one slice every three millimeters. Not good enough anymore for brain surgery. But perfectly useful for archaeology."

Of course, that just moves the goal posts. Imagine having a scanner with ten times the linear resolution; you could see carvings and toolmarks on the pieces without ever having to disturb them.

Indeed, Janne. But let me explain where we come from: there are still colleagues alive who remember when cremated bones were re-buried on site because they were considered lacking in information potential.