Spitalfields osteological research: database and Wellcome project (SRP98)

Clients: Spitalfields Development Group

Author: Chris Thomas

Site supervisors: Brian Connell, Amy Gray-Jones, Rebecca Redfern, Don Walker

The assessments of the Spitalfields project are now complete and we are beginning the massive undertaking of analysing the material for publication. One aspect of this is the medieval cemetery of St Mary Spital from which just over 10,500 medieval skeletons were recovered.

This collection forms the largest single group of human remains ever recovered from one site and covers the period from the late 12th century to 1539. Thus the project is of international importance and will add immeasurably to our understanding of medieval populations: their stature, diet, disease and lifestyle.

Four highly qualified osteologists are now undertaking the study of a little over 6,000 of the skeletons from Spitalfields. These represent the skeletons which survive best and will give us the most amount of information. It was considered to be important, at the outset, that the skeletons contained sufficient bones to allow us to age and sex them. Early results are already interesting. There are large numbers of pathologies appearing on the bones telling us that many people suffered from tuberculosis and that a number of other diseases were prevalent at the time, including syphilis and leprosy (even though lepers were specifically excluded from St Mary Spital). Provisional results also suggest that there were lots more children in the mass burial pits and that the proportions of men and women were roughly equal, whereas there seem to be more men in the other parts of the cemetery. Senior archaeologists are, at the same time, completing the laborious task of phasing the cemetery, to work out when people were buried and how the cemetery was used. Running in parallel with this, another four osteologists are analysing the other 7000 human skeletons in the Museum of London as part of a project funded by the Wellcome Institute. These skeletons date from the prehistoric period up to the 19th century and will provide a useful comparison with the Spitalfields material.

These two three-year projects will result in the largest database of human osteological information anywhere, which will be made accessible to all via the web. London will then have the best-researched collections which, it is hoped, will be available for other researchers to view as well. In addition the findings of the Spitalfields project will be published as one of the most important osteological assemblages anywhere in the world.

This site report is extracted from MoLAS 2003: annual review