The project is designed to make a dispersed body of research more accessible to international audiences. The authors searched Google Scholar, Web of Science and Science Direct using English and other relevant languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Georgian and Kazakh. Their summary notes that much of the regional literature was published in Russian and was largely absent from the international literature.

The atlas contains measurements for six stable-isotope systems: carbon, reported as δ13C; nitrogen as δ15N; oxygen as δ18O; sulphur as δ34S; strontium as 87Sr/86Sr; and lead as 206Pb/204Pb. These are the measurement types recorded in the source studies. The compilation does not describe a new laboratory experiment or a single unified analytical campaign.

Instead, it gathers results already obtained and reported by separate research teams, retaining their associated archaeological and source-article information. Each dataset entry records the originating archaeological site, including GPS coordinates, and links the associated isotope data to a relevant source article. Where those details were available, the compilation also includes the source of the analyzed sample, its dating and information about its deposition.

This structure preserves the context supplied by the original studies and allows database users to return from a compiled measurement to the publication in which it was reported. The first accompanying dataset is titled “Compilation of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and strontium stable isotope data from the Mesolithic to the Late Modern period in the Black Sea area.” The second is presented as “A landmark compilation of stable isotope data from archaeological contexts in the post-Soviet space.” Both are associated with the IsoArcH database, and the preprint lists them as accessible data sets connected to the compilation. The stated purpose of the atlas is to serve as a comprehensive source for further research and as a reference set for the geographic and temporal area it covers.

Its scale is substantial: the authors collected results from more than one hundred studies spanning archaeological contexts across the former USSR, with the accessible collection incorporating ancient human and animal remains from Asia and the Caucasus. The resources are intended to support researchers who may not have encountered the region’s studies in international publications. Because the project is a literature compilation, its reach is defined by the papers found through the stated searches and by the information reported within them.

The datasets contain multiple isotope systems and archaeological metadata, but the supplied preprint description does not present a new statistical assessment, population-level estimate or uniform analytical protocol across the 114 papers. The collection is instead an openly connected archive of published measurements, site records and source references, preserving the diversity of the underlying studies rather than replacing their original methodological context. The work is currently a preprint under review for Earth System Science Data, with discussion beginning on 20 October 2026.

Its central contribution is organizational rather than experimental: by bringing 114 papers, 435 locations and six stable-isotope measurement types into two linked datasets, the authors have created an open resource for studying the archaeological record of the post-Soviet space. The authors describe it as a comprehensive source for future research and a geographic and temporal reference set, while the associated source articles remain the foundation for assessing the context of every compiled observation.

Subject of Research: Stable-isotope datasets compiled from archaeological studies across the former Soviet space

Article Title: Stable isotope bioarchaeological atlas from the post-Soviet space

Article References: Hagarová, A., Gorbulina, M., & Salesse, K. (2026). Stable isotope bioarchaeological atlas from the post-Soviet space. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-619

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/essd-2026-619

Keywords: stable isotopes, bioarchaeology, archaeological data, former Soviet space, Black Sea region, Caucasus, open datasets, IsoArcH, archaeological atlas, Stable, isotope, bioarchaeological

The honour carries particular weight because of what Rivera teaches and how he teaches it. He is, according to the university, the first lecturer in Hong Kong to offer university courses dedicated specifically to biological anthropology and human diversity, and he has built his teaching around a humanistic, community-centred model that treats public engagement as an essential obligation of higher education rather than an optional extra. In a discipline that often lives in laboratories and museum collections, Rivera has worked to bring the study of human variation and evolution into conversation with the city around him, arguing that publicly engaged teaching is a vital imperative for the future of Hong Kong’s universities.

At the heart of his teaching portfolio is a large Common Core course, ‘All You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Humans’, known by its course code CCST9081, which introduces students from across the university to human variation and evolution. The course is deliberately hands-on. Rather than relying solely on lectures, Rivera uses active, inquiry-based laboratory sessions in which students handle skeletal material and learn the methods that bioarchaeologists and forensic scientists use to read the human body as a record of lived experience. Bones and teeth, in this framework, are not static specimens but documents: they carry traces of diet, disease, activity and environment that can be recovered through careful, methodical analysis.

The pedagogical logic behind those laboratories is as important as the content. Rivera has designed them to help students confront common misconceptions about human development, to foster ethical thinking about how scientific knowledge is produced and used, and to cultivate a sense of civic duty grounded in that knowledge. Students are asked to consider how anthropological science contributes to significant societal issues, a framing that pushes the discipline beyond its academic boundaries and into questions of public policy, social justice and community wellbeing. In a university system often organised around narrow specialisation, the approach asks students to see science as something embedded in society rather than separate from it.

