archaeology
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Recently I came across this fascinating blogpost by an archaeologist called Katharina, who was working on a Bronze Age burial site in Austria. The skeletons her team excavated have recently been DNA tested–and one of them carried the maternal haplogroup J1c2, which is part of the group to which Richard belonged. Richard’s Bronze Age foremother?…
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Sir Alec Jeffreys, the scientist who revealed the secrets of genetic fingerprinting, remembers the exact moment of his discovery. “It was 9.05 on the morning of Monday, September 10, 1984 – it’s seared into my memory,” he said. It may not be seared into ours in the same way, but we still marvel at the…
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Edward IV’S Hatpin? A fabulous archaeological find has turned up in a Lincolnshire fields–a beautiful golden hatpin shaped like the Sun in Splendour and bearing an intact amethyst stone. An extremely high status object without a doubt and estimated at £15,000. But whose was it? Unfortunately the article accompanying the find is full of…
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We all know the amazing reconstruction of the head of Richard III, and the confirmation it gave of how he really had looked. Forget Shakespeare’s Richard III, the real man had been young, good-looking and altogether normal, except for scoliosis that affected his spine. But when he was dressed, it wouldn’t have shown, especially in…
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Ancient human remains can sometimes ‘speak’ to us through time and inform us not only of their own life stories, but how modern medical complaints came to be. Here is a case of a Franciscan friar’s mummified remains found in an old church in Ecuador that collapsed during an earthquake in 1949. The man, who…
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Scoliosis treatments at the time of Richard III
“Tudor” propaganda, Battle of Bosworth, Eugenie of York, genetics, hormones, idiopathic scoliosism, Ipswich, James Blake, Kurt Cobain, Leicester Greyfriars, Liz Taylor, Liza Minelli, massage, Richard III, Richard III Society, Robert Lovell, scoliosis, Shakespeare, surgery, traction, Turkish baths, Usain BoltAfter centuries of slanders about Richard III, always named as “the hunchbacked king”, it was finally proved that he just suffered from scoliosis. He was not born with this condition but he probably started to suffer with it in his adolescence between 10 and 15. This is the so-called idiopathic scoliosis that can be, in…
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The quoted passage below is from this source . “….What will happen to your bones after you die? Will they be venerated as relics? Buried with care by your loved ones? Preserved as part of a museum’s collection? Each of these treatments says something different about the value – religious, cultural, or scientific –…
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We all know that medieval London was surrounded by great city walls, a lot of which dated from Roman times, and that there was a wide ditch outside the wall, to add to the capital’s defences. It gradually became silted up, and although it was dredged and cleared several times, it was encroached upon by…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 