








































Bioarchaeology International
Volume 3, Number 1: 16–31
DOI: 10.5744/bi.2019.1006

Copyright © 2019 University of Florida Press

Osteobiography: The History of the Body as Real 
Bottom- Line History
John Robb,a* Sarah A. Inskip,a Craig Cessford,a Jenna Dittmar,a  
Toomas Kivisild,b Piers D. Mitchell,a Bram Mulder,a Tamsin C. O’Connell,a  
Mary E. Price,a Alice Rose,a and Christiana Scheibc

aDepartment of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
bKatholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
cEstonian Bioscience Centre, Tartu, Estonia
*Correspondence to: John Robb, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, 
Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK 

e- mail: jer39@cam . ac . uk

ABSTRACT What is osteobiography good for? The last generation of archaeologists fought to overcome the traditional as-
sumption that archaeology is merely ancillary to history, a substitute to be used when written sources are defec-
tive; it is now widely acknowledged that material histories and textual histories tell equally valid and complementary 
stories about the past. Yet the traditional assumption hangs on implicitly in biography: osteobiography is used 
to fill the gaps in the textual record rather than as a primary source in its own right. In this article we compare 
the textual biographies and material biographies of two thirteenth- century townsfolk from medieval England— 
Robert Curteis, attested in legal records, and “Feature 958,” excavated archaeologically and studied osteobi-
ographically. As the former shows, textual biographies of ordinary people mostly reveal a few traces of financial 
or legal transactions. Interpreting these traces, in fact, implicitly presumes a history of the body. Osteobiogra-
phy reveals a different kind of history, the history of the body as a locus of appearance and social identity, work, 
health and experience. For all but a few textually rich individuals, osteobiography provides a fuller and more 
human biography. Moreover, textual visibility is deeply biased by class and gender; osteobiography offers par-
ticular promise for Marxist and feminist understandings of the past.

Keywords: medieval; experience; osteobiography; ordinary people; biography

 ¿Para qué sirve la osteobiografía? La última generación de arqueólogos luchó para superar la suposición tradi-
cional de que la arqueología es meramente (accesoria) a la historia, una sustituta que se puede utilizar cuando 
las fuentes escritas son deficientes. Ahora es ampliamente reconocido que las historias materiales y las historias 
textuales igualmente válido y complementario del pasado. Sin embargo, la suposición tradicional continúa im-
plícitamente en la biografía: se utiliza la osteobiografía para llenar los vacíos en el historial textual en vez de 
utilizarla como fuente primaria por derecho propio. En esta investigación comparamos las biografías textuales 
y biografías materiales de dos ciudadanos de la Inglaterra medieval del siglo XIII— Robert Cuteis, documentado 
en registros legales, y “Feature 958”, excavada arqueologicamente y examinada osteobiograficamente. Como 
demuestra la primera, biografías textuales de la gente común sobre todo revelan algunos rastros de transac-
ciones financieras o legales. La interpretación de estos rastros de hecho presume implícitamente una historia del 
cuerpo. La osteobiografía revela una clase de historia distinta, la historia del cuerpo como un sitio que contiene 
información sobre apariencia e identidad social, trabajo, salud y experiencia. Para todos aparte de algunos 

Received 29 July 2018
Revised 3 January 2019

Accepted 5 January 2019



Robb et al. 17

Biography with and without Texts

Years ago, one of the classic texts of medieval history 
was Eileen Power’s (1924) book Medieval People. It 
featured biographies of six medieval men and women. 
A tradition followed of using the biographies of “typ-
ical” people as an entrée into medieval society (e.g., 
Bennett 1955). Today, biographies of medieval people 
still form a staple of popular history. The core of these 
works was upper- class aristocrats, public men, and 
merchants, but they made an effort, usually trying to 
include a token woman and a token poor person. The 
woman was usually based on some fortuitously well 
documented gentlewoman such as Margery Paston or 
an exceptional case such as Margery Kempe; the poor 
person may have been a fictionalized pastiche such as 
Power’s Frankish peasant “Bodo.” Later microhisto-
ries (Davis 1984; Ginzburg 1992; Le Roy Ladurie 1978) 
expanded the genre, but were possible only when they 
hit a lucky trove of exceptionally documented mate-
rial in court or inquisition records. This tradition con-
tinues; a recent compilation of medieval biographies 
(Bates et al. 2006) contains only one subject who is not 
an aristocrat, a high- ranking religious figure, or a lit-
erary figure. The one exception is based not upon tex-
tual but upon archaeological and osteological data 
(Fleming 2006).

Even with texts, sources reveal different things in 
different abundance. Chaucer and Shakespeare, the 
outstanding literary figures of their times, were well- 
known individuals in public life, and each left over a 
hundred life records. Yet virtually all of their life re-
cords tell about their business transactions; we know 
far more of their minor property investments than of 
whether each really loved his wife or not. As any gene-
alogist will tell you, this bias is true even for surprisingly 

recent periods. For ordinary people, particularly be-
fore parish records began in the sixteenth century and 
national censuses began in the nineteenth century, it 
is rare to have even a few life records, and a “biogra-
phy” almost always consists of just a few incidental 
transactions and perhaps a will (cf. Fleming 2009). 
Such minimal documents form the tough and lasting 
enamel crowns of the textual record, remaining when 
the letters, diaries, and conversations, like fragile but 
informative pelvic bones, vanish in the erosion of 
time. Before the last couple of centuries, no textual re-
cord at all attests the very existence of the vast bulk of 
humanity (Fig. 1). This destruction of information fil-
ters our historical vision, making an uncritical textual 
history the preferential history of the rich and note-
worthy. If we want to write a genuine “people’s his-
tory” (Zinn 1980), a history of submerged people and 
their struggles, we need material evidence, above all 
the evidence of their own bodies.

What role can osteobiography play in balancing this 
situation? The answer hinges upon the relationship of 
texts and material remains. Traditionally, history has 
been based upon textual records; material remains 
have been regarded as ancillary, typically as a supple-
mentary source. In fields such as Classical, historical, 
and early medieval archaeology, the last generation 
fought to establish archaeology as an equal, comple-
mentary source to textual records. Biography, how-
ever, is among the last holdouts. We still retain the 
idea that a biography must deal with a named individ-
ual and contain specific historical facts and dates. 
Skeletal studies are commonly thought of as provid-
ing generic background and color rather than detailed 
individual stories. This perception partly derives from 
our idea that imagining an individual requires a name, 
a face, and a backstory (Robb 2009). Indeed, with 

Figure 1. Medieval England: the inverse relationship between level of historical knowledge and an 
 individual’s social position.

pocos individuos que tienen una historia textual abundante, la osteobiografía provee una biografía más amplia 
y más humana. Además, la visibilidad textual está profundamente sesgada por clase y por género; la osteobi-
ografía ofrece un potencial especial para los entendimientos marxistas y feministas del pasado.