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Rivera’s teaching is his university-level course on race and racism, which is described as the first of its kind in Hong Kong and the only one of its scope in all of Asia. The course integrates elements of critical race theory with story-sharing and anti-racist praxis, and it deliberately spans both the local and the global, the historical and the contemporary, and the scientific and the sociopolitical understandings of race. That breadth matters because race sits at an awkward intersection of disciplines: biological anthropology has a painful historical entanglement with racial classification, while modern genetics has decisively shown that human variation does not map onto folk racial categories. Teaching the topic well requires students to hold both the science and the social history in view at the same time.

Through the course, students develop what Rivera describes as critical consciousness and transformative insights, capacities that allow them to engage thoughtfully with questions of race in Hong Kong and beyond. In a globalised city where questions of identity, migration and belonging are live and often contested, the course gives students analytical tools that extend well past the classroom. Alongside it, Rivera is promoting a project called ENGAGE with colleagues at HKU, which provides students with feedback and encouragement designed to build their confidence in communicating with public audiences. The project reflects a consistent theme in his work: that the ability to speak clearly and honestly about science in public is a skill that must be taught and practised, not assumed.

Underlying all of this is a philosophy of care. Drawing on care theorists and recent higher education scholarship, Rivera has embedded an ethics of care into his courses, emphasising values of respect, trust, responsiveness, empathy and community-building in university teaching. In his own words, he treats teaching as a relational practice rather than content delivery or training for work readiness. Assignments and course activities are designed to foreground emotional health, holistic development and inclusive values, so that students feel seen and supported. That framing runs counter to prevailing pressures in higher education, where metrics of throughput and employability often dominate, and it suggests why the award committee found his work worthy of recognition: it models a different account of what a university education is for.

Rivera’s scholarly background helps explain the range of his teaching. He is a biological anthropologist, writer, public speaker and interdisciplinary researcher who obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019. His research focuses on how humans have evolved and adapted, both biologically and culturally, over the last six million years. His doctoral work involved reconstructing the diets, health profiles, physical activities and body shapes of ancient humans, and through the analysis of ancient bones and teeth he has been most interested in how active and healthy the lifestyles and diets of ancient peoples were, particularly those living in coastal environments in East and Southeast Asia and in the Baltic region of northeastern Europe. That research agenda, which connects skeletal evidence to questions of daily life and environment, translates naturally into the inquiry-based laboratory teaching for which he has been recognised.

His interests extend well beyond the skeleton. Rivera’s wider work encompasses heritage and museums, cultural identity, food studies, ethnographic documentary-making and visual anthropology, decolonial theory and praxis, the history of racism and contemporary racial justice issues, social media and digital technologies, public engagement and science communication, and archaeology and anthropology more broadly. This breadth is not incidental to his teaching; it is the reason his courses can move so fluidly between the biological and the social, the ancient and the contemporary, and the academic and the public. It also reflects a broader shift within anthropology itself, as the discipline reckons with its colonial legacies and seeks more collaborative, community-embedded ways of producing knowledge.

The 2026 UGC Teaching Award is, on one level, an individual honour for an early-career lecturer. On another level, it is a signal about the direction of teaching in Hong Kong’s publicly funded universities. The award explicitly rewards leadership and scholarly contribution to teaching and learning within and across institutions, and Rivera’s profile fits that brief: he has created courses that did not previously exist in the city, developed laboratory and discussion-based methods that make dense scientific material accessible to students from every faculty, and built projects that train students to communicate science to the wider public. As universities everywhere grapple with how to teach about human diversity, race and science in ways that are rigorous, ethical and humane, the work now recognised by the UGC offers one concrete, tested example of what that can look like in practice.

Subject of Research: Recognition of a biological anthropologist's teaching of human diversity and race at a Hong Kong university

Article Title: HKU academic receives UGC Teaching Award 2026

Article References: HKU academic receives UGC Teaching Award 2026. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: UGC Teaching Award, University of Hong Kong, biological anthropology, human diversity, race and racism, critical race theory, bioarchaeology, forensic science, care ethics, science communication, higher education, public engagement

