Telltale breaks
Campbell re-examined the 46 skulls to determine the individuals’ age and gender, as well as clues about their health and cause of death. Their findings regarding biological sex were largely consistent with Petrie’s, although Campbell cautions that it is difficult to make a conclusive statement based on the skulls alone; To be sure, you would need the pelvic bones. Even if she had the resources and time to re-excavate these remains, matching the bones to their respective skulls would be extremely difficult.
Most interesting was the presence of linear fractures in 18 skulls (approximately 39 percent), indicating blunt force trauma. Such fractures would have rendered the subjects unconscious, caused internal bleeding and likely resulted in death, Campbell said. Some of the skulls also showed signs of sharp force injuries, including signs of lacerations to one eye of the skull. As for the cause of death of the others, scientists suspect suffocation, strangulation or poisoning.
Petrie found no evidence of fatal trauma on the remains, but research has advanced significantly over the last century. “I don’t think he missed them because he was a pretty keen observer,” Campbell said. “He just didn’t know what he was seeing. Only in the last few decades have we gotten a much clearer understanding of how to distinguish the timing of an injury. Much of it involves studying how dry bone, fresh bone, and bone subjected to different types of forces respond to different types of insults. If you didn’t know that a bone breaks differently when it’s 100 years old, 1,000 years old, or 6 days old, then you would see one Crack and say, “Well, that probably happened during the excavation.” Unfortunately, this is not uncommon.”
While Egyptian rulers are often shown striking enemies with a mace, such a weapon would have resulted in muted fractures, not the linear variety seen here, so it was more likely to be a flat, broad and lighter weapon. “It’s really hard to say specifically,” Campbell said. “It could be as simple as a board. Petrie thought it could have been a sandbag. Honestly, sandbags are very heavy, and I think the force it takes to swing a large sandbag might have done more damage, but you could easily make some kind of wooden bat. People use makeshift weapons all the time.”