Keywords: medieval; experienca; osteobiographía; gente común; biographía



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History18

high- profile cases such as Richard III (Buckley et al. 
2013), what makes the osteobiography a “real” biogra-
phy, rather than just the study of a random skeleton, 
is the act of identifying the skeleton with a specific his-
torically documented individual.

We advocate dethroning the textual individual as 
the gold standard biography. We define biography 
as the life story of a specific individual, without pre-
suppositions about what specific information it must 
contain and what methods are used to achieve it. Thus, 
biographers have the same challenge as any other an-
alysts. Different sources, like different scanning tech-
nologies, yield different pictures. Consider an X- ray, a 
genotype, a family story, and a photograph. One is not 
“truer” than another. Instead, they are based on dif-
ferent methods, reveal different aspects of someone, 
and are useful for different purposes. This point was 
made graphically by Sir John Sulston, the Nobel lau-
reate who founded the Human Genome Project, when 
he proposed two autobiographical portraits of him-
self: a photograph and a genotype.

Osteobiography has already proved its value in pro-
viding “a past with faces,” a past in which all people, 
rather than just textually privileged ones, have hu-
manity and agency rather than remaining “faceless 
blobs” (in Tringham’s [1991:94] memorable phrase). 
Landmark osteobiographies are reviewed in the intro-
duction above and in the articles in this issue; for me-
dieval England osteobiographical approaches have 
been advocated by Gilchrist (2012:43– 67; see also Knü-
sel et al. 2010, and medieval examples from the Neth-
erlands [Arts 2003], Norway [Hamre et  al. 2017], 
Cyprus [Baker et al. 2012], and Poland [Matczak and 
Kozłowski 2017]). Our goal in this article is not only to 
provide another example, useful though that would 
be. Rather, by explicitly comparing skeletal and textual 
biographies, we wish to explore how they create dif-
ferent kinds of life stories.

This article compares two people who lived and 
died around the same time— the earlier thirteenth 
century— and in the same place, a neighborhood about 
200 meters across in Cambridge, England. One is 
known through historical records, and the other is an 
excavated skeleton. They spoke the same language, 
Middle English; shared a cosmological frame of refer-
ence, medieval Christianity; and would have had many 
of the same thoughts and preoccupations. They may 
have known each other or jostled in the marketplace. 
They were buried in the same cemetery. They may have 
been related. But when we investigate them through 
textual biography and osteobiography, very different 
understandings of them emerge. We will argue that, 
for understanding the lives of the medieval poor, 
and indeed the vast bulk of humanity in almost any 
period, osteobiography provides a more detailed, reli-
able, and insightful life story than textual biography.

Medieval Cambridge

By the early twelfth century, Cambridge was a medi-
eval town of ca. 90 hectares (Fig. 2; Bryan 1999; Cam 
1959; Lobel 1975; Taylor 1999). Records from 1279 show 
that, by then, it contained around 440 domestic houses, 
60 additional houses in outlying suburbs, around 50 
vacant properties, and 75 shops or booths. This docu-
mentation suggests a population of ca. 2500– 4500. It 
was a medium- size market town in which economic 
life was based upon farming and river trade up and 
down the Cam. It had a castle, and a substantial cler-
ical population based in the Benedictine nunnery of 
St. Radegund, the Hospital of St. John, and the outly-
ing Barnwell priory and leper hospital. More friaries 
were founded later in the thirteenth century. The uni-
versity was founded in ca. 1208– 1210, but it did not 
become a major force in the town until the late thir-
teenth to early fourteenth centuries. In the period dis-
cussed here, its major effect upon the town probably 
was to add a steady demand for food, drink, and ser-
vices to support a few hundred clerics and students.

Burial in medieval Cambridge was organized 
around the religious landscape. In the late twelfth 
and early thirteenth centuries there were 14 parish 
churches in Cambridge, each anchoring a neighbor-
hood of a few hundred parishioners. Both of our sub-
jects were buried at the Hospital of St. John, located 
adjacent to the parish of St. Clement in the north end 
of town where the main north- south road crossed the 
river Cam. This parish held 35 domestic houses and 
five shops and booths. Its several hundred residents 
were a broadly representative cross section of society. 
The parish church cemeteries were the normal place 
to be buried, but people were also buried in religious 
houses of various kinds, including the Hospital of 
St. John. From 1144 to 1275, Jews were buried in Jew-
ish cemeteries. Of all these burial options, only a few 
have been investigated archaeologically. At the parish 
cemetery of All Saints by the castle north of the river, 
ca. 220 townspeople buried ca. 950– 1365 have been ex-
cavated (Craddock and Gregory n.d.), and nearly 40 
skeletons, mostly of friars, recently have been exca-
vated at the Augustinian friary south of the market-
place (Cessford 2017).

The most extensively investigated cemetery is at the 
Hospital of St. John, where approximately 400 burials 
were excavated (Cessford 2012; 2015). St. John’s Hos-
pital was a small charitable institution that provided 
shelter to poor and indigent people. It was founded 
around 1195 and lasted until 1511 (Cessford 2015; Ru-
bin 1987; Underwood 2008). The hospital itself initially 
supposedly consisted of the “poorest of shacks” (pau-
perrium bordam) erected on a valueless piece of waste 
ground, but it soon acquired a stone chapel, accom-
modation for the brethren, a dormitory for inmates, 



Robb et al. 19

Figure 2. Cambridge in the early thirteenth century (map by Vicki Herring).

ancillary structures, and a cemetery (Rubin 1987). In 
the usual medieval pattern, it was supported by in-
come from parish churches and from rent- yielding 
urban properties and agricultural land. These prop-
erties were donated to the hospital by the pious in 
return for prayers and masses. It provided room, board, 
and clothing for its dozen or so fortunate inmates, 

who were chosen from the town’s poor and infirm. 
Medieval hospitals provided charitable shelter for 
many distinct categories of people, including the poor 
and aged, pilgrims, and the chronically ill (Prescott 
1992). Hospitals also provided the necessary setting to 
have a “good death,” with ready access to confession 
and masses around the dying person’s bed (Rawcliffe 



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History20

Figure 3. Robert Curteis: the principal life record (SJCA D18.23). This 
document in the archives of St. John’s College, Cambridge, records, 
among other transactions, his father’s gift of land to St. John’s Hospital 
in return for the burial of Robert’s body there. Used by permission of 
the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge.

