Secrets from the Grave
叠测听Lisa Marshall听鈥⑻齈ublished:听March 4, 2024
Centuries from now, if an archaeologist were to dig up Professor Sharon DeWitte鈥檚 bleached and weathered bones, they鈥檇 find a 7-inch stainless steel rod and nine screws buried among them.
These remnants of her childhood bout with scoliosis would not be the only window into the life she led.
Her flaming red hair and the rich tapestry of arm tattoos would be long gone. But the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in her molars would hint at her mostly vegetarian diet. Her stout, calcium-rich foot bones would offer clues that she was a runner. And a bony bump on her right patella, or knee bone, would serve as a legacy of the bad fall she took on a trail one summer.
While imagining one鈥檚 remains may seem grisly, DeWitte has been doing it for as long as she can remember.
鈥淪ince I was a child I鈥檝e been thinking about what happens to our bodies after we die and what stories people might make up about us based on what they find,鈥� said DeWitte, seated cross-legged in her dark gray office, plaster casts of two human skulls and a femur perched on a shelf near her desk.
A CU Boulder professor of anthropology and a pioneer in the niche field of bioarchaeology, she is now the one crafting those stories.
Through hours spent alone in museum basements, analyzing the fragile bones of those who died centuries ago in pandemics, she offers new insight into why some resist novel viruses and bacteria while others succumb to them. Her work also sheds light on how pathogens, like those during the Black Death, evolve and lend insight into the past lives of individuals, including women, children, the poor and racial minority groups.
鈥淪keletal evidence can provide us with information about people who aren鈥檛 necessarily represented in most historical documents,鈥� said DeWitte, noting that those documents were often written by and about the wealthy and powerful. 鈥淚 feel honored to be able to share something about people who were likely ignored while they were alive and are not represented in many surviving documents.鈥�
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