Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  When we exhumed Sarah, our eyes were caught straight away by the unmistakable glint of gold. On further investigation, we found that her right upper central incisor had been sawn off, probably then cauterized with acid, and her own crown then fixed to a solid-gold dental bridge. As gold does not tarnish, it was still shining brightly through the brown, soupy decomposition deposits within the coffin, almost 150 years after her interment. The bridge, which remained in position within her mouth, linked back to her right upper first molar, which was held in place by a ring, again made of gold.

  Unfortunately, this tooth showed significant decay and the kind of extensive bone loss associated with chronic pus production, which was probably still active when she died. The only thing holding her molar in place was her dental bridge. The pain she must have suffered when trying to eat and the stench of decay can only be imagined.

  Harriet Goodricke, who was sixty-four years old when she died in 1832, was also buried in a pricey triple coffin, but she had spent less than Sarah on her dental restorations. Harriet possessed a full upper-plate horseshoe denture, which had fallen out of her mouth by the time we examined her body. This was not surprising as there was nothing holding it in place. When the denture had been designed for Harriet, she must still have had a single tooth remaining in her upper jaw as the denture had a big hole in it on the right-hand side, corresponding to the position of her first molar, and the denture would have been constructed to fit over this tooth.

  However, Harriet had subsequently lost the tooth and so there was nothing left to which her denture could be secured. It would therefore have served no practical purpose. It was a touching testament to the care of the person who had laid her out that the denture had been buried with her to preserve her dignity, and perhaps her pride in her appearance, even in death.

  It must be said, though, that the denture would not have been overly convincing. It did not consist of separate artificial teeth but was carved out of a single piece of ivory (we could not determine the animal this came from: perhaps an elephant, but hippopotamus and walrus ivory was also commonly used in the nineteenth century), with the positions of the teeth delineated rather crudely by vertical lines, giving only a vague definition and approximation of the appearance of teeth. Dentures like this, which were fairly typical of the time, were often carved by clock- or watchmakers rather than anyone with a dental or medical background, and sometimes their anatomical accuracy left something to be desired.

  Having been in the coffin for over 150 years, this bone denture had taken on the brown colouration of the viscous liquid in which it had resided (decomposition fluids that had mixed with the wood of the interior coffin to form a weak humic acid). Harriet’s beloved accessory was therefore stained a very dark brown when we recovered it from her coffin and I am sure she would not have been impressed.

  The Rolls-Royce of dentures possessed by this trio of women has to be the set sported by Hannah Lenten. Hannah, who was forty-nine years old when she died in 1838, was evidently a woman of considerable wealth. She occupied an ornate lead coffin and boasted some phenomenally costly and inventive dental work. Since replacement teeth of the kind Harriet had, which were frequently fashioned from ivory, were often less than lifelike, there was a demand for dentures featuring real teeth among those for whom money was no object.

  Dentists would place adverts in newspapers seeking to buy human teeth. Sometimes these were supplied by the resurrectionists, or body-snatchers, active at the time. Others were scavenged from the mouths of dead soldiers (preferably young) who had perished on the battlefields. After the Napoleonic Wars, these became known as “Waterloo teeth.” They were often fixed to an ivory dental plate but Hannah’s Waterloo teeth were riveted on to a solid-gold horseshoe—the ultimate in Victorian bling. When you consider that in the early nineteenth century even an ivory plate containing real teeth would cost in excess of £100 (about £12,000 today), you can only imagine what that denture would have set her back.

  These extravagant creations were the brainchild of Claudius Ash, a silversmith and goldsmith who turned his hand to making top-quality dentures for the very rich. He became Britain’s foremost manufacturer of dental appliances and by the mid-nineteenth century he dominated the high-end European market.

  Because the multirooted molars in the back of the mouth are more tricky to extract than the front, single-rooted teeth, fewer of these tended to be removed. While there was an aesthetic imperative to replace the front teeth if possible, people were not as concerned about the less noticeable gaps at the back, and when substitutes were used, they were often crafted out of ivory or animal bone.

  Hannah Lenten, though, had had six of her molars removed, and was the proud owner of both upper and lower dentures. In order to ensure that these would not cause embarrassment by falling out, the upper set was wired to the lower set by means of a pair of coiled gold springs and secured with swivel pins, so that when she opened her mouth the upper denture was forced upwards against the palate.

  In total, Hannah’s dentures comprised six front, single-rooted Waterloo teeth, riveted by gold clasps to the solid gold horseshoe upper plate. The six replacement molars (three on each side) were made of ivory and, again, secured by gold rivets. Although her lower denture was only partial and made of ivory, it included six more human teeth not originally hers.

  It was poignant to note that, even in an age where tooth decay was not treatable or preventable and it was therefore far more commonplace for people to lose teeth, they were still sensitive about how this affected their appearance. So much so that these well-heeled ladies were prepared to go to a great deal of expense and discomfort in their quest to maintain their smiles.

  Sarah, Harriet and Hannah, having held on to their prized teeth for a century and a half after their deaths, were now being removed, along with the other bodies buried beneath St Barnabas church, to allow the imperilled crypt to be repaired and restored. Their remains were cremated and their ashes scattered on consecrated ground, but their dentures live on as a record of the dentistry of the past.