1995). Although the concept of the “good death” was 
only fully expressed in the fifteenth century, when the 
Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying) was published, it is 
clear that there had been an increasing elaboration 
around death linked to the developing concept of Pur-
gatory, with a distinction between an “idealised and 
studied good death” and an “unregenerate and impen-
itent one” (Crouch 1997:180). On current bio archae ol-
o gi cal evidence (Inskip et al. in prep), Cambridge’s 
Hospital of St. John sheltered a combination of older 
individuals, perhaps unable to work owing to age, 
weakness, or chronic illness, and younger people with 
chronic debilitating illnesses. It also housed a few cor-
rodians, older people who had donated property to 
the hospital in return for guaranteed room and board 
for the rest of their lives. Among the dead buried in 
the cemetery there were also some townsfolk (such as 
Robert Curteis, below) and perhaps some of the hos-
pital lay staff, such as cooks, bakers, and maltsters.

Robert Curteis: A Textual Biography

Of the tens of thousands of people who lived and died 
in Cambridge during the thirteenth century, only a 
minuscule proportion is mentioned in historical re-
cords. Children, probably about half the population 
at any time, are almost entirely invisible. Adult women 
appear infrequently, mostly when they owned prop-
erty in their own right. Aside from a few major land-
owners or civic figures, even adult males emerge only 
if they were householders subject to taxation, bought 
or sold property, or fell afoul of the law. Anybody ac-
tually named in any textual record, therefore, already 
has far- above- average historical visibility. One such 
person was Robert Curteis, who lived in St. Clement 
parish in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centu-
ries (Faber 2006:321– 322). We have chosen him be-
cause his level of historical documentation is typical 
of the minority of individuals mentioned historically, 
and his family seems to have been economically rep-
resentative of the neighborhood. Somewhat unusually, 
he is one of only two townspeople textually docu-
mented as being buried in the cemetery of the Hospi-
tal of St. John (Fig. 3), making him a compatriot (at 
least in death) of Feature 958 and others of the skele-
tal sample under study.

Table 1 summarizes Robert Curteis’s available life 
records, drawing both upon the Hospital of St. John’s 
records (Underwood 2008) and upon Faber’s (2006) 
exhaustive family- by- family study of the parish of 
St. Clement. Robert Curteis is actually mentioned by 
name only twice: once as a witness to a neighbor’s mi-
nor legal transaction, and once in the document that 
notes his burial place (Fig. 3). We can build something 
of a family history from references to his paternal 

grandfather, who was referred to as Curteis “at the 
Bridge”; his father, Gilbert; and his son, Peter. The 
name “Curteis,” or “Curtis,” an Anglo- Norman word 
meaning “a man of good education or manners,” be-
gan to be used in England in the twelfth century, be-
coming widespread by the thirteenth (Reaney and 
Wilson 1991:121). Gilbert’s, Robert’s, and Peter’s lives 
span the transition when ordinary people began to 
have fixed inherited surnames, often patronymics as 
in this case. For all of them, their dates of birth can 
only be estimated by calculating backwards from 
events such as legal transactions or parentage at which 
point they must have been adults. Except for Robert 
himself, their date of death is also entirely inferential.

Robert’s grandfather, father, and uncle were towns-
people who owned small houses in a crowded neigh-
borhood at the north end of Cambridge. They also 
owned small parcels of land in the town fields that 
surrounded Cambridge. They did not own enough 
farmland to support a family as full- time farmers, and 
we do not know if they cultivated this land themselves 
or let it out for rent. They did buy other small urban 
plots, conforming to the medieval pattern in which 
property was the basic form of wealth and savings 
were invested in holdings that would yield rent. We do 
not know where they came from or what their occu-
pations were. A few of their neighbors are identified 
by place- names or trade names such as “baker” or 
“fisher,” but most are not. Economically, the family 
seems to have been typical of their neighborhood. 
St. Clement’s parish contained about 100 households 
paying tax, plus an unknown number of households 



Robb et al. 21

too poor to do so. Robert’s father, Gilbert, and his un-
cle, Richard, were both among the townspeople who 
paid taxes, including an amercement in 1211 and tallage 
in 1219 (Maitland 1898:167– 170). In both assessments 
they were close to the median amount paid in their 
parish. However, tax was assessed for only 20– 30% of 
households (149 of about 500 in 1211, 92 of about 500 
in 1219). As taxpayers, the Curteis males were firmly 
ensconced in the middle range of the burgess class, 
the property- owning freemen of the town, and be-
longed to the uppermost 10– 20% of adults overall. 
They were ordinary townsfolk, probably working with 
their hands in a craft or trade, but certainly not poor.

Robert’s own life course is even more inferential. 
Robert was almost certainly born between 1180 and 
1200. He was not taxed as a head of household in 1211 
or 1219, but his father was, implying that Robert still 
lived in his father’s house at that point, perhaps as a 
young man who was born in the 1190s. He lived long 
enough to buy or inherit a house plot and to have an 

acknowledged son or heir, Peter, suggesting that he 
also married. We know when Robert died with more 
precision. Between about 1220 and 1230, Gilbert is re-
corded as donating a very small (ca. 3.65 m by 5.50 m) 
piece of riverside land to the Hospital of St. John in re-
turn for burying Robert there. Assuming that Robert 
was born in the 1190s, he would have died around 
30 years of age, probably leaving a young son, Peter, 
who inherited both a house plot from him and prop-
erty from Gilbert. The transaction between Gilbert 
and the hospital at Robert’s death is interesting in it-
self. The hospital was permitted to bury its own mem-
bers, servants, and the inmates in its care. It could 
also bury others who asked to be interred there in 
writing, but the hospital then had to pay a fee to the 
deceased’s parish church (Rubin 1987:106). Robert 
would normally have been buried in the graveyard of 
his local parish church, St.  Clement’s. Why would 
Robert be buried at the hospital cemetery? While 
burial in monastic cemeteries was a prestigious act in 

Table 1. Robert Curteis: the textual record. Items in italics are not directly attested by textual records but are inferred from events textually attested, 
such as transactions implying that the person in question was legally an adult at a given date. SJHC denotes documents listed in the Cartulary of the 
Hospital of St. John (Underwood 2008).

Approximate Date

Robert’s 
Approximate 

Age Event

Before 1170 — Robert’s grandfather, Curteis “at the Bridge,” is born.

1160– 1180 — Robert’s father, Gilbert Curteis, and uncle, Richard Curteis, are born.

1180– 1200 0 Robert Curteis is born.

Ca. 1200 Curteis “at the Bridge” is a bailiff, pays fines, and witnesses various minor legal transactions implying  
he is a responsible adult (Faber 2006:321).

Ca. 1200– 1211 Curteis “at the Bridge” dies.

Early 1200s — Robert’s father, Gilbert, and uncle, Richard, are adults, witnessing a neighbor’s legal transaction (SJHC 5) 
and owning seven acres of land in fields around the nearby village of Maddingley (SJHC 196– 97).

