CT scanning, 3D modeling, and direct digital radiography are being used by researchers at the Museum of London, funded by the Rosemary Green grant awarded by the City of London Archaeological Trust, to understand the origins of cancer and obesity. But the subjects of this study are not modern people; instead, bioarchaeologists are dipping into the Museum’s vaults of human skeletons to trace the diseases back to the Industrial Revolution.
Historians use the Industrial Revolution as a time stamp for the transition between the early modern and modern periods. Starting in the 1760s in England, manufacturing became mechanized. Water, steam, wood, and coal powered machines forever changed a number of industries, and suddenly small towns became large cities as people flocked to factories to find work. As wealth increased nearly across the board, the economic standard of living rose dramatically along with the average life expectancy.
But the Industrial Revolution came at a cost to overall health. Museum of London curator of human osteology, Jelena Bekvalac, has launched a three-year project with Gaynor Western of Ossafreelance and radiologist Mark Framer to analyze and digitally document over 2,500 skeletons from 18 archaeological sites in the U.K. The people Bekvalac is studying lived in London, in small towns, and in cathedral cities between the Medieval period and the Industrial period. She told me that she aims to “examine the influence of the Industrial Revolution on the changing nature of disease from the medieval and post-medieval periods through to the present day.” The seven key diseases that Bekvalac and her team will look for on skeletons are often associated with industrialization, urbanization, and longer life spans.
The effects of industrialization and the resulting congregation of people into urban areas are written on the human skeleton. As cities became more populated and people lived in closer quarters, the opportunity for infectious diseases like tuberculosis to spread increased dramatically, and rib lesions can reveal whether or not a person suffered from respiratory conditions. But the new manufacturing process itself also etched its effects into bone. Repetitive tasks performed on the new machines took a toll on operators’ joints, and the research team will look at evidence for joint disease throughout the skeleton. These new tasks also increased the opportunity for bodily injury, whose results—namely, fractures—can also be seen easily on bone.
As the Industrial period ushered in a population that was living longer than its forebears, Bekvalac will analyze the skeletons for evidence of diseases related to old age. Women are commonly affected by two diseases related to hormone changes as they age: hyperostosis frontalis interna, which results in a thickening of the frontal bone of the skull, and osteoporosis, which results in thin bones that can fracture easily. Men are not immune from age-related skeletal changes. Older men are more likely than women to suffer from DISH (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis), a condition that causes fusion of parts of the spine. DISH is also thought to be related to obesity.
Jelena Bekvalac, curator of human osteology at the Museum of London, will lead a team in assessing... [+]
Another consequence of living longer is a higher chance of suffering from cancer. Bioarchaeologists do not commonly see cancer in ancient skeletal remains, in part because life spans in the past were quite short and in part because of a general lack of environmental carcinogens in antiquity. With changes to manufacturing in the Industrial period, Bekvalac expects to see an increase in the incidence of cancer. She and her research team will use radiography and CT scanning to learn whether the frequencies of these conditions changed as the population in the Industrial period was living longer.
This project “offers a chance to be able to create a narrative about the health of Londoners over time based upon archaeological collections,” Bekvalac says, and to “create a data set that at the end will be able to be interactively accessed online through the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology website.” Digital radiographs taken as part of this project will be made available to the public, as will the archaeological site information and the osteological data, such as age-at-death. A number of skeletons have already been 3D scanned as part of the Digitised Diseases project run by the University of Bradford. When the three-year project is complete, Bekvalac promises that “users of the website will be able to examine the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the skeletal remains of Londoners in comparison to assemblages from across the country.”
Without the Industrial Revolution, our lives today would not involve iPhones, self-driving cars, and designer clothing. But technological advancement has come at a cost to our health. As the average person today is living 30 years longer—a full generation—than a century ago, we are at greater risk of developing diseases like cancer and obesity seen only rarely in antiquity. Bekvalac is pulling together archaeological, historical, and medical information to look critically at the changes that the Industrial Revolution made to our bodies. Skeletons of London’s past population may hold the key to understanding the life and health of the city’s current inhabitants.