The story begins with the appointment of Maximilian Daublebsky von Sterneck as commander of the Austrian Imperial and Royal Navy in 1883, which opened a new era in which commercial and scientific endeavors became official tasks of the war fleet. The Navy institutionalized its cooperation with the Natural History Museum Vienna, whose curators wrote collecting instructions and, as the study describes them, veritable wish lists for the ships. Because hiring scientists for the voyages was too expensive, crew members with demonstrated interest and talent were tasked with collecting, and it usually fell to the ship’s physician, who possessed basic knowledge of natural sciences and physical anthropology. Through this arrangement, even Austria-Hungary, a power with little colonial success of its own, thoroughly exploited the colonial travel and trading networks built by its neighbors Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Two corvettes anchor the study: the S.M.S. Frundsberg, which sailed to East Africa in 1884 and 1885, and the S.M.S. Saida, which traveled to South America and circumnavigated Africa in 1886 and 1887. These armed vessels, crewed by 209 and 318 men respectively, were centerpieces of power and knowledge during their voyages, bringing back botanical, zoological and mineralogical objects as well as ethnographica and human remains. Aboard the Frundsberg, physician Emmerich Billitzer received written instructions from Josef Szombathy, head of the museum’s anthropology department, to collect human remains from hospitals, prisons, execution sites and private collections, with geographic origin and ethnic affiliation recorded as precisely as possible so the remains could represent local racial types for later racial studies. The instructions emphasized quantity: if more crania and bones were present than could be taken, the best-preserved crania were to be preferred, even if fleshy parts still clung to the bone.

The archival record allows the researchers to reconstruct the collecting days almost hour by hour. On 30 November 1884, one day after the Frundsberg reached Bagamoyo in today’s Tanzania, Billitzer exhumed the remains of a person who had decayed for roughly three to four months in a palm grove, still not fully skeletonized, with a string of beads on the left lower arm and a ring, objects now held by the Weltmuseum Wien. A missionary of the Holy Ghost Fathers led him to the site. Because Nyamwezi porters, who dominated the caravan trade between the interior and the coast, camped near the mission in Bagamoyo, and because several East African societies used sacred groves as burial places, the authors conclude the palm grove was very likely a burial site from which Billitzer exhumed the remains. Later that day he collected a second calvarium and a third cranium lying freely accessible on the shore. Three years later, ship physician Stefan Paulay, who had traveled to Vienna for collecting training before his mission, gathered sixteen crania from the bushes of Bagamoyo in the same area, strengthening the suspicion that a grave site first plundered by Billitzer was revisited by Paulay. Paulay also exhumed four allegedly Sakalava crania from graves on an island near Nosy Be in Madagascar and plundered the burial goods, a collection Szombathy valued at 280 guilders.

To read violence directly from the bones, the researchers applied a non-invasive bioarchaeological framework that distinguishes three forms of harm. Interpersonal violence is assessed through healed, healing and unhealed trauma. Structural violence, following the concept introduced by Johan Galtung, refers to the systemic denial of access to essential resources by social hierarchies, colonialism among them, and is sought in non-specific physiological stress markers such as cribra orbitalia, porotic hyperostosis, caries and signs of inflammation, which correlate with malnutrition, anemia and poor health. Epistemic violence describes knowledge produced by science that harms the Other through its interpretation, and its markers include the ways crania were transformed into objects: ink inscriptions of provenance, year and collector written directly on the bone, pencil landmark points for craniometric measurements, mustard seeds used to gauge cranial volume, preservative coats, and screws attaching mandibles to calvaria.

The osteological results are sobering in their ambiguity. Of the 22 inventory numbers still present in the collection, most individuals were young adults, and 13 were estimated as female. No perimortem trauma was detected, and only two cases of possible antemortem trauma emerged: a healed depression fracture on the right frontal bone of one individual and a healed or actively perforating blunt force wound on the frontal bone of another, both of which might indicate interpersonal violence but could also be accidental. Notably, this reassessment overturned earlier findings: a 2010 analysis had attributed perimortem trauma to six individuals, including one suspected trepanation and two cases of post-mortem disarticulation, all of which were reclassified as pathological origins or non-metric traits. The frequency of severe pathological markers also proved lower than previously recorded, underscoring how observer-dependent macroscopic estimation can be.

The taphonomic assessment, entirely absent from earlier research, revealed the museum’s own fingerprints. Of 101 recorded alterations, the majority were caused by curators, followed by written applications and environmental changes. The most common alteration was ink notes applied to the bone surface, mostly the left parietal, while preservative coats and paper notes in the boxes followed. Seven identical notes document when an individual was removed from and returned to the depot, proving that crania were displayed in the department’s permanent exhibition between 1977 and 1997, an educational display organized around a hierarchical racial characterization of humanity that was finally closed and re-evaluated in the late 1990s after a major public debate. One cranium showed such pronounced weathering, together with the absence of a mandible and non-pathological porosities, that the authors suggest it had tumbled across an abrasive surface such as sand for a long period, a phenomenon known as a tumbleweed cranium.