1211 10– 30 Along with many neighbors, Robert’s father, Gilbert, and uncle, Richard, are taxed (“amerced”); this 
implies that their father, Curteis, is dead and they are the householders in the family. They pay two marks 
each, approximately modal for taxpayers in their neighborhood of Cambridge and about a third to a half 
of a laborer’s annual wage (Faber 2006:321, 808).

Early 1200s? 20– 40 Robert is an adult, witnessing a neighbor’s land transaction (SJHC 101– 02).

1200– 1220 20– 40 Robert’s son Peter is born.

1200– 1220 20– 40 Later tax lists (the Hundred Rolls of 1279) imply that Robert bought at least one plot of land in St. Clement 
parish; his son, Peter, inherited this from him as well as another plot either inherited from Robert or 
directly from Gilbert (Faber 2006).

1219 20– 40 Robert’s father, Gilbert, and uncle, Richard, are taxed (“tallage”), implying that they are the responsible 
heads of household (Faber 2006:321, 809– 10). Richard pays 1£ 4s 8d and Gilbert 15s, again approximately 
modal for their neighborhood.

Ca. 1220– 1230 25– 45 Robert Curteis dies. His father, Gilbert, still living, gives a piece of riverside land approximately 3.65 by 
5.50 m to the Hospital of St. John in return for being able to bury Robert in the hospital cemetery  
(Faber 2006:321; St John’s College Archives D18.1.23).

1246 — Robert’s son, Peter, gives up rights to seven acres of fields around the nearby village of Maddingle  
(SJHC 200). He owns at least three properties in St. Clement’s parish (Faber 2006:321– 22).

1260 — Robert’s son, Peter, owns property at least to 1260, implying he is still living. He does not appear in records 
after this date and his properties belong to other people, implying that he had no male heirs  
(Faber 2006:321– 22).

1279 No male members of the Curteis family are mentioned as owning property in Cambridge when the 
Hundred Rolls are compiled.



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History22

the later Middle Ages (and one that was usually paid for 
with a substantial donation), at this point being buried 
in the cemetery of a young hospital with its mission of 
care for the needy was unlikely to be a status- oriented 
move. Rather, in the early to mid- thirteenth century 
the townspeople of Cambridge considered the hospital 
an establishment that they had founded and created 
(known as a hospitale simplex or locus privatus), rather 
than a more formal religious institution (locus religios; 
Rubin 1987). As Robert had lived within 200 m of the 
hospital for all or most his life, there may have been a 
close familial attachment. Hospitals also provided 
the necessary setting to have a “good death,” with ready 
access to confession and masses around the dying per-
son’s bed (Rawcliffe 1995). Whether this burial loca-
tion implies that Robert was outstandingly pious or an 
exemplary sinner in need of help is conjectural. The 
document itself does not specify whether his burial 
was in the hospital cemetery among the inmates or in 
a higher- status position near the chapel. That the piece 
of donated land was so small probably indicates noth-
ing about the family’s economic status, but simply that 
it was an infrequent transaction at that point, without 
an established scale of cost. It seems likely that the 
land was an adjacent scrap that conveniently filled in a 
gap in the hospital’s riverside access.

As a textual individual, “Robert Curteis” consists of 
a name, a sex, a general economic class identification, 
and a general identification with a place. These provide 
orientation points for extrapolating much more. While 
no gender system is entirely binary, for the medieval 
period, identifying somebody as a social male strongly 
suggests that this individual was biologically identifi-
able as male, and it suggests a strongly conventional-
ized identity and activity regime. We can infer a legal 
status: a free person not tied to a feudal manor. This 
information sketches in a series of rights and obliga-
tions. For instance, Robert would have been free from 
corvée demands, but owed taxes upon his property. 
Placing Robert as an urban man from a moderately 
prosperous family suggests that he was probably a 
craftsman or tradesman rather than a general laborer. 
He and his male line had a four- generation run in the 
ranks of more prosperous townsfolk, buying a handful 
of small properties that presumably provided rent in-
come from people still less prosperous. This cycle may 
have ended due to a lack of further heirs, or their prop-
erty may have ended up among daughters or collateral 
relatives; it is almost impossible to trace such links in 
records of this nature. There are also some interesting 
starting points for further inference. For instance, 
Robert lived long enough to act as a legal witness, buy 
property, and father a son, all acts of a socially com-
petent adult male, but he was never recorded as a 
head of household. He may have never left his father’s 

household. Alternatively, perhaps he was adroit at 
avoiding tax assessments, or perhaps his relatively 
brief social adulthood simply fell between the infre-
quent tax exactions that form the available records.

This biography has four principal limitations, which 
can be taken as typical of textual biographies.

1.  It relies heavily upon normative generalization to 
fill in gaps. For instance, we do not really know 
that, because he was identified as male, Robert con-
formed to “normal” masculinity. We assume that 
he participated in medieval Christianity in a “typi-
cal” way rather than being indifferent, skeptical, 
atheistic, or heretical. Similarly, links between peo-
ple are often more or less inferential. For example, 
it is sometimes assumed that males with the same 
surname in successive generations and sometimes 
holding the same properties are father and son, or 
at least a straightforward succession of legal heirs.

2.  It relies upon an underlying, assumed history of the 
human body, for instance, in estimating the length 
of a generation and the level of social activity at dif-
ferent stages of life.

3.  It has important social gaps. It really only tells us 
about heads of households and people engaging in 
recorded legal transactions. We know almost noth-
ing about women and children, younger sons, ser-
vants, and other people (e.g., how large the Curteis 
household actually was, and whether Robert had 
siblings or not).

4.  Most importantly, even a textual biography much 
more complete than this one categorically remains 
silent on many aspects of human experience. It is 
uncommon to know the occupation or actual daily 
activities of anyone other than a cleric who is men-
tioned in textual records of medieval Cambridge. 
Similarly, we rarely know of their origin or move-
ments in life, their appearance, or their individual 
diet or health experience and life risks.

It is also worth noting how little relationship this 
life story bears to any of the dramatic or important re-
gional or national events between 1190 and 1225. Na-
tionally, Richard I was succeeded by King John (1199), 
Jews were permitted to live freely in England (1201), 
and a harsh winter created famine (1205). King John 
was excommunicated by the pope in 1209, involved in 
the First Barons’ War, and forced to sign the Magna 
Carta (1215– 1216), and was succeeded by Henry III 
(1216). Locally, Cambridge obtained a town charter 
(1201), a nationally important fair (1211), and royal 
visits (1215– 1216), and scholars arrived from Oxford to 
begin university teaching (1208– 1210). None of these 
events are visible in the Curteis’ family saga. For ordi-
nary folk, wars and dynastic politics mostly happened 



Robb et al. 23

Figure 4. Feature 958, excavated (photo: Cambridge Archaeological 
Unit).

somewhere else far away. Major famines and local 
events must have impinged on their lives, but none of 
these can be readily traced in the individual lives, 
whether of survivors or casualties.