  While it is, of course, standard practice to check for artificial teeth when examining human remains, we rarely come upon such elaborate examples these days. It is, though, amazing how many other foreign objects can be found in the mouths of the dead. Piercings of the lips, tongue, of the spaces between teeth or even the uvula (the little pendant of tissue dangling from the back of the soft palate) are not unusual. We might discover gems embedded in teeth. We are even starting to see RFID (radio frequency identification) trackers implanted in the mouth. The ingenuity of the human, it seems, knows no bounds, and the ways in which we choose to modify or embellish our already unique faces, the part of our body through which we communicate with the world around us, is limited only by our imagination.

  Our chin is another feature that is unique to the human and therefore really interesting in terms of its purpose, variation and growth. What is the chin for? Is it about mastication, mechanics or communication, or is it merely an evolutionary blip? In newborn babies, the two halves of the mandible are separate and fuse only during the first year of life. The chin grows substantially in small children to accommodate the roots of the incisor teeth, slowing down at around four years of age. In males, it shows marked alteration following puberty.

  Chins vary endlessly in shape: they can be cleft, they can be double, they can be pointed (in women and children), generally squarer in men. They can therefore be of considerable help in determining sex from the skeleton, and sometimes in identifying individuals. Although they are a prominent potential point of contact for a fist, the bone is robust, so it takes quite a swipe to fracture the chin. But we do see such injuries.

  The separate structures of the bones of the human face all play an important role in identification but it is only when they are brought together in perfect synchronicity that the composite becomes so much more than the sum of its parts.

  PART II

  THE BODY

 
; Postcranial Axial Bones

  3

  The Spine

  Vertebral Column

  “You are only as old as your spine”

  Joseph Pilates

  Physical Trainer, 1883–1967

  I once wrote this very pompous academic opening to a chapter on the vertebral column: “The metameric segmentation of the central axis of the skeleton is the primitive phylogenetic phenomenon from which the subphylum vertebrata derives its name.”

  My colleague and friend Louise Scheuer told me I had incomprehensible verbal diarrhoea—I love her.

  What I meant was that the human is formed around a central axis (skull and spine) and made up not of single bones but from many different segmental pieces that fit together, a bit like irregular-shaped toddler’s building blocks. The fact that we have a spine, or vertebral column, is one of the features that defines us, as it is the basis for the animal classification of “vertebrates.” If you don’t have a spine then you are an invertebrate and probably not reading this book as you are likely to be an insect, spider, snail, crab, jellyfish, worm or some equally spineless character.

  Like the word “spine,” the name vertebral column has its origins in Latin (from verto, meaning to turn). Having a mobile spine allows us to be able to twist our bodies into many amazing shapes. As we grow older, though, the flexibility in the spine decreases and the movement we enjoyed in our youth becomes a distant memory. These changes can be seen in each of the bones of the spine individually and equally when we seriate, or stack, them into their correct anatomical position.

  As we age, bony growths called osteophytes start to develop around the edges of each of the bones of our spine, which limits our movement and causes pain. Sometimes they can get so large that they fuse one vertebra to another, thereby permanently restricting our flexibility. The presence of osteophytes is useful for determining the possible age of an individual as they are rare in the young. They are one manifestation of osteoarthritis and can in occur in any and all of our twenty-four pre-sacral vertebrae.

  We normally have around thirty-three vertebrae altogether: seven in our neck (cervical), twelve in the chest (thoracic), five in the small of the back (lumbar), five that fuse together in late childhood in the buttock region (sacrum) and around four that consolidate to form our rudimentary tail (coccyx).

  When presented with a single vertebra, having established that it is human, the forensic anthropologist must decide which of the five regions it comes from, and which of the individual thirty-three adult bones it is most likely to be (there are almost three times as many bones in the spine of a newborn baby, before they start to fuse together). The answer may be pertinent to identity or hold other information that can assist the investigative authorities with the manner or cause of death. Sometimes all three.

  A death by stabbing may well leave its marks on the vertebrae, but if all thirty-three become separated, perhaps when remains have been scavenged by animals or dispersed in water, we must be able to identify every bone in isolation and to list all those that are still missing and need to be found. Identifying individual vertebrae is, not surprisingly, a frequent topic for examination questions when students are learning their trade. They are usually asked to estimate the position of a single bone in the vertebral column and if their answer is more than one vertebra out in either direction, it will be marked as incorrect. We are tough.

  Sometimes a single bone can be a mine of information about who someone was—or wasn’t. This certainly proved to be the case when my Dundee university team were challenged to verify whether remains interred in Wardlaw mausoleum, just outside Inverness, were truly those of Simon Fraser (1667–1747), the most notorious chief of the clan Lovat. The mausoleum, in the quiet hamlet of Kirkhill, was built in 1634 for the Lovat family and used by them as a burial vault until the early nineteenth century. Although permission for Fraser, the 11th Lord Lovat, to be laid to rest here was refused by the government of the day, legend had it that his body had been brought secretly to the vault from London.