The study also confronts the ethical weight of multiple, sometimes contradictory datasets. Sex and age-at-death estimations exist in three sources: the museum’s inventory catalogue, the first scientific description by Viennese physician Augustin Weisbach in 1889, and the 2010 thesis, and the new analysis produced considerable differences from some of these. Because such estimations are not absolute facts but adjustments to predefined categories shaped by Western ways of thinking, the authors argue they must be handled within what Zuckerman and colleagues have called relational ethics for bioarchaeology, which stresses the second layer of agency human remains acquire through the individual stories told by their data. The authors acknowledge that their own work may itself represent a form of epistemic violence and therefore chose not to publish images of the remains, and they openly invite representatives of the Nyamwezi and Sakalava communities into the conversation, since no local affiliated communities were involved in the research.

Ultimately, the study demonstrates that markers of violence can be found at both the collecting and the curating stages of a collection’s life, even if the osteological record offers only non-specific clues, while the archival record describes circumstances of structural violence with striking clarity. Numbering the individuals, the authors note, removed them from their individual presence and made them objects of knowledge, a transition from human persons to specimens that the training voyages of the Kriegsmarine exemplify. Although Austria may not have acted as a colonial power in the conventional sense, its collecting enterprises made it a clear beneficiary of the global colonial situation, and the continued existence of such osteological collections perpetuates colonial and racial stereotypes even when restitutions occur. Acknowledging the circumstances that created and named these collections, the researchers conclude, is essential for making informed decisions about future collection management, particularly because the remains remain valuable scientific resources for reconstructing the lives and histories of past populations.

Subject of Research: Colonial-era violence in the formation and curation of an osteological museum collection from Tanzania and Madagascar

Article Title: Ships and Bones: Violence contributing to and consisting in osteological museum collections

Article References: Schattke, C., Wolf, D., Berner, M., & Eggers, S. (2026). Ships and Bones: Violence contributing to and consisting in osteological museum collections. Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 127, 85-94. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.182645

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.182645

Keywords: osteology, bioarchaeology, colonialism, human remains, museum collections, Austro-Hungarian Navy, Tanzania, Madagascar, structural violence, epistemic violence, provenance research, provenance

The story begins in the 1920s, when the pioneering British archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated the funerary complexes at Abydos, a site in Upper Egypt that served as a burial ground for Egypt’s earliest pharaohs. Petrie documented subsidiary burials surrounding the royal tombs and their associated enclosures, which were probably used for funerary rituals. Each subsidiary burial consisted of a simple chamber arranged in rows of dozens of others. Some of the dead were given simple coffins, and most were accompanied by a modest set of grave goods, including ceramic vessels. Many graves also contained small objects such as copper tools, projectile points, and small ivory figurines. A few grave markers bore names and official titles, and those titles appear to refer mostly to lower- and mid-level officials as well as artisans, suggesting that the people buried there were not elite nobles but working members of the royal establishment.

The sheer scale of these burials raised immediate suspicions. Some individual burials were surrounded by hundreds of others, and Petrie found it difficult to believe that so many people could have died of natural causes at the same time, in close succession, and in circumstances that led them all to be interred around royal tombs. He suspected that the graves reflected the practice now known as retainer sacrifice, in which people close to a ruler are killed when the ruler dies. Yet when Petrie examined the skeletal remains, he found no evidence of lethal injuries, and the absence of corroborating trauma cast doubt on his own hypothesis for decades. Without physical evidence of violence, the retainer sacrifice interpretation remained an intriguing but unproven possibility, relegated largely to footnotes in the grand narrative of early Egyptian state formation.

Dr Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University, lead author of the new study and author of a forthcoming book on state-sanctioned violence and human sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt, set out to solve this cold case. Her interest was drawn not only to the question of how these people died but to who they were. Even though they were buried around royalty, they have mostly been relegated to the margins of the historical narrative, and little attention has been paid to how these individuals may have viewed the ruler and their own role in his or her life and death. Retainer sacrifice, as practiced in many cultures, is often rooted in beliefs that the sacrificed individuals will continue to serve the ruler in some kind of afterlife, but it can also function as a visceral display of the ruler’s power. Some retainers might have volunteered to die in the expectation of eternal life or honor, while others may have been chosen or even forced.

To reexamine the evidence, Campbell first had to track down what remained of Petrie’s excavated material. Petrie kept meticulous records of his work, but he reburied most of the human remains he uncovered, retaining only the skulls, some of which were sent to the United Kingdom. Campbell located 46 of these crania in the Duckworth Collection at the University of Cambridge and reexamined them using modern forensic and bioarchaeological methods. The results were striking. Eighteen of the 46 crania, roughly 39 percent of the sample, showed evidence of significant cranial trauma in the form of linear fractures. Petrie appears to have mistaken these fractures for naturally caused post-depositional damage, but advances in forensic science now allow researchers to recognize them as perimortem injuries, meaning they occurred at or around the time of death, when the bone still retained the moisture and elasticity of living tissue.