Feature 958: An Osteobiography

Feature 958 (F958) is the skeleton of an adult male 
excavated in the cemetery of the Hospital of St. John, 
Cambridge. F958 presented a complete, fully articu-
lated skeleton (Fig. 4). He was chosen for osteobiograph-
ical reconstruction because he is an older individual 
with a very well preserved skeleton (Figs. 5– 6). More-
over, for this article we wanted an adult male to pro-
vide a relevant comparison for Robert Curteis, since 
our ability to write textual biographies of women from 
medieval Cambridge is almost nil. F958 was male, ac-
cording to both skeletal criteria (pelvic and cranial 
indications) and aDNA evidence. Based upon both 
pelvic traits (following standard protocols in Buikstra 
and Ubelaker [1994], as validated in Inskip et al. [2018], 
these included the public symphysis [Brooks and 
Suchey 1990] and auricular surface [Buckberry and 
Chamberlain 2002]) and advanced dental wear (Broth-
well 1981), he died between 40 and 60 years of age.

F958 is currently modeled as having a 95% proba-
bility of having died between 1222 and 1290, based 
upon Bayesian calibration of direct AMS dating of his 
skeleton. As he was between 40 and 60 years old when 
he died, there is a 95% probability that he was born be-
tween 1174 and 1236, and a 68% probability that he 
was born between 1195 and 1231. If we place him to-
ward the middle of his chronological range and age- 
at- death distribution, we might imagine him as born 
around 1200 and dying around 1250. If so, he would 
have been a child or young man when Robert Curteis 
was an adult. He, thus, outlived Robert both in lifes-
pan and chronologically.

Figure 5. Feature 958: the principal life record (photo by John Robb).



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History24

Figure 7. Carbon and nitrogen isotopic values for adult Saint John’s 
Divinity School samples. Feature 958 is marked with a black dot. Gray 
cross indicates median values, and the dark gray area (“bag”) contains 
50% of the samples. The outer gray loop is three times the size of the 
“bag,” and anything outside it is considered an outlier (chart by Alice 
Rose produced following Rousseuw et al. 1999).

Figure 6. Feature 958: skull (photo by Craig Cessford).

We can summarize the salient facts to be learned 
from F958’s skeleton succinctly, arranged as far as pos-
sible in chronological order.

• F958’s genetic heritage is completely unremarkable 
for the region. While higher- resolution scans are 
ongoing, his mtDNA lineage is H2A, which is ex-
tremely common for the British Isles.

• His childhood must be considered a success. Lin-
ear enamel hypoplasias upon his anterior teeth re-
veal at least two intervals of interrupted growth 
between 0 and 6 years of age. It is unknown how 
serious a stress is needed to produce such lesions, 
and it may have been quite minor— a short bout of 
childhood illness, for instance. If he suffered from 
conditions that result in cribra orbitalia, a very 
common finding in the St. John’s sample, he lived 
long enough to remodel all trace of it. He does not 
show evidence for rickets, which is evident in oth-
ers in the cemetery. Moreover, he survived child-
hood, unlike perhaps half his birth cohort (based 
upon general comparison with premodern demo-
graphic profiles; see Fleming 2006), and he reached 
an adult stature above the average for males buried 
in the cemetery.

• His adult stature was approximately 177.5 cm, esti-
mated using the Trotter and Gleser “white” equa-
tions (Trotter and Gleser 1958). His height is well 
above the average stature of 167– 168 cm for adult 
males in this sample (Dodwell in Cessford 2015). 
With above- average but not extreme height and at 
least average robustness, he would have fit well into 
the cohort of adult males.

• F958’s collagen carbon isotope value (– 18.7) is typical 
for the St.  John’s group, and for medieval English 
samples in general (Price 2013). However, his nitro-
gen isotope value (14.7) is among the highest for 
both the St. John’s Hospital group and for medieval 
England generally (Fig.  7; Price 2013). This result 
suggests that his diet contained a significant pro-
portion of animal protein and/or fish, particularly 
in the last decade or two of life, the interval presum-
ably represented by the analyzed rib sample. Food 
in medieval England was strongly related to social 
class, with poorer people subsisting largely on bread, 
ale, and vegetable pottage. Inmates of St. John’s Hos-
pital were supposed to receive meat several days a 
week, and fish at least once a week (Rubin 1987). 
However, F958’s carbon and nitrogen isotope values 
relative to those of the rest of the hospital skeletal 
sample suggest perhaps that he had not spent many 
years within the hospital, but in settings with more 
privileged access to food.

• He displays 12 Schmorl’s nodes in thoracic and lum-
bar vertebrae; these lesions indicate places where 
bone has resorbed around a herniated interverte-
bral disk. Schmorl’s nodes are common, both in 
the St. John’s Hospital sample and generally in pre-
modern populations. If they do not impinge upon a 
joint surface or nerve, they do not necessarily indi-
cate any clinical symptoms such as pain or limita-
tion of activity (Faccia and Williams 2008). Unlike 
osteoarthritis, Schmorl’s nodes are often found in 
younger as well as older adults. However, manifest-
ing them in almost every vertebra in the central and 
lower back suggests significant accumulated func-
tional stress, perhaps related to work activity.



Robb et al. 25

Figure 8. Feature 958’s feet (plantar view); note extensions to the heads 
of most metatarsals, and flattened facets on the heads of proximal 
phalanges (photo by Sarah Inskip).

• F958’s bones show entheseal markings typical of a 
male of advanced age in this group, suggesting that 
he was physically active without impairment from 
any long- term chronic illness. The most distinct ev-
idence of activity in his skeleton consists of modi-
fications to his feet (Fig. 8). These alterations involve 
inferior extensions to the distal articular surfaces 
of almost all metatarsals, reflecting a habitual pos-
ture in which the toes were strongly flexed beneath 
the feet. At the same time, the proximal phalanges 
display flattened facets on their distal articular sur-
faces, suggesting that the toes were extended un-
der pressure. The modifications are bilateral. The 
ankles and hips show no sign of so- called “kneel-
ing facets,” “squatting facets,” or hyperflexion at the 
hips. This posture is unusual and would not result 
from habitual kneeling or from riding with the feet 
held in stirrups, for example. While we do not know 
what activity would involve this position, it was sus-
tained enough to result in skeletal modifications 
in a pattern distinct from others in the sample. This 
observation suggests that F958 may have been a 
specialized worker of some sort rather than a gen-
eral laborer.