  Throughout his life, Simon Fraser, a wily rogue known as the Old Fox, opportunistically changed his allegiances to suit his own agenda. Having started out, ostensibly, as a supporter of the English Crown, he later defected to the Jacobite rebels loyal to Bonnie Prince Charlie. Inevitably, his duplicity eventually caught up with him and he was incarcerated in the Tower of London to await trial at Westminster Hall for high treason.

  His was the biggest scalp to be taken by the Crown, and after six days of damning evidence, he was duly sentenced to the traitor’s fate of death by hanging, drawing and quartering, which was subsequently commuted by the King to beheading. He thus acquired the dubious honour of becoming the last person in Britain to be executed for treason by this method. Thousands turned out on Tower Hill to watch the show. His demise was swift, if not without incident. One of the many overcrowded temporary spectator stands collapsed and nine people were killed. The Old Fox found this irony amusing and his reaction is said to have given rise to the expression “laughing your head off.”

  A drawing of the Old Fox was made by William Hogarth while Fraser was at the White Hart Inn, St Albans en route to his execution in London. It shows Fraser, an overweight, powerful and rather unpleasant-looking man, preparing to commit his thoughts to paper. His open diary and a quill pen lie waiting on a table beside him.

  The government initially agreed that after his execution, Lovat’s body could be returned to the family vault at Kirkhill (after his head had spent the requisite period on public display atop a spike as a deterrent to others). However, they changed their minds and decided that the Old Fox should be interred, along with two other Jacobite peers, the Earl of Kilmarnock and Lord Balmerino, in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Inner Ward of the tower. But a story persisted that his body had in fact been smuggled out of London and taken up north by ship to Inverness and on to Kirkhill. Lovat was labelled by some as the last great Highlander, a true Scottish patriot, and his clansmen would not have wanted him to rest for ever on English soil. Today the mausoleum at Kirkhill is a tourist destination for devotees of the TV series Outlander, the fictitious time-travelling drama set in the spectacular local highland scenery around the period of the Jacobite rebellion, which has a cult following in the USA and Canada. I gather the Old Fox himself appears in one or two of the episodes.

  There was some evidence to support the claim that Lovat’s bones resided in the Kirkhill mausoleum. A marked space on the lid of a double-layer lead coffin in the crypt corresponded perfectly to an interesting bronze coffin plate that had become detached. The plate was inscribed with his name and his family coat of arms, in addition to an epigram in Latin denouncing the tyranny of neighbouring clans.

  Two developments led to the involvement of my department in this ancient mystery. First, funds needed to be raised for the Wardlaw mausoleum to prevent the building from falling into disrepair, and secondly, the coffin lid was found to have been breached, which meant it would be only proper to exhume the remains within and transfer them to a sound vessel for safekeeping. As the 11th Lord Lovat was known to have been beheaded, we were naturally very interested in having the opportunity to examine the top of his spine, should it be present. But as things turned out, it was the bottom end that caused the early commotion.

  Given the potentially significant findings from the analysis of the coffin contents, news of the exhumation caused a flurry of excitement. Dan Snow, the historian and television presenter, would be coming up to Kirkhill with a crew from History Hit TV to film the entire proceedings and the Royal Society of Edinburgh planned to hold a public event in Inverness at which the question of whether the Old Fox was buried in the Wardlaw mausoleum would be answered once and for all. The pressure was on.

  I was accompanied to Kirkhill by my frequent partner in crime, my dear friend and colleague Professor Lucina Hackman. We trailed up there one cold day to view the site and start to plan our excavation. The mausoleum sits amid a beautiful
old cemetery and is opened by means of an ancient key which apparently has its own starring role in Outlander. Every tourist wants to be photographed at the entrance holding that key, so we followed suit. Well, it would have been rude not to.

  At the far end of a simple, rectangular room there is a trapdoor leading down to the crypt via a flight of steep stone steps. Laid out in this small, windowless, vaulted chamber (only in the centre is the ceiling high enough to allow you to stand upright) were six lead coffins, one child-sized, all belonging to the Fraser family, each bearing the name, age and date of death of the interred individual. All were intact except for the largest one—the one that had been breached—which was waiting for us in the far left corner of the crypt.

  We donned masks, because it was clear from the dusting of white powder that the lead was oxidizing, and this can be a significant health hazard when you move the lead around and disperse the lead oxide particles into the air. We knelt down to look into the coffin through the narrow slits between the opened lid and the sides. We could see that there was a lot of wood present, probably the remnants of the inner wooden coffin. We could also see bone, so we backed away to agree a recovery strategy.

  Since we wanted to try to get DNA from any bone present, we decided to go off and suit up fully, with double gloves to ensure that we did not contaminate anything. As to who did what job, there was no drawing of straws because Lucina always gets the short one (I am the elder). So Lucina would go down into the crypt to photograph and lift small sections of bone and coffin content, bit by bit. I would work upstairs in the mausoleum, where the remains would be relayed to me by a runner for further photography, recording, sampling and analysis. As we lifted the lid, it was apparent that the inner wooden coffin had collapsed, leaving some bones lying on the surface. The first to be pulled out was a sacrum, the large, triangular bone at the base of the spine. It was robust and in relatively good condition.