The technical characteristics of these injuries carry important implications. The fractures on the preserved crania are generally linear rather than depressed, a pattern that forensic anthropologists associate with blows delivered by a flat, wide implement rather than a rounded or pointed weapon. According to Campbell, such injuries would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death. Some of the 18 traumatized skulls also displayed evidence of sharp-force trauma, including a chopping injury to one individual’s eye. The nature of the blunt force injuries poses a puzzle for reconstructing the exact method of killing. Egyptian kings are often depicted in art smiting their enemies with a mace, but these retainers were not enemies of the crown, and a mace blow would be expected to produce depressed fractures rather than the linear pattern observed. A hard fall could also produce linear cranial fractures, but a fall violent enough to fracture the skull would probably have broken other bones as well, and no such injuries were visible in Petrie’s photographs or recorded in his notes.

Considerable uncertainty remains about the fate of the other retainers whose skulls showed no trauma. Some of them could have died naturally, perhaps of disease or other causes that left no mark on bone. Alternatively, they may have been killed in ways that are not visible skeletally, such as asphyxiation or strangulation, which leave little or no trace on the skeleton. It is also possible that some were killed in ways that would be detectable only if the rest of their skeletons could be examined, since the surviving evidence is limited to skulls that were separated from the rest of their bodies more than a century ago. Campbell has noted that with unlimited resources she would like to locate the reburied bodies of these individuals and analyze them, but the surviving cranial sample, however incomplete, has already yielded transformative new information.

The study is a powerful demonstration of the scientific value of legacy collections and archival data. Museum collections assembled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often lack the contextual documentation that modern archaeologists would prefer, and the remains they contain were frequently recovered with excavation and recording methods that would be considered inadequate today. Yet as this research shows, revisiting such datasets armed with updated methods and knowledge can reveal entirely new dimensions of the past, even when the material is incomplete and imperfect. Forensic standards for distinguishing perimortem fractures from post-depositional breakage have advanced enormously since Petrie’s era, and techniques that simply did not exist in the 1920s can now extract behavioral and pathological information from bones that were examined and set aside generations ago.

Beyond its methodological significance, the research reshapes our understanding of the earliest Egyptian state. The First Dynasty funerary complexes at Abydos represent some of the earliest monumental expressions of royal power in Egypt, and the evidence that household members were deliberately killed to accompany their rulers speaks to both the ideological and coercive dimensions of early kingship. The victims were artisans and officials, people whose names and titles were occasionally recorded on grave markers, embedded within the machinery of the royal court. Whether they went to their deaths voluntarily, believing they would serve their king in eternity, or under coercion, their deaths were woven into the political theater of royal burial. The study, published on 5 October 2026 under the title New Data from Old Bones: Using Bioarchaeology and Forensics to Reassess Legacy Data from Ancient Abydos, Egypt, marks a turning point in the debate that Petrie opened a century ago, confirming that human sacrifice was practiced at the heart of one of the world’s first territorial states and reminding archaeologists that old bones, patiently reexamined, can still rewrite history.

Subject of Research: Forensic bioarchaeological reassessment of retainer sacrifice in First Dynasty royal burials at Abydos, Egypt

Article Title: Modern forensic methods reveal human sacrifice in ancient Egypt

Article References: Modern forensic methods reveal human sacrifice in ancient Egypt. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: ancient Egypt, human sacrifice, Abydos, First Dynasty, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, retainer sacrifice, cranial trauma, Flinders Petrie, legacy collections, Duckworth Collection, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology

The specimen came from the Ipatovo-5 site in the Stavropol region of Russia, associated with the so-called Steppe Maikop horizon of the final third of the fourth millennium BCE, roughly 3300 to 3000 BCE. The burial contained the remains of a man aged 40 to 49 years at death, an estimate based on standard skeletal aging methods such as assessment of the pubic symphysis. During excavation, archaeologists recovered a small calcified object whose identity was not immediately obvious. Concretions found in burials can be urinary or gallbladder stones, but they can also be soil nodules, mineralized plant material, or other pseudopathological formations. Distinguishing a genuine biological stone from a geological look-alike requires chemistry, and that is precisely what the team set out to deliver.

The analytical protocol was unusually broad. The researchers employed Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance to identify molecular bonds and mineral phases, X-ray diffraction to resolve crystal structures, micro-X-ray fluorescence mapping to chart elemental distributions across the stone, scanning electron microscopy to image its microstructure, combustion-based elemental analysis to quantify carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen, and both tabletop micro-computed tomography and photon-counting computed tomography to reveal internal architecture in three dimensions. Each technique answers a different question, and together they converge on a diagnosis in a way no single method could. This kind of multi-method strategy mirrors the morpho-constitutional analysis that clinical urologists use today, in which a stone’s composition and structure are read as a biography of the conditions that formed it.