• He suffered from ongoing dental disease, with peri-
odontal disease, five posterior teeth lost before 
death, and two abscesses. This dental pathology is 
typical for someone his age in medieval Cambridge, 
and dental problems would have been recognized 
as part of the normal life course, particularly in 
older people. No effective therapy was available 
other than removing the offending tooth. Dental 
disease would not have limited his ability to eat a 
varied diet, as he would simply have shifted chewing 

forward to his surviving molars, premolars, and an-
terior teeth. Dental wear on his remaining teeth is 
very even. However, with untreated dental prob-
lems of all kinds, he would certainly have experi-
enced sometimes prolonged episodes of perhaps 
severe pain.

• He suffered two minor traumatic injuries in his life-
time, both of which healed completely without any 
apparent skeletal complications: a fractured left rib, 
and a small depressed fracture in the posterior area 
of his left parietal. Both could plausibly have re-
sulted either from accidental causes or violence. 
Traumas from both lesion types were more com-
mon in medieval males than females (Grauer and 
Miller 2017). Both would have caused pain and ten-
derness for some time but could have healed with-
out medical intervention and without changing his 
appearance noticeably.

• F958’s metatarsals exhibit characteristic lesions of 
incipient gout, in the form of very small erosive le-
sions on the medial sides of both MT1 heads. Gout 
was relatively common in medieval Cambridge, in-
cluding in the St.  John’s Hospital sample, with 
multiple individuals showing pathognomic signs of 
the condition. It may have been caused by a com-
bination of diet, exposure to lead, and genetic back-
ground. Gout was recognized by medieval people. 
This condition may have led to episodes of pain, 
particularly in the feet, and limited mobility.

• F958’s leg bones (both femora and tibiae, on both 
sides) exhibit extensive, fine, active periosteal bone 
deposition on their midshafts. This pathology is 
non- specific. While it seems likely that it originated 
in some systemic infection, no differential diagno-
sis is possible. However, it does suggest that he suf-
fered from chronic, low- level illness of some kind. 
Its experiential symptoms are unknown.

A common feature of conventional biographies is 
providing images of the biographee to transform him 
or her from a textual individual to a visual one whom 
the reader can imagine as a person. Being able to pro-
vide such an image is a major asset to biographical ma-
terials. F958’s skeleton provides us with the necessary 
material. His facial features were distinguished by a 
relatively gracile brow but a strong, markedly flared 
jawline (Fig. 6). A facial reconstruction using standard 
forensic methods (Wilkinson 2004), and with a choice 
of beard and hair aimed at the middle of the range of 
possibilities, reveals an unremarkable, pleasant, mas-
culine face (Fig. 9). Going further, how does such an 
image relate to F958’s everyday appearance? Particu-
larly for subjects before recent centuries, almost all 
available biographical images are formal portraits, 
normally posed and in full regalia, often made quite late 
in life. They were not intended to present someone’s 



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History26

Figure 9. Facial reconstruction of Feature 958 (image: Chris Rynn, 
University of Dundee).

Figure 10. Reconstruction of Feature 958 in life, some decades prior to 
his death (picture by Mark Gridley).

appearance in ordinary life and activity, and they nor-
mally seem quite distant from it. Much the same is 
true for an expressionless, decontextualized, formal 
forensic reconstruction. Figure 10 presents a comple-
mentary approach. As with all forms of biographical 
interpretation, it helps us think about specific dimen-
sions of the subject’s life. Rather than focusing on 
highlighting individuating physical details (other than 
a hint of a prominent gonial angle), it focuses upon 
motion, activity, and social context (the streets of 
Cambridge, some specialized manual work placing 
stress on the back, a basket potentially of foodstuffs) 
and is set some time before decline and death.

Although the Hospital of St. John may have housed 
a few paying inmates (corrodians), and a few non- 
inmates may have been buried in its cemetery, the 
overwhelming probability is that F958 was an inmate 
of the hospital. How might he have ended up there? 
The hospital housed a heterogeneous population, in-
cluding a mixture of young, chronically ill people and 
older people who presumably needed shelter due to a 
combination of age, infirmity, and lack of family sup-
port. It may also have contained a few aged and indi-
gent scholars. We have built a picture of F958 as a 
robust, physically active person who formerly may 
have pursued a specialized manual craft or trade, and 
most of his health problems were common in older 
age. General indicators of decrepitude— particularly 
tooth loss, back problems evidenced in stooping, and 

disability— were recognized as signs of advancing age, 
for instance in visual characterizations of the later 
“ages of man” (Gilchrist 2012). It is possible that he be-
came an inmate of the hospital because of age- related 
inability to work, lack of family networks, and the re-
sulting indigence rather than because of any specific 
medical problem.

There is no indication of what caused F958’s death. 
He lacks any sign of lethal trauma or of tuberculosis 
or leprosy; preliminary screening has not revealed any 
pathogen aDNA. The burial is peculiar in two ways: 
the grave cut is unusually deep (0.84 m, in contrast to 
an average of 0.4– 0.6 m). Contrary to almost univer-
sal practice in medieval England, the body was depos-
ited face down. Prone burials are rare, but about a 
dozen cases are known in medieval England and Scot-
land (Gilchrist and Sloane 2005:153– 154). There is no 
consensus about what they may connote, with hypoth-
eses ranging from premature burial of someone still 
alive to postmortem disturbance or response to an un-
usual body. It has been suggested that prone burial 
may represent a penitential gesture. The only evidence 
of this practice is an account from twelfth- century 
France describing a royal burial three centuries earlier, 
so how widespread a practice this was in thirteenth- 
century England is hard to assess. The most likely 



Robb et al. 27

interpretation here seems “casual or hurried burial” 
(Gilchrist and Sloane 2005:154), perhaps related to 
depositing a body completely wrapped in a shroud 
within a deep grave.

This osteobiography already provides quite a full and 
varied set of “life records” Using these facts to construct 
a life narrative involves a delicate balance of probability 
and generalization. Some likely inferences include:

• What F958 probably looked like.
• That he suffered periods of pain from chronic con-

ditions such as dental disease in a world without 
much effective anesthesia.

• That 958 was likely a manual worker rather than a 
cleric based on the functional stress found in his 
spine. Most clerics who also worked manually (e.g., 
some monks and friars) had their own institutional 
burial grounds elsewhere in Cambridge.

• F958 probably habitually performed some un-
usual, repetitive gesture or posture, perhaps with 
functional stress, based on the idiosyncratic func-
tional modifications of his toes. Thus, he may have 
had a craft or trade rather than being a general-
ized laborer performing the same range of activi-
ties that others did.

