Every Bone has a Story (original) (raw)

This conference centers bones as objects which convey profound messages about the past, from its lived experiences to its manifold expressions of cultural identity, religious belief, and technical expertise (as well as their various intersections). From increasingly fine-grained paleopathological methods and tools, osteological remains are yielding ever sharper insights into what it was like to live, suffer, or thrive in the ancient world. Tracing the DNA extracted from bones has, and continues, to help us to rewrite the evolutionary history of endemic disease and epidemic events as they unfolded across the Mediterranean. Isotopic analysis of minerals lodged in bones tell us stories about environment, diet, and patterns of mobility. Similarly, faunal remains disclose not only alimentary programs of peoples, but their sacrificial ones as well. Bones can tell us as much about human communication with the gods as statuary, song, or temple. Astragaloi, knucklebones, were popular as dice and used for various kinds of games. But so too they provided the material basis for a widespread form of divination, astragalomancy. More than yielding binary yes or no answers, a simple toss of the knucklebones yielded sophisticated responses to a wide variety of questions about the future, depending on complex numerical combinations. But religious-and by extension political-life itself could be "articulated" through bones-from the foundational bones of hero cult