Martyrs to their Health?
The climate and conditions of life for the Nomadic peoples of northeastern Siberia life was often hard. It would have been a rare individual indeed who made it to their fifties without having suffered malnutrition and injury at some time in their lives. The remains of many of these people can be found at Yur-yakhal III, an eleventh-century cemetery on Siberia’s Yamal peninsula. Here, the nomads of the region were laid to rest. The bodies in these graves are laid out straight. However, in 2016, archaeologists from the Archaeology Department of the Arctic Research Centre of the Yamalo-Nenets found four burials that bucked this trend.
The graves were of one man around 50 and three young women aged between 18-20. Instead of lying straight, the quartet had been laid in a crouched, fetal-like position. In the case of the male, his burial was even more unusual as his body was briefly burnt after his death. This burning seems to have been deliberate and intended to remove the soft tissues before the burial of his bones. According to senior researcher Andrey Plekhanov, the graves are unprecedented and raise all sorts of questions as to why these four people were interred in such a markedly different way.
One suggestion is that they had health issues that marked them apart from the rest of their tribe. Although all showed signs of the kinds of health problems typical of Yamal Nomads of the era, the number of ailments each suffered from was unprecedented. They included shoulder dislocations, sinusitis and in the women lower spine trauma consistent with giving birth. The male appeared to have suffered starvation since childhood and hyperostosis, a condition where bone tissue cannot stop growing causing some musculoskeletal disorders.
Could the extreme ill health of the men and women have marked them out as unlucky or sacred and so earned them a unique ritual burial? Any sacred element is unclear from the grave goods, which seem to relate to status in life rather than the significance of the individuals at death. One young woman who may have died giving birth went to her grave with only an iron knife while another was buried with a bronze arm ring shaped like a bear, an implement for scraping snow off clothes, a tanning scraper, bronze and silver pendants and a face mask made of animal skin. The burials show the deceased no disrespect; merely that they were different.
Health problems were also an issue for a roman giant from the third century AD.