I've been reading skeletal reports from sixth-century English cemeteries all week, and have been finding tons of cool, useful, and heartbreaking things (in roughly equal measure).

Today I found an Anglo-Saxon man buried with weapons who had spina bifida occulta.

Now, Heinrich Härke (an archaeologist to whom everyone who studies Anglo-Saxon weapons is indebted) uses the example of a man buried with spina bifida occulta at Berinsfield as a case study for why we should not assume everyone buried with weapons was a fighter. This congenital condition, he argued, made it impossible for the man to have used the weapons with which he was buried and, hence, the weapons reflected a symbolic social status marker, not tools he actually had used.

The case I found today is interesting, however, because (unlike H. Härke's example from Berinsfield) this 40 year old man has clear skeletal evidence that suggests he spent a lot of time fighting and training to fight. He has tennis elbow in his right arm (which you get from swinging your arm repeatedly, as with a tennis racket, or a sword), arthritis in his right shoulder (again, a sign of repetitive swinging motions), and a bone growth on his left arm (shield arm) near the elbow which probably resulted from a healed muscle tear. He also had at least three (healed) broken ribs. These injuries could result from mundane activities (perhaps he was a blacksmith who swung a heavy hammer, and was once kicked by a horse he was shoeing). But they're the kinds of skeletal signs we'd expect to see on someone who fought for two decades.

This doesn't mean no weapon burials were 'symbolic'; children, weak men with no musculature, and a pregnant woman were buried with spears. But it does suggest that mildly crippled men could still train to be good fighters, contra our expectations.

That's useful (and cool, because it's super rare to find anyone buried with weapons who you can prove actually fought with them).

But the rest of this post is bad stuff.

Yesterday, I found clear skeletal evidence of violent rape on a 14 year old girl.

Her legs had been forced apart so hard that her muscles were torn, and someone held a knife to her leg to keep her from struggling.

She survived (her injuries had at least 4-6 months to heal), but died around her 15th birthday and was buried with her hands tied, face down, and possibly naked.

Was she a slave, captured and killed after her captors were finished with her? Or was she punished for her rape once her pregnancy became too advanced to hide (the excavator's theory)?

I'm still upset imagining what happened to her, because her last months were physical and psychological hell, and the way she was buried suggests that the people who buried her didn't want anything better for her in the next life either.

I'll not talk about all the babies and pregant women who died together, or the leppers whose hands and feet had been eaten by bacteria; or the little boy whose grave was reopened to add the body of an old dog who had waited years to be reunited to its little master.

Sometimes i'm working with numbers and data, but this week has really foregrounded the fact that all my sources come from the graves of real people, most of whom had hard lives and died too young.

I just finished with Sveinsson's The Folk-Stories of Iceland. In a previous century I tried to muddle my way through the Icelandic original, which appeared in 1940. It has been translated and to a certain extent updated, appearing in 2003 - and now available as a PDF with the link provided.

The work is a classic and full of insights. Having it available in English is a great gift, and it was nice to revisit an old friend and to consider all the wonderful insights provided in the text. Sveinsson is particularly good at reviewing all the available primary sources in historical sequence, and then he takes them apart to discuss what they reveal about contemporary folk beliefs and traditions.

crossposted from Friday Free-for-all

What's the most recent general survey of Chinese history, suitable for classroom use? I have to use Fairbank's China: A New History, and while it's by no means bad (making it onto the AskHistorians booklist is just the most immediate testament to its quality), it seems to me like there's a lot of room to accompany the treasure trove of new scholarship that's come out since 1992.

I was given The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal for my birthday (my gifts almost solely consisting of books, booze, and one syncretic gift of a book about booze!). It was an excellent piece of literature which breathed life into a period which is far beyond my typical purview, tracing the fortunes of the Ephrussi family (powerful Jewish brokers and bankers) from the late nineteenth- to the present through the conceit of a familial heirloom, 264 Japanese netsuke (small carved miniatures of varying materials). I cannot speak for its accuracy nor particularly its methodology as it seems to straddle the border of literature and family history with one foot more firmly on the literary side of things, but I am thoroughly looking forward to reading his new history of porcelain (once my commitments to the Middle Ages are done).

I highly recommend The Hare with the Amber Eyes, it's enthralling both in its style, topic, and the sense of ominous doom which looms over the interwar period. I truly felt moments of dread as the Second World War approached. Has anyone else a similar type of book they might recommend?

Can anybody recommend a solid book on the Compromise of 1850? I've read about it quite a lot (In rough order of recency of my reading: What Hath God Wrought, Disunion!, Freehling's Road to Disunion, Potter's The Impending Crisis, and Battle Cry of Freedom) but realized I'd never read a dedicated work on the subject.

I was all set to go with Bordewich's America's Great Debate but the lack of footnotes is a major turn off. Is the book worth it anyway? Is Remini's At the Edge of the Precipice good? I see it's pretty short, which seems like it would be hindrance when getting into the nuts and bolts of things.