Tea at Trianon: What Teeth Can Tell

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

What Teeth Can Tell

About Ancient Greece. From The Greek Reporter:

But in 2008, a team of Italian archaeologists began to excavate outside the ancient city wall at Himera, a Greek colony on the north-central coast of Sicily, Italy. In the western necropolis, or cemetery, they found several mass graves dating to the early fifth century B.C. All the individuals in the graves were male, and many had experienced violent trauma or even had weapons still lodged in their bones.

The evidence strongly suggests these men could have been soldiers who fought in 480 B.C. and 409 B.C. in the Battles of Himera, written about by ancient Greek historians. I’m part of an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and geologists who analyzed the teeth of these people who lived more than 2,400 years ago to figure out who they were and where they came from. It looks like early historians didn’t pass down the whole story, and our findings might rewrite parts of what’s known about Greek military history.
In Ancient Greece, Herodotus and another historian, Diodorus Siculus, both wrote about the Battles of Himera. They described the first battle in 480 B.C. as a victory of an alliance of Greeks from all across Sicily over an invading Carthaginian force from modern-day Tunisia.

Three generations later, the second battle in 409 B.C. was more chaotic. The historians report that Carthage besieged the city of Himera, which this time had little outside assistance. These ancient accounts tell of grand generals, political alliances, and sneaky military tactics such as the Greek cavalry who pretended to be friendly as a way to get into the Carthaginian camp.
The 21st-century discovery of what looked like the remains of soldiers from around the times of these two famous battles provided a rare opportunity. Once Italian researchers had done initial studies on the skeletal remains of the 132 individuals, including estimating their age at death and looking for signs of disease, I was able to travel to Sicily with the Bioarchaeology of the Mediterranean Colonies Project, co-directed by Laurie Reitsema and Britney Kyle, to collect samples for isotope analysis.
My colleagues and I were interested in figuring out whether the soldiers’ remains told the same story as the ancient historians. The historical sources say they were likely all Greeks, with some possibly from other cities in Sicily, like Syracuse or Agrigento. Where had these soldiers really come from? (Read more.)