Digging for Richard III

by Mike Pitts

  The archaeologists were clear from the start, from watching the remains emerge from the ground and later from their study of the grave and the records they made, that this had been no ordinary body. For one thing, the grave was a mess. During the subsequent 2013 excavation, when they worked throughout July and investigated an area about twice that of all three previous trenches put together, Mathew’s team exhumed three burials they had identified the year before but left in the ground. One of these was exceptional: a substantial stone coffin with a stone lid (quite unlike the old troughs claimed in the past to have held Richard), which when opened revealed a lead coffin and the remains of an older woman. The other two were typical of medieval graves in Leicester, even in the poorer quarters: the pits were neat, straight-sided and big enough to hold wooden coffins (indicated in the ground by stains in the earth and corroded iron nails) in which the bodies had been laid out comfortably on their backs.

  Far from being deep, squared and regular, Skeleton I’s grave was relatively shallow with rough curved sides and base. The foot end is missing, but with the body’s torso twisted to one side and the head crammed up against the other end, we can surmise that very little has been lost. The grave was too short, and the only surplus space would have been just enough on one side for a man to stand as he helped another above to lower the body into place.

  Skeleton I laid out in Leicester University; a variety of analyses were conducted on individual elements, and 3D scans will allow visual study of the skeleton after its burial. (Aman Phull)

  Skeleton I had been laid on its back with its legs straight out, feet reaching east towards the altar in the conventional Christian way.13 Unusually, however, the left arm, instead of matching the right which hung down the side, was bent and crossed the torso so that the two hands were together over the right hip, right hand apparently over left. No organic remains survived to confirm the hypothesis, but it seems reasonable, as the archaeologists suggested, to imagine that the wrists had been tied, which would explain why the right arm had not fallen down off the hip. Otherwise the body appears to have been handled casually. There was no coffin. Neither was there a shroud: though fabric almost never survives, Leicester’s archaeologists have come to recognize shrouded burials by the way skeletons lie in a compact, tight tube, with arms tight and legs close together. With relaxed shoulders, flexed arms and parted legs, Skeleton I was not like that.

  Graves of Greyfriars’s own important people at the church’s east end were excavated in 2013; all had originally been dug with more care than Skeleton I’s. (Mike Pitts)

  This is not to say that the body had been singled out for punitive treatment. There is a rare but consistent practice, found around the world and in many different eras, of burying certain people – hated, feared, marked in some way as deeply abnormal – face down, or prone. Skeleton I had apparently been buried with haste and disinterest, but not dramatized disrespect.

  Though no coffin, there was one nail. A piece of old Roman iron, along with a handful of weathered Roman and early medieval pot sherds, had been disturbed by the grave diggers and thrown back in with the fill. This provided the first new evidence of date, meaning the grave had to have been dug between around 1300 and the Dissolution in 1538 (so Mutton and Richard are still in the running). This was the nail that had been identified as a possible arrowhead, but X-ray images cut through the corrosion to reveal its true form.

  When Jo was excavating the skeleton, her first thought on finding the skull was that it didn’t belong to the body whose legs stuck out at a lower level. It soon became clear that they were in fact linked, but I wondered, given the angle at which the skull lay, if the head might have become disconnected from the body before – or possibly even during – burial? In my own research, I had encountered a case where a body had been crammed into a short grave and the head lay at a higher level; only on forensic examination did we realize the poor man had been decapitated with a sword. Not so, Jo assured me, with Skeleton I. The neck bones were all articulated, and the occipital condyles on the skull fitted exactly the superior facets of the atlas vertebra – head and neck were fully attached.

  With the DNA samples taken and the remains scanned, cleaned and scanned again, Jo was able to begin her study in earnest. She laid the bones out on a work table in a room in the Archaeology Department, spacing them out so they would not knock against each other, a 3D exploded diagram of human anatomy. What stories did they tell?