The mineralogical verdict was unambiguous. The stone’s matrix consists of carbapatite, the carbonate-rich form of calcium phosphate also known as carbonate apatite, together with hydroxyapatite and whitlockite, a magnesium-bearing calcium phosphate. That particular assemblage is a clinical hallmark of infection-driven stone disease. Certain bacteria, most famously urease-producing species such as Proteus and related organisms, split urea in urine into ammonia, driving the local pH upward. In alkaline urine, calcium phosphate phases precipitate readily and can grow into substantial stones. In modern urology, a phosphate-dominant stone of this kind points the clinician straight toward chronic urinary tract infection as the underlying cause, and the same logic applies retroactively to the archaeological specimen.

Just as telling is what the stone does not contain. The complete absence of calcium oxalate and uric acid, the two mineral phases that dominate metabolic and dietary-related stone disease, rules out diet as the primary lithogenic factor. Many popular accounts assume ancient stones must reflect rich or unbalanced diets, and indeed some archaeological cases have been interpreted that way. Here, the chemistry says otherwise. The Ipatovo man’s stone formed in a urinary environment altered by bacterial infection, not by the excess of oxalate-rich plants, purines, or other dietary components that produce oxalate and uric acid calculi. This distinction matters for how archaeologists reconstruct ancient lifeways: a stone’s composition is a physiological document, and misreading its mineralogy can lead to unfounded claims about ancient cuisine.

The data leave one genuine ambiguity, and the authors are careful not to overclaim. Two anatomical origins fit the evidence equally well. The stone could be a renal calculus, formed in the kidney as a consequence of an upper urinary tract infection such as chronic pyelonephritis. Alternatively, it could be a prostatic calculus, formed in situ within the prostate gland as a result of chronic bacterial prostatitis, a condition in which tiny infection-driven phosphate stones can accrete around ductal debris. Prostatic stones have a specific chemistry tied to infection and often preserve bacterial imprints, as clinical research has shown. Without precise contextual information about the stone’s position within the pelvis, which burial environments rarely preserve, the team cannot definitively choose between the two scenarios. Either diagnosis, however, points to the same underlying reality: a chronic, infection-associated urogenital condition.

What would that have meant for the man while he lived? Chronic pyelonephritis and chronic bacterial prostatitis are both debilitating conditions. Renal infection can produce recurring fever, flank pain, and progressive scarring of kidney tissue, while chronic prostatitis causes persistent pelvic pain, difficult and painful urination, and, when stones obstruct the urinary tract, potentially serious complications. A stone lodged in the ureter or bladder can cause colic of legendary severity, hematuria, and secondary infections. In a world without antibiotics, surgical stone removal, or even effective analgesia beyond herbal preparations, such a condition would have significantly degraded the man’s quality of life, likely for years. The stone is thus not merely a curiosity; it is a durable trace of prolonged illness in a person who otherwise left no written record and whose skeleton may show few or no overt signs of the disease.

The case also fills a conspicuous gap in the paleopathological literature. Urolithiasis, the medical term for urinary stone disease, is exceedingly common today, affecting roughly one in ten people in industrialized countries, yet confirmed archaeological cases remain scarce. Reported examples include an approximately 8,500-year-old bladder stone from Uzzo Cave in Sicily analyzed by infrared spectroscopy, a bladder stone from a Neolithic passage grave at Chenon in France, prostatic stones in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burials at Al Khiday in central Sudan, stones from medieval cemeteries in Poland and Catalonia, a giant bladder stone in the mummy of a nineteenth-century Lebanese Maronite Patriarch, and a kidney stone in a nineteenth-century skeleton from Peoria, Illinois. Each new well-analyzed specimen adds a data point to a map of ancient disease that is still mostly blank, particularly for prehistoric pastoral societies of the Eurasian steppe.

The Ipatovo man lived during a transformative period in the region. The Maikop phenomenon of the North Caucasus is known for its rich kurgan burials, metalwork, and connections stretching across the steppe and toward the Near East. Recent research on Bronze Age communities in the Caucasus and the southern Russian steppes has documented the emergence and intensification of dairying, reconstructed diets from stable isotopes, and charted ancient genomes across a 3,000-year interval. Against that backdrop, a case of chronic infectious urolithiasis offers a ground-level view of health that population-level studies cannot provide. It reminds researchers that the people behind the isotopic ratios and genetic profiles carried burdens of chronic disease whose prevalence in prehistory remains essentially unknown.

