 Thank you for coming to listen to my talk. I'm sure you came especially for this one. No need to answer. So I'm looking at the unfurnished burials of an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery, Worthy Park. First of all, I'll just do my acknowledgements. I'm a Australian National University who have been kind enough to let me study there. There's School of Archaeology and Anthropology, my former supervisor and now colleague Mark Oxenham, and the places where I examined the teeth of skeletons, Duckworth Museum, Southampton University, Dover Archaeological Group and the Dover Museum. So thanks to all of them and of course thanks to the organisers of this session which brought me all the way here and I'm very excited to be here. This is the Anglo-Saxon cemetery, a map on the Anglo-Saxon cemetery of Worthy Park, Kingsworthy Hampshire. It was excavated in the early 1960s and is dated approximately 450 to 600 common era. It contained or excavated were 105 individuals from 94 graves and amongst those of eight poor men or as I call poor men they have no buried without surviving grave goods and eight poor women. Now I didn't excavate this cemetery nor did I actually examine the paleo pathology of the skeleton that was done by Calvin Wells and most of the pictures you'll come you'll see have come from the published report by Hawks and Granger. My contribution is the analysis of the meaning of these poor graves and what we can see from the health and disposition of these individuals. Oh and okay the blues and ovals are the poor men and the greenish ones are the poor women so they're sort of scattered throughout no real special location for them. Now here are all the poor men or the poor men or six of them that could be, I'll show you the other two later that haven't been aged. So they have been, most of the skeletons from this cemetery have been reaged using the methodology of cave and oxenum to identify the elderly in this cemetery. So the age here is not going to necessarily match that in the published report. So there the men here are the women. As you can see they still lived quite a long time some of them. Now these are the three skeletons out of the 16 that have been excluded and you can see why because basically we don't really know that they were poor individuals so it's just legs or feet or little bits of so they could we cannot be sure they're poor individuals and of course there's not much of their remains to to use for you know to look at their paleo pathology either so they've been knocked out of this analysis. To introduce early Anglo-Saxon burials this is a pre-Christian cemetery. They have a highly gendered burial ritual so in this case women tended to be buried with brooches with beads jewelry items that perhaps represent beauty. Men not all men of course were buried with weapons usually a shield and a spear sometimes they get a sword sometimes even two and things like knives pins buckles pots can be buried with males be males or children as can other items like wrist clasps and strap ends you don't want to talk about them when you're drunk but yeah and so the male grave would sort of tend to highlight a martial warrior type status but we're not looking at those people we're looking at those buried with no goods and as you can see from the graph the tall grabs are the people buried with goods and the smaller ones without and yeah you can see that in general the older stage category is reserved for people buried with goods females and males the average age of death with women with goods was 46 years and those without goods with poor women was 40.1 years so that's I haven't done a statistical test on that to see whether that's significant or not but it is a fair difference now strangely for the men the average age of death of poor men is 46.7 and men with goods is only 41.8 now I suspect that's because if you see the the male graph the 19 to 29 people with goods for males is very high and I wonder if that relates to wars battles fights of the sunday night in the pub or whatever but it perhaps is an activity that the male poorer members were excluded from now the oldest individual in this category is a woman and she was really aged to 65 to 74 years I mean she was old so it's not surprising she shows lots of pathological lesions and you can read through all of those I'm not going to try and pronounce them all here when I'm in the state of nervous and I've got a little bit of coffee left now if you look at now this this particular graph comes from three cemeteries um for so it's Worthy Park plus Great Chesterford and Mill Hill are all similarly dated early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and so they're combined people without goods so the hyperplasia you can see that people with no goods suffered at almost at twice the rate of those without um quibera orbitalia and osteoarthritis trauma the poor people had more of it but surprisingly for teeth they had fewer abscesses and fewer anti-mortem tooth loss and fewer caries now this is for the poor women um so you just wonder if they have been excluded from a karyogenic view none of those statistics were statistically different but they were different um I'm gonna as we go through this talk I'll introduce you to various poor people so this old fellow he lived he was the oldest poor man or one of the equally oldest lived 55 to 64 years approximately his grave was deep and you can see it's quite spacious as well he's got plenty of room around him um he's got um some fair bits of trauma on him um perhaps the original reports suggested he'd been in a sleazy brawl presumably on a Saturday night um he and being old it's not surprising he was much afflicted with arthritis um and all sorts of things and he had very well-developed musculature which sort of suggests hard work um now for the men um the total number of lesions and all sorts of things this is just the worthy park men I think I've got arrows here um for the most part the um poor men did worse than the wealthy I don't think I can call them wealthy men the men with goods um so leh is well 53 point I don't know whether I've stuffed up that um but 50 that's a big difference there but I think it may be part oh so I'm getting through yes well anyway largely more lesions um some things different okay oh more arrows and there's only one male individual from this cemetery with quibra or or batalia which is is an interesting fact and this is him he died between 45 to 54 years but the interesting thing about him he was born without his um right right arm or sorry sorry the right left one of those one arm and um shoulder completely missing um he's got injuries to infractured face etc sword injuries um and has been you know quite ill at times but he and his skeleton shows changes that suggest he's come to to get used to having only one arm and now the grave size of um these individuals um on the whole people with our foods were buried in smaller graves now if you can just look at that picture which is not um worthy part but you can see the comparison of one of the smaller graves to one of the larger graves and it makes a big difference that lady was pretty well squashed in there um again for the men the grave size um in in all the dimensions depth with height um volume um the poor men have smaller graves than the rich men again I use that term and another thing I looked at was what I call awkward burrows so but burrows that are a bit careless you know the feet might be squashed in at the end not exactly lying comfortably maybe thrown in any other way um so five out of the 12 of the poor women in the three cemeteries obviously have awkward burials and that's 41% whereas only 15% of the women in grave in graves with goods now number 43 there is also buried prone um and she may possibly she may have a vision hands tied I can't say that for sure but her ankles are certainly together and her arms are sort of in front of her like that so it's possible they were tied um and I think I've said all that but basically um this is a statistically significant result that um old women were buried women without goods were buried awkwardly um another we're just we're running out of time so that's another poor old man um and another poor old woman the other running out of time um so in general I forgot to do the analysis for the men in the awkward grave so I can't talk about that but in general we found that the men had a very hard working life they were subject to lots of violence and a little effort was expended on their graves and of course these graves are mostly undatable because Anglo-Saxon graves are largely dated through grave boots you know were they slaves were they native British I mean these are sort of people who more notice needs to be taken of in the archaeological record um now the poor women also are buried with less care and effort and more likely they have fulfilled pathological lesions but their teeth were better than their letters and they did they have you know what's figured were they given more trauma but not as much as their men folk suffered and when I was thinking about this in the shower the other day this is the picture that came to my mind you see here a man he earns the place he's ready he he doesn't care what anyone else thinks he's there ready um if anyone came and um disagreed with him he'd tell them what's what now the women sitting next to him they're accommodating him they say yeah don't worry about me that's all right I'll squash over here and that even today is the sort of thing there's especially people like older I'm not old at all okay I'm still young young people like me have grown up with and it's sort of automatically assume you know people like don't push buttons and I'm just wondering if that was the case in early Anglo-Saxon England the women had tough lives but they weren't they didn't have the trauma they've treated badly thrown into graves prone awkwardly so they were punished um so that's my thoughts on that and there are my references and I think my timing is not too bad