Wederath-Belginum cemetery.Credit: Kulturzentrum Belginum Archäologiepark
Posted on 10/26/2024 8:03:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...A total of 1,689 cremains were dated and studied, and they were categorized as belonging to one of three time periods: 364 to the La Tène Period, 113 to early Roman, and 1212 to the Imperial Roman period...
On average, individuals lived longer during the Roman Period than during the Iron Age, with far more cases of individuals reaching the age of 60 and above.
However, during both the Iron Age and Roman Period, females were more likely to die younger than their male counterparts, with over half the cremations for both the Iron Age and Roman Period representing females below 40 years of age.
It was also discovered that only Iron Age individuals showed signs of violence, likely the result of brawls, indicating that conflict was less common during Roman times.
While Roman individuals were less likely to have experienced violence in their lives and tended to live longer, they were also more likely to grapple with pathologies that included tooth loss, degenerative joints and spines, as well as sinusitis. It is not possible to say definitively if this increase in pathologies is directly linked to an increase in the average age of the population or due to physiological stress.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Wederath-Belginum cemetery.Credit: Kulturzentrum Belginum Archäologiepark
I’ve spent a lot of time on ancestrydotcom these last 5 years or so. The number of women who died in childbirth is staggering. And depressing. In one case, I found a three-generation string. That was early 1600s in the Jamestown area.
Until late 1800ths, women lived on average substantially shorter than men, because of complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
yep, if you have ever done any genealogy work, you will see most men had 3 or more wives over their lifetimes, because they women kept dying (most likely in childbirth)
Up until about 150 years ago medicine was almost none existent for women and children died in great numbers. The Hollyweird version of the past is as fake as it can be.
Some historians think the reason Elisabeth I stayed chaste was her fear of childbirth.
My Dodson line came over with Smith to Jamestown.
Be careful believing Ancestry. Use it as breadcrumbs.
I've done a good bit of digging around on that and other genealogy sites too. There are a few things that strike you immediately. The number of women who died in childbirth. The number of little babies who died in the first year (and to a lesser extent kids under the age of 10) and finally just how many kids they had. Holy Crap! They were cranking out a good 8-9 kids who lived per generation. Once you see that you come to quickly understand how so few people in the 1600s could turn into so many by the 20th century.
“The lack of preserved bones within the 15 inhumations...”
“On the other hand, fortunately, cremations are mostly well-preserved.”
“A total of 1,689 cremains were dated and studied...”
They seem to have gotten a lot or relatively detailed information from cremains...bodies that were burned to ash.
Ancient cremation was considerably less efficient than than the gas-fired brick oven modern variety. Most of the bone would have survived intact and was broken up to fit in a rather large urn or pot. Smaller bones and teeth might have remained intact. Modern cremains are run through a grinder.
How can anyone tell anything from ashes?
Probably the incompleteness of the process. Cremation requires temps north of 1400F and a good period of time to render everything (teeth, bones) into ash. Early on the cells have to burst as the water (which is most of our body mass) rises in temperature. After the dessication other stuff evaporates or maybe ignites.
Crematoria are the modern way of doing this. A Viking-style ship burning might get most of the job done.
This is why I suspect the Battle of Watling Street (where Boudica led 70,000 of her fellow genocidal idiots to their sorry ends) probably wound up resulting in a big bonfire just to get rid of the dead, which took care of most of the mass (the water) but probably left behind over 2 million teeth. That could be the way to identify the battle site, and with luck, allow for DNA testing of the remains.
Definitely. One of my (local) great-great-grandfathers was married three times, my gggmother being his third wife. The second wife only lasted a couple of years (probably not even) so, of the rather large number of kids, there were three groups.
OTOH, in the south, where tobacco was the big crop early on, the men tended to be croaking out more due to labor in the very sunny and hot fields, while the widows would have little trouble finding another husband who needed land to earn his fortune. George Washington was in that boat. Martha it sez here spent about half of the Revolutionary War with George, what a trooper.
Interesting. I never thought about the replacement husbands.
One of my grandfathers was 6 when his mother died (aged 38, shortly after giving birth)--4 of his siblings died in childhood. My other grandfather was 19 when his mother died at 41 (of cancer).
One of my ancestors born in the 1760s or 1770s was one of ten children but the only one who lived to adulthood.
Thank you, that was interesting.
It was unusual, stemmed from the assets. By contrast, one of my great-grandfather’s sisters was widowed (different part of Michigan) and as was often the case, only inherited the marital home and had the skills of a 19th c housewife, so she started to take in boarders.
Back in the 1990s one of her descendants was doing genealogy and contacted me via the forums we had back then. The information I had was in one of those biography books door-to-door peddlars use to sell to us rube, and it gave her second husband without mentioning the first one.
The genealogist didn’t have that info, but noted that she was descended from the first husband, and the second husband showed up in the census as a boarder. :^)
Put a deer cam up. Anything moves....you know the rest.
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