  Unlike bears, walruses and chimpanzees – to name a few – humans do not have a bone in their sex organs, a baculum (male) or an os clitoridis (female); fortunately for Skeleton I’s dignity, there are some parts of long-dead men we can never measure. Unfortunately for archaeologists, this means the human skeleton does not carry a label saying male or female – much research time would be saved if it did. Instead, more or less subtle differences are sought, reflecting the basic fact that, on average, men are bigger and stronger than women.

  This is not a hit and miss affair. A huge amount of work has gone into compiling statistical formulae using skeletons of known sex (archaeologists use ‘gender’ for the cultural distinction, and ‘sex’ for the biological one, as they are not always the same) and, for comparable studies, known age. A group of remains that can be used in this way was recorded in London in the 1980s, when a thousand 18th- and 19th-century burials were removed from a crypt in Spitalfields during the church’s restoration – the unusual scale of the archaeological project is revealed by its cost, said to be over five times that spent on building the church! Nearly four hundred of the individuals could be identified from coffin plates, so we know from these and other records when they were born and when they died, and something about their life histories – and even, in some cases, their appearance – all of which can be compared with the evidence of their bones.

  The key elements for distinguishing men and women are the skull and, especially, hips. Interestingly, Skeleton I is a case where most of the evidence points in one direction, but is qualified by suggestions of the opposite. During excavation Jo had suggested it was male. Yet on more detailed analysis, she could see feminine signs – at one point she even emailed Richard Buckley to say the skeleton might be female (a moment that Richard remembers as one where he contemplated leaving the country).

  The greater sciatic notches, the inner curves in the hip bones that partly determine the size and shape of the space through which a baby is born, are naturally wider in women. So, too, the notches are wider in Skeleton I than for a typical male. The third molars (wisdom teeth) are tiny. The limb bones are unusually slender for a typical adult man (‘almost feminine’, as Jo put it), and overall the skeleton does not show the strong muscle attachments associated with men. On several occasions, Jo discussed Skeleton I with Piers Mitchell, a Lecturer in Biological Anthropology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge whom she had got to know and respect during her time at the university there; he is also a hospital consultant in the National Health Service. He agreed with her diagnosis, that the skeleton was in some respects feminine, but he also supported her original judgment: it was male. Here was a gracile man, with quite a delicate frame and features – ‘less chunky’, as Mitchell put it, than the caricature macho leader. As I write, Richard Buckley is still living and working in Leicestershire.

  You don’t need to be an anatomist to see that Skeleton I was adult, but could Jo be more precise about the man’s age than that? In this, as elsewhere, she was helped by the scans – among other things, they allowed the Forensic Pathology Unit to say Skeleton I was white, answering a question that archaeologists rarely ask.

  There are all sorts of ways of estimating adult age, reflecting the difficulties (ageing younger people, because of the fast, substantial changes that occur as they grow, is easier and more precise). They considered the condition of the teeth – a little worn, with a few cavities – and the presence of those third molars, the closure of sutures (fixed joints between plates in the sk
ull), degeneration of moving joints, the state of the pubic symphysis (the place where the two hip bones meet at the front) and ossification of epiphyses (the extent to which cartilage at the ends of longbones and in the back has turned to bone), among other regions. Yet none of these offers a precise and uncontroversial age, even in a perfectly preserved skeleton. Usually an age range is suggested. The teeth, said Guy Rutty, suggested the man was around 35, while the bones indicated someone in their 30s. Skeleton I, decided Jo, was probably from a man in his late 20s to late 30s – or to put it another way, 33 give or take six years.

  Having concluded that Skeleton I was male, Jo could estimate the man’s height – the formulae differ slightly for men and women. If a body was laid out completely flat and the skeleton is particularly well preserved, sometimes it can be possible literally to measure an individual’s height. Typically, however, this cannot be done, and Skeleton I – with missing lower legs, a slightly folded torso and sharply angled neck, and bones having moved by various small amounts in the ground – is typical. The key database for estimating height was compiled in the 1950s, from study of American fatalities in the Second World War and the Korean War. The most useful bones (as with ageing, there are several ways to estimate height) are in the arms and legs, the longbones; just one bone can give a good approximation, though legs are better than arms.