Methodologically, the study also showcases how modern clinical imaging and spectroscopy can be transplanted into bioarchaeology. Photon-counting computed tomography, a cutting-edge hospital technology that separates materials by their X-ray attenuation signatures, and micro-CT, the standard for three-dimensional stone analysis in urological research, both revealed the internal structure of the specimen non-destructively. The work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation and carried out with the shared research facilities of Moscow State University. For the authors, the Ipatovo urolith demonstrates the power of an integrated analytical approach in bioarchaeology: a single small stone, interrogated with enough techniques, can yield a diagnosis, an etiology, and a window onto the lived experience of illness in a world that vanished more than five thousand years ago.

Subject of Research: Paleopathological analysis of an infectious-origin urinary stone from an Early Bronze Age burial in the North Caucasus

Article Title: Urolithiasis in the early bronze age of the North Caucasus: a paleopathological case study and insights into ancient lifeways

Article References: Berezina, N. Y., Statkus, M. A., Kalmykov, A. A., Abdrashitova, I. V., Kolesnik, I. V., Platonov, V. B., Shashurin, D. A., Garmay, A. V., Korobkova, V. V., Ryleeva, V. S., & Gresky, J. (2026). Urolithiasis in the early bronze age of the North Caucasus: a paleopathological case study and insights into ancient lifeways. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(10), Article 209. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02574-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02574-7

Keywords: urolithiasis, paleopathology, Early Bronze Age, North Caucasus, Maikop culture, carbapatite, infectious disease, micro-CT, FTIR spectroscopy, bioarchaeology, Ipatovo-5, urinary tract infection

The burial in question belongs to the Qin state, the polity that would eventually unify China in 221 BCE after centuries of warfare during the Warring States era (roughly 475 to 221 BCE). Qin cemeteries from this period have yielded rich evidence of social stratification, ritual practice, and craft production, but intraoral objects remain rare and poorly understood. When excavators encountered the stone within the dental arcade of the buried individual, its position raised an immediate question that could not be answered by visual inspection alone: had the stone been placed deliberately at the time of burial, or had it entered the oral cavity after death through natural processes such as soil intrusion?

Answering that question required what the researchers describe as a differential bioarchaeological assessment, meaning that multiple competing hypotheses were formulated in advance and tested against independent lines of physical evidence. The first hypothesis held that the stone was a deliberate funerary deposit, inserted into the mouth as part of a mortuary ritual. The second proposed accidental incorporation, in which sediment movement or decomposition of soft tissues allowed a stone from the surrounding fill to migrate into the oral space. A third possibility considered was that the object had a physiological origin, for example as a bezoar or concretion formed within the body itself. Each scenario carries distinct implications for taphonomy, for ritual interpretation, and for the study of ancient beliefs about death and the body.

To discriminate among these scenarios, the team combined macroscopic and microscopic examination of the stone with detailed documentation of its position relative to the teeth, mandible, and cervical vertebrae. The stone’s surfaces were inspected for use-wear, modification traces, and adhering materials. Microscopic analysis sought evidence of deliberate shaping, such as grinding facets, polished planes, or flaking scars that would indicate human manufacture rather than natural stream or soil abrasion. The sediment trapped in the surrounding context, including material between the teeth and within the oral cavity, was compared with the grave fill above and around the burial to determine whether the matrix associated with the stone matched the original depositional environment or showed signs of later intrusion.

The materials characterization extended to mineralogical identification, because the type of stone itself is informative. Techniques such as petrographic assessment, scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and Raman or similar spectroscopic methods allowed the researchers to determine the rock’s composition and texture. Comparing that signature with known geological sources in the region provided a preliminary indication of whether the stone was locally available or had been transported. Trace residues on the surface, including possible organic films, mineral encrustations, or precipitates consistent with prolonged contact with dental enamel and bone, were mapped and chemically characterized. Such residues are central to the differential assessment, because prolonged intimate contact with oral tissues should leave a distinctive pattern of surface alteration that a stone accidentally swept into a grave void would lack.

The position of the object within the dental arcade proved especially significant. A stone deposited during burial rites would plausibly rest in a stable, constrained position, often wedged between the mandibular or maxillary teeth, with its long axis conforming to the space available. A stone that migrated after burial would more likely rest beneath the collapsed mandible or on the floor of the burial pit in an unconstrained orientation. The excavation documentation, including photographs, three-dimensional recording of the find spot, and stratigraphic drawings, allowed the team to evaluate the object’s orientation and support. Combined with the sediment-matrix comparison and the surface-alteration evidence, the integrated data favored an interpretation of deliberate placement rather than passive intrusion, though the authors are careful to present their conclusions as probabilistic rather than absolute, in keeping with the logic of a differential assessment.