• As a chosen recipient of generous institutional 
charity in a sea of the urban needy, he must have 
been seen as deserving and conventionally reli-
gious. (This selection, incidentally, gives us some 
guarantee that his sex and the gender ascribed to 
him coincided conventionally; it is unlikely that a 
charitable religious institution would have admit-
ted someone not conforming to gender norms.)

Bringing these pieces together suggests more com-
plex scenarios. For example, given that the basic way 
of supporting the old and infirm was within family 
networks, was F958 the last of his family? Given that 
his isotope values do not converge with those of his fel-
lows, did he live in the hospital for only a few years at 
most? He appears to have eaten a diet rich in meat or 
fish in a period during which poor people largely sub-
sisted upon bread, ale, vegetables, and a few dairy prod-
ucts. Yet he was buried in a charitable institution that 
housed people unable to care for themselves. He, thus, 
appears either to have been eating above his station, or 
was buried below it. Possible backstories for this situa-
tion might include the following:

• He was previously more prosperous but had come 
down in the world (illustrating the vicissitudes of 
“Fortune’s Wheel,” in medieval parlance).

• He previously worked at some manual trade involv-
ing access to richer- than- normal food (a merchant 
selling provisions, a butcher, a fisherman).

• His need for shelter was not based upon poverty but 
on other factors such as general decrepitude and a 
lack of family.

In the hyper- precise world of Sherlock Holmes, in 
which individuals always substantiate the obvious 
generalities, every retired sailor conveniently has an 
anchor tattooed on his arm, and all facts are tightly 
connected to a single plot, we might imagine F958 as 
a retired, formerly prosperous fisherman, butcher, or 
food merchant, a man of conventional and pious dis-
position, who has become unable to work through age 
and infirmity and who suffered family losses that left 
him on his own. Thus, he was taken into a poorhouse. 
But our evidence does not exclude many alternative, 
if less probable, scenarios, for instance, that he was a 
lay servant of the hospital who ate at the staff table but 
was buried in the common cemetery. Or he could have 
been a neighbor who bought his way into the hospi-
tal either while living, as a corrodian, or after death 
through a donation in return for burial there, like 
Robert Curteis. In both osteobiography and biogra-
phy, part of the art is knowing when to stop.

The key point, however, is not whether we can re-
construct his biography in every detail; rather, it is un-
derstanding what kinds of insights osteobiography 
affords. Unlike the ideal textual biography, we do not 
have name, precise dates, correlation with historic 
events, or relatedness to specific other people. But we 
do have some idea of appearance, diet, the experience 
of health and illness, habitual activity, social treatment 
at death, and above all some possible life trajectories— 
all dimensions of life for which textual biography is 
normally silent as the grave.

Discussion: Biography, Self- Knowledge,  
and Bias

By now, the take- home message should be obvious. 
While we are predisposed to regard textual individu-
als as “real” biographies, the gold standard to which 
other forms of biography should aspire, this goal re-
ally misrepresents the situation. Reading the two bi-
ographies above, whom do you feel you know more 
about, Robert Curteis or F958?

Clearly, the situation will vary according to the his-
torical context and the available sources. Using the two 
biographies presented here as an example, we might 
summarize the information available for ordinary me-
dieval people as in Table 2. It is obvious that, as with 
all technologies for scanning and representing people, 
each method highlights different aspects of an individ-
ual’s life; there is no single master method to which 
others serve merely as handmaidens or substitutes. 



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History28

There are important sectors of human life that are far 
more accessible through skeletal studies than through 
textual studies, particularly if we want to understand 
someone’s individuality rather than simply filling in 
historical generalizations (cf. Fleming 2006).

Comparing the two forms of biography makes an 
important meta- point about the nature of biography. 
While a naive view might consider textual biography 
an arraying of known facts and dates, and osteobiog-
raphy an interpretive exercise, both are fundamentally 
interpretive. For traditional textual biographies, this 
situation is immediately clear not only from compar-
ing competing full- length biographies of public or lit-
erary figures but also from how obituaries or entries 
in biographical dictionaries select which facts to pres-
ent and how to marshal them to create a headline or 
story line. The interpretive element in osteobiography 
is more obvious at first sight, as the genre implicitly 
or explicitly is expected to supply elements defined by 
textual biographies, such as names, faces, occupations, 
and causes of death. (Conversely, and perhaps unfairly, 

no one considers a textual biography incomplete if it 
does not report the number of childhood stress epi-
sodes as well as the subject’s relationship with her par-
ents, her isotopic values as well as her favorite foods, 
or her genetic relationships as well as her name!) The 
point is that neither one is a definitive, universal de-
scription of a human life; both are selective interpre-
tive techniques with strengths in highlighting specific 
aspects of life. It thus follows that there is no single 
cookbook set of rules; how to interpret a life is rela-
tive to why you are doing it. Naming a skeleton pro-
vides an example. Should we have given F958 a name? 
As discussed above (Hosek and Robb, this issue), nam-
ing humanizes a skeleton and makes it easier to relate 
to, which is valuable for both public and profession-
als. However, it also makes a concrete knowledge claim 
about the skeleton; it can represent a conscious choice 
about making it familiar or alien; and, as in cases such 
as “Ötzi,” the name can take on a life of its own almost 
as a quasi- real person to whom the skeleton becomes 
appended. In some cases, naming a skeleton may be 

Table 2. Sources of information on an ordinary person in medieval England.

Textual Biography Osteobiography

Name A very small number (some better- off male heads of 
households, and a few other people)

Unavailable without textual aid

Historical dates  
(birth, death, etc.)

Rarely known; sometimes inferable for historically 
mentioned people to within a generation or so

Available for dated or archaeologically phased skeletons but 
usually with a margin of error of one to two generations

Age Rarely known; inferable for historically mentioned 
people to within ca. 20– 30 years

Knowable to within 10– 20 years error for adults, more precise 
for younger individuals

Gender When somebody is historically attested, gender is 
generally clear

Skeletal sex is often available, genetic sex increasingly so, and 
social gender can often be inferred

Individual appearance Rarely known Reconstruction of face and body form sometimes possible

Religious sentiment Rarely known, except through textually attested  
pious donations

Rarely known, except through variant burial practices

Personality Rarely known Rarely known

Economic status When somebody is historically attested, approximate 
economic status may be inferred from tax or  
property transactions

May be inferred approximately from place and manner of 
burial, and from evidence of food consumption

Legal status  
(e.g., serf, free)

Can sometimes be inferred from legal or  
financial transactions

Rarely known

Activity regime Rarely known, except by generalization from job titles Specific occupations rarely known, but level of work and 
idiosyncratic activity patterns may be visible

Diet, food consumption Rarely known Some aspects accessible from skeletal and isotopic evidence

Health experiences Rarely known Some aspects accessible in some detail from palaeopathology 
and pathogen aDNA

Life risks, contingencies Rarely known, except where inferable from  
legal transactions

Sometimes inferable from conjunction of disease, trauma, 
consumption, etc., measured at different points in the lifespan

Relatedness Rarely known, except when legal documents or 
surnames give clues to parentage or siblinghood

Rarely known, except if place in general population structure 
may be reconstructable (aDNA)

Mobility Rarely known, except when first- generation surnames 
include place- names

May be reconstructable through isotopic analysis  
and/or aDNA

Cause of death Rarely known, except for unusual cases mentioned in 
law, medicine, or chronicles

Rarely, except for severe diseases or traumatic injury leaving 
skeletal signs



Robb et al. 29

justified and productive. Here, as we undertook this 
osteobiography as an academic form of exploration to 
test the limits of the method in generating knowledge, 
we thought it would prove an impediment.