  Jo measured a thigh bone, and estimated Skeleton I’s height at around 5 ft 8 in. (1.73 m), which matched the Pathology Unit’s estimate – based on averaging a variety of calculations – of 5 ft 7 in. to 5 ft 9 in. (1.70–1.75 m). This was a decent size for a man who had died between 1300 and 1538 – an inch above average.14 Yet in life, he would never have stood that high.

  He had a funny back.

  ‘The appearance of the skeleton’, wrote Michael H. Young (consultant orthopaedic surgeon, retired) from Cardiff to the The Times newspaper, ‘may be a consequence of throwing a body into a hole in the ground. The spinal curvature cannot be accepted as conclusive evidence that the deceased had such a deformity in life.’

  In February 2013, the team would release much information, and more through subsequent interviews and public talks, about their often incomplete research. They would then have to face something that no scientist or historian would choose. The conclusions of their work would be picked over by a public desperate to know more. People would exhibit strange ideas about how archaeologists, and scientists in general, conduct research, often appearing to believe that no one in the University of Leicester’s project had any scientific skills, or even common sense.15

  Meanwhile, science journalists, and sometimes scientists and other archaeologists, would point out that Leicester was unprofessional in not publishing the research in peer-reviewed journals. The dilemma for Jo and her colleagues was that by late that year they would have submitted or nearly completed key journal articles, but they could not enter much of the public debate. Peer-review is a slow, thorough process, and journals work to their own schedules. And they demand exclusivity: breaking an embargo could result in a rejected paper.

  Jo was very curious about Skeleton I’s spine – as were Piers Mitchell and Bruno Morgan. They examined the bones, they scrutinized the 3D scans, and they concluded that Skeleton I suffered from severe idiopathic adolescent-onset scoliosis: he really did have a bad back.

  Most of that diagnosis is a technical way of saying the spine was curved strongly sideways – severe scoliosis – but no one can say why – idiopathic. It has a Cobb angle of around 60–80 degrees; in modern medicine, young scoliosis patients with an angle of over 45 degrees are typically considered for surgery. As well as the curve to the side, there was also a twist, causing the spine to spiral. This was revealed in a physical replica of the skeleton made at Loughborough University, which could be handled in ways the original can not. A 3D computer model, derived from the CT scans, was used to create the replica by laser sintering, in which a high power laser fused small particles into precise, extremely detailed copies of the bones.16

  Adolescent-onset means the man was not born with the condition, but that it developed as he grew up, perhaps around the age of 10 or 13. The evidence for this lies in the individual vertebrae. These are broadly normal, so early growth was not affected. However, the bones in the curve are slightly wedge-shaped, and the spinous processes – the wings that stick out behind the vertebrae – are twisted to one side. As the boy’s teenage growth spurt began, the first signs of scoliosis caused some of the bones to develop abnormally. Above and below the curve, however, the vertebrae were unaffected, and his neck and hips developed as they should have done.

  As he aged, some of his back ligaments turned to bone, stiffening the curve, and he developed severe osteoarthritis. His twisted ribcage would have squeezed his lungs, possibly causing shortness of breath and severe pain, though he may have been unusually fortunate and suffered little in that respect. Late in 2013, Richard Buckley told me that he had given over 40 public talks, at which several people had ‘stood up at the back to say, “I have scoliosis”’, without apparent discomfort. However, Skeleton I’s condition was probably worse. It was a particularly rare form, and with such an extreme curve, present only in one among several thousand individuals – and five times more common in females than males.

