As I was filling up my kids with eggs this morning (state standardized test week), Steve read the newspaper in the midst of the chaos. He likes to stand up at the counter and read the paper in Ground Zero for the morning routine.
I glanced over at the open paper. He was engrossed in the article about new evidence that the Jamestown colony had to resort to cannibalism to survive.
It's a great article that talks about the extreme starvation that the colony faced. It also describes the break throughs in genetic research that have helped historians understand the past.
From the state of her molars, she is judged to have been 14 years old. Isotopes in her bones indicate that she had eaten a high-protein diet, so she was probably not a maidservant but the daughter of a gentleman.
Dr. Owsley said in an interview that he could tell she was English because of his familiarity with English skeletal remains of the 17th century and from scientific tests. The ratio of oxygen isotopes in her bones indicated that she had grown up in the southern coastal regions of England, Dr. Owsley said, and the carbon isotopes pointed to a diet that included English rye and barley.
As my frustrated historian hubby walked out of the house, he was talking about tree rings and core samples from Greenland and entomology and all the other new techniques that anthropologists and historians have at their disposal.
More at the Atlantic.
Apt. 11d 
I always try to keep my interest in cannibalism from my family.
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I haven’t read the article, and probably should, but I felt like they couldn’t have high confidence in some of their conclusions (say, for example, has the assessment of age from molars really become that confident? My 12 year old has adult molars, and thus, her age cannot be determined by her molars). My gut impression is that it’s a nice study that should have error bars and is being over-hyped, and, the head reconstruction is exhibit #1 on the over-hyping.
I would like to read a historian critique of the study, though. Where’s the original article actually published?
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PS: I found the critiques of the Jefferson DNA study unconvincing; there I thought they’d used newly available technology to significantly decrease the error bars on a historical hypothesis, and that the counter-arguments after the addition of that evidence were weak.
Is this new conclusion based on similarly conclusive evidence? My skimming of evidence about molars, axe marks, . . . did not convince me in the same way.
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I’ve read some historians’ critcism of the study, and for the most part see it as valid. There was plenty of documentary evidence for cannibalism during the ‘starving time’, including independent accounts by contemporaries of e.g. a man being executed for killing and salting his wife. At least one historian who thinks the stories are made up or wildly exaggerated still feels that the ‘proof’ of the skeletal remains are inconclusive.
Really the only way to prove cannibalism without a doubt is to analyize what’s in (or comes out of) human digestive tracts. Me, I feel like the documentary evidence was persuasive and that the archaeological evidence just adds to it. If someone else wants to insist that butcher marks don’t absolutely prove the flesh was eaten, I’ll live with that. I’ve got Jamestown myths I care about running down a lot more than this one.
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It’s interesting that people would refer to this find as the “first solid evidence” of cannibalism. That is true only in the literal sense of the word “solid,” i.e., tangible. There have always been substantially contemporaneous written reports of cannibalism.
It’s a good illustration of how science is considered more authoritative than history. C.S. Lewis wrote once about how the average person considers the conventional account of cavemen much more reliable than any account of the Roman Empire, because the former is science, the latter history.
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“t’s a good illustration of how science is considered more authoritative than history.”
Yes, this is the point I was actually trying to make — not that I don’t believe the evidence of cannibalism, but that it didn’t seem like “butcher marks” were the kind of conclusive evidence that science can sometimes add.
For example, in this case, maybe some evidence of human remains in the digestive tract of an individual, might be significant additional evidence (as, I felt, the DNA evidence showing common patrimony from historically identified descendents of Sally Jennings & Thomas Jefferson was).
The over reliance of particularly kinds of evidence (in science, it’s often some form of imagery, like fMRI, or now, the hot technique is optigenetics) occurs within science, too.
Has anyone read how they came up with the model head? I was so offended that I didn’t follow up on the link. Really, if they were going to make a model head, they should have made at least 20, each depicting different branch points in probabilities. And, they could have done that, in a computer rendering format. But, I get the impression that they actually made a physical head of “the girl who was eaten”?
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Well, I will say that the reporting and the study itself seem not to have the marks of willful ignorance that we saw last year with Atkinson et al’s Science paper on the proto-Indo-European homeland. Nobody here is dismissing entire disciplines with a condescending wave of the hand as unscientific and advancing transparently ludicrous alternatives. Probably that’s because no computers were involved, though.
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Zombies.
Just saying.
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