Finally, osteobiography offers three specific and 
valuable advantages that make it a compelling form of 
biography. One concerns methodology and intersec-
tionality. Textual and skeletal biographies are meth-
odologically and epistemologically very similar. Each 
starts with proxy evidence (e.g., isotopic data as a 
proxy for nutritional status, a tax register as a proxy 
for household income); each requires a good deal of 
sifting and construction to build the ensemble of prox-
ies into a life narrative; and each involves constantly 
tacking back and forth between the specific case and 
generalities, using generalities to draw out implica-
tions but with the risk of normalizing the data and 
missing individuality. For example, if we know that a 
given textual or skeletal individual was male, we can 
infer a great deal about his social identity and activ-
ity, but only to the extent that he conformed to con-
ventional norms about maleness. The resulting picture 
can be complex but always contains an element of 
probabilistic infilling.

Generally, in biography, isolated facts lead us to 
types, and it is the relationship between facts that leads 
us to nuance these types, depart from them, or de-
velop complex narratives. A major strength of osteo-
biography is its ability to incorporate multiple strands 
of evidence to support such narratives. Understand-
ing that somebody is both male and upper class tells 
us far more than each fact does on its own; if you add 
the fact that he lived to old age, or moved geographi-
cally during his lifetime, or plied a specialized trade, 
it prompts us to develop relations between these facts, 
to construct a life narrative. This process may be a 
form of intersectionality, of seeing somebody’s life 
as structured not by a single dimension but by a con-
junction of many dimensions and circumstances. It is 
obvious that the broader the range of potential in-
formation, the more complex or nuanced a portrait 
may emerge. The textual record tends to give us infor-
mation on a narrow range of wavelengths, and it is 
hard to expand beyond what is present on the page. 
The skeletal record affords a much wider range of po-
tential information, and it is easier to associate differ-
ent kinds of information. Moreover, while (for many 
areas of history) the textual record tends to be static 
and closed, the range of information available from 
skeletal sources is constantly expanding as new meth-
ods are developed. For most people in most times, 
osteobiography affords the basis for more complex and 
nuanced lives.

Osteobiography’s second advantage concerns expe-
rience and self- understanding. Osteobiography is not 

the administrative history of someone being taxed, 
conscripted, or legally cited by an external authority; 
it is the history of the body and its experience. Hu-
mans understand themselves through their bodies. 
One dimension is self- image, for example via stature 
and facial appearance. Another is health status, one’s 
understanding of one’s own body as well or ill, and as 
well or ill in particular ways (e.g., as subject to com-
mon or universal maladies, or as afflicted by unusual 
or inexplicable conditions). Age is also salient. In most 
premodern societies, what counts is the social age of 
the body, not chronometric age (cf. Sofaer 2011). 
Whether or not most ordinary medieval people had a 
precise notion of their own age in years, age was typ-
ically measured in terms of physical characteristics 
and capability (Gilchrist 2012). Age was understood 
through collectively remembered historical land-
marks, social stages such as marriage, and the evi-
dence of people’s own bodies: menstruation, fertility, 
strength, gray hair, aching joints, and lost teeth en 
route to finishing up (in Shakespeare’s words [As You 
Like It, act II, scene 7], building upon the medieval 
trope of the “ages of man”) “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans 
taste, sans everything.” Writing a person’s history 
through his or her body, rather than through random 
textual citations, thus gets us much closer to that per-
son’s self- understanding; it is history from the inside.

Finally, osteobiography allows a more democratic 
history. Almost without exception, the textual record 
is systematically biased toward the more affluent. 
Moreover, it is overwhelmingly male, leaving women 
less historically visible. It holds other biases too, such 
as often excluding children, marginalized people, and 
excluded minorities. The “people without history” 
(Wolf 1982) thus include not only colonized peoples 
but different or subaltern people of all kinds. The skel-
etal record certainly is not without bias, starting first 
and foremost with the question of who is buried within 
or excluded from a particular site, and moving on to 
differential visibility of sites, preservation, and exca-
vation. But, by and large, the criteria for osteobiogra-
phy are less biased and more likely to give a true cross 
section of human experience; we are far more likely 
to encounter a woman, a child, or a poor person in the 
grave than on the page. F958 is an ordinary person; 
such people, who made up the overwhelming mass of 
medieval people, offer very little material for the tex-
tual biographer to examine, when they can be seen at 
all. Osteobiography affords history for those below the 
textual threshold. For Everyman, and above all for Ev-
erywoman, whether rural peasants or the urban 
poor, osteobiography offers allows us to see women, 
children, and marginalized or excluded people. This 
makes osteobiography especially valuable for femi-
nist, Marxist, and “people’s history” (Zinn 1980). It is 



Osteobiography as Bottom-Line History30

our best chance for understanding the lives of the 
vast bulk of humanity in the vast majority of the past.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to many colleagues who have helped in 
this research. Natasha Dodwell (Cambridge Archae-
ological Unit, now of Oxford Archaeology East) con-
ducted the preliminary assessment of the St.  John’s 
collection. Craig Alexander contributed to the Bayes-
ian calibration of radiocarbon dates. Chris Rynn (Uni-
versity of Dundee Centre for Anatomy and Human 
Identification) created a facial reconstruction of 958 
(Fig. 9). Mark Gridley, archaeological illustrator par 
excellence, created Figure 10. We thank St. John’s Col-
lege, Cambridge, for access to college archives and for 
permission to publish Figure  3. We are grateful to 
St. John’s College, the McDonald Institute for Ar-
chaeological Research, and the Wellcome Founda-
tion (Collaborative Grant 200368/Z/15/Z “After the 
Plague: Health and History in Medieval Cambridge”) 
for financial support, and to the McDonald Institute 
and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit for support 
of many kinds. Finally, we are grateful to three anon-
ymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve 
the manuscript.

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