Looking at Grave Patterns

Hi everybody! Only one more week to go and I have to wrap all of my data analysis up. Right now I'm trying to have an optimistic and confident attitude like the GIF below.



In the BONE lab this week, I did pretty much the usual things: clean bones, label bones, try not to choke on too much bone dust. Burials 1 and 2 of grave site 14-04 are now cleaned and being labeled. I have some cool pictures of skeletal remains below so this is the time to look away if you don't like viewing remains. The first picture is of two conjoined phalanges and the second picture is of vertebrae I've been cleaning. I find that I feel most uncomfortable when cleaning vertebrae over other types of bones.

As for my data analysis, I created more graphs on R this week! Like I promised, I have a graph on the proportion of grave goods. Also, I have a graph on the proportion of body positions for site 03-01. From the graphs below, you can see that faience beads comprise the majority of grave goods. Next, there are also quite a few burial shrouds present. This makes sense since the majority of the graves in 03-01 are Christian graves. You can also see from the proportion of body positions graph that the majority of remains are buried extended on their back instead of flexed to their right like the site 09-01. This is because Christian burial practices usually lay the remains on their back while in the Kerma period remains are usually flexed to one side.

Instead of an article discussion this week, I was invited to a brown bag meeting by Annie to see Dr. Tina Jacob of Durham University in the UK speak about her research in central Sudan. This presentation was really interesting as it featured similar results to what I've been analyzing in our data sets. For example, Dr. Jacob found that mostly women seem to be present in the grave sites. I found this to be true in our data as well. However, what I found really interesting is that she found no burial orientation patterns in her grave sites. In the El-Ginefab school site, I found quite obvious patterns that people are buried with their heads oriented to the west and feet facing the east. Another interesting topic Dr. Jacob talked about was of the practice of teeth avulsion found in three of her remains. In tradition Sudanese practices, which continue to this day, the canine/incisor teeth are removed during childhood. Bioarchaeologists are still not certain where this practice stems from or what the purpose of the avulsion or removal of these teeth are. Dr. Baker also finds evidence of this in her skeletal remain collection.


Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed this post and the direction my research is going in so far. I will try to knit a word document of all the graphs I have created and try to discuss what the results mean with Dr. Baker so I can make more sense of all the patterns I'm finding. I wish everybody a joyous weekend!