  It would have reduced Skeleton I’s height. ‘We cannot be sure how much this [loss] would have been,’ said Jo, ‘but it would have been substantial.’ Otherwise above average height, he would have looked short – probably nearer 4 ft 8 in. (1.42 m) than 5 ft 8 in. His right shoulder probably rose above his left: his right clavicle or shoulder blade is misshapen from having to work harder, the inner end where it articulated with the top of the chest being noticeably enlarged. When Skeleton I was fully dressed, the visible signs of his affliction would have been a squat torso and uneven shoulders.17

  Most of the illnesses and injuries that Skeleton I suffered during his life were probably minor, and they left no traces on his bones. However, analysis revealed that, when approaching death, he was infected with roundworms. Jo had taken soil samples from three areas. When Mitchell analysed these (dysentery and ancient parasites being a special research interest), he found many roundworm eggs (Ascaris lumbricoides) in the area where the intestines would have been, but none from the skull and few outside the grave. He found no sign of other intestinal parasites: if Skeleton I ate any beef, pork or fish, said Mitchell, it had been well cooked, as there were no eggs from tapeworms associated with these foods.18

  Other studies showed that Skeleton I had indeed had a high-protein diet, and ate plenty of seafood. This insight came from analysis of nitrogen and carbon in the bone. These two elements each have two stable forms, known as isotopes, both absorbed by the body from food – nitrogen-14 and nitrogen-15 (14N, 15N) and carbon-12 and carbon-13 (12C, 13C). The ratios between each of the two forms reveal the relative proportions of land and marine food consumed: fish and shellfish have significantly more 13C, and on average more 15N, than do plants and animals that live on land.19

  Two different labs each analysed two rib samples, and both found the same thing: Skeleton I had a varied, protein-rich diet that included seafood. One of the labs hazarded that over a quarter of the diet was marine, and that the rest of the food was heavy on meat. This was clearly someone who ate well.

  That information about culinary habits was a by-product of an especially important study, which set out to determine when Skeleton I died: radiocarbon dating. Two laboratories were selected because of the significance of the date, in case anything should go wrong, and to provide considerable security in an area of reliably high-precision work. The labs were at the University of Glasgow, at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC), and the University of Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU).

  Carbon dating uses a third carbon isotope, this time an unstable, radioactive form, radiocarbon or carbon-14 (14C). Extremely small amounts of 14C are present in the atmosphere (and thus in every living th
ing), produced by cosmic rays from space hitting nitrogen. Carbon-14 is not absorbed by dead matter, and it decays (reverting to a form of nitrogen) at a known rate. So careful measurement of the amount of 14C relative to other carbon in something that was once alive – the less 14C, the older it is – can establish when it died.

  The technique has been around for over 60 years, during which time it has been immensely refined. We cannot yet date a sandwich (as a disgruntled inquirer at the British Museum once hoped, apparently trying to catch out his corner shop), but radiocarbon dates on properly collected samples are now consistently accurate and precise, often to within a few years. There were no reasons to question the results on Skeleton I.

  Up in Glasgow, Derek Hamilton’s initial two dates were six years apart. When averaged and adjusted for long-term variations in atmospheric carbon-14 (one effect of which is to reduce a date’s precision), the result was that Skeleton I died – with a 95 per cent certainty – between 1430 and 1460.

  Down in Oxford, Christopher Bronk Ramsey came up with pretty much the same date. His initial two were only two years apart, and his final estimate 1415–1450. So Skeleton I could not have been Mutton the knight, who had died long before 1415. On the other hand, neither, apparently, could he have been Richard III, who died after 1460. What was going on?

  The problem was all that bouillabaisse. Having realized that Skeleton I ate a lot of seafood, both labs duly corrected their dates to remove a distortion that this had caused: overall the sea contains relatively less 14C than the atmosphere, so if you carbon date an old fish it looks older than it really is – an effect that would have been passed on to anything that might have eaten it. Using established correction data, which make the dates more accurate but unfortunately less precise, Hamilton and Bronk Ramsey – quite independently – came to definitive results that were almost identical. Hamilton then combined the four dates with sophisticated (Bayesian) statistics, threw in the knowledge that the burial had to have occurred before the Dissolution in 1538, and sat back.