Beyond the mechanics of deposition, the study situates the find within a broader anthropology of mouth deposits. In Chinese funerary tradition, objects placed in the mouth of the dead, sometimes called han in later textual sources, range from jade cicadas in Han dynasty burials to coins, shells, and pearls in other periods and regions. These deposits are commonly interpreted as provisions for the afterlife, symbols of rebirth, or attempts to seal the body against decay and malevolent influence. Jade is the material most often discussed in the textual and archaeological record, which makes a plain stone object from a Qin burial particularly interesting. If the identification of deliberate placement holds, the find suggests that the practice of intraoral deposit was not restricted to elite jade artifacts but extended to humble, locally sourced materials, potentially broadening the social range of the rite.

The bioarchaeological component of the assessment also involved the human remains themselves. The researchers evaluated the dentition for pathology, wear, and post-mortem damage, since the condition of the teeth constrains both the timing of insertion and the physical possibility of placing an object of a given size into the oral cavity. Evidence of periodontal disease, caries, or ante-mortem tooth loss can indicate whether the individual was edentulous at death, which would affect the stability of an inserted object. The age and sex estimation of the individual, together with any observable indicators of health status, provides social context: intraoral deposits may have differed by age, gender, or status within the Qin community, and each well-documented case contributes to building that comparative framework.

Methodologically, the article is a case study in how heritage science can resolve questions that older excavation reports left open. Many intraoral objects discovered in earlier decades were recorded only in photographs or brief notes, and their mode of deposition was asserted rather than demonstrated. The differential approach modeled here, in which hypotheses are specified, tested with independent techniques, and compared for explanatory power, offers a template that can be applied retrospectively to museum specimens and prospectively to future excavations. The authors emphasize that no single technique is decisive: mineralogy, micromorphology, residue chemistry, spatial documentation, and osteology must converge before a deliberate funerary deposit can be argued with confidence.

The find also carries implications for the archaeology of the Qin state specifically. Warring States Qin mortuary practice has often been characterized through large cemeteries, stamped-earth tombs, and later imperial monuments, while small-scale ritual behaviors of ordinary burials are less visible. A carefully analyzed intraoral stone adds texture to this picture, indicating that communities on the Qin periphery participated in symbolic practices concerning the mouth and the passage of the dead, even when exotic materials were unavailable or not socially appropriate. As the dataset of differentially assessed cases grows, it may become possible to trace the geographic spread, chronological development, and eventual textual codification of the mouth-deposit rite, linking the silent stones of excavated graves to the rich corpus of Chinese ritual writing that began to describe such customs in later centuries.

Subject of Research: Bioarchaeological analysis of a stone object deposited inside the mouth of a Warring States-period Qin burial in China

Article Title: Differential bioarchaeological assessment of an intraoral stone object from a Warring States-period Qin burial, China

Article References: Wang, S., Zhang, X., Wang, C., & Zhou, Y. (2026). Differential bioarchaeological assessment of an intraoral stone object from a Warring States-period Qin burial, China. npj Heritage Science. https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02987-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-02987-6

Keywords: bioarchaeology, Warring States period, Qin burial, intraoral deposit, funerary ritual, heritage science, taphonomy, ancient China, mortuary practice, dental anthropology, archaeological science, stone artifact

The central finding is chronological. Millet, the researchers discovered, was already being consumed in southeastern Poland around 1590 BCE, more than a century earlier than previous estimates had suggested. That revision matters because the timing of millet’s arrival has long been debated among European archaeologists. The crop, domesticated originally in what is now Inner Mongolia, spread westward along trade and contact networks that connected the steppe with the settled farming societies of Europe. Knowing precisely when it appeared in local diets allows archaeologists to align that arrival with broader developments in Bronze Age society, including population growth, increasing food demand and shifting climatic conditions.

Equally significant is the manner of the adoption. The isotope data show that millet did not sweep through the region as an instant staple. Instead, it was consumed at first by only a handful of individuals, gradually working its way into foodways that had been dominated for millennia by wheat and barley. By analysing tissues that form at different stages of life, the team could reconstruct dietary change within individual lifetimes. Several early millet consumers had clearly grown up eating the traditional cereals, only incorporating the new grain later in adulthood. This within-lifetime evidence pins down the moment the crop entered existing diets with a precision that conventional archaeological methods rarely achieve.

The multi-proxy approach at the heart of the study is what makes such fine-grained conclusions possible. Carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in bone collagen reflect a person’s average diet over the years, capturing the relative contribution of different plant and animal foods. Oxygen and strontium isotopes, by contrast, record the geology and hydrology of the places where an individual’s food was produced during tissue formation. Radiocarbon dating anchors the timeline, palaeoproteomic analysis of tooth proteins establishes biological sex, and previously published ancient genetic data situates individuals within the region’s population history. Each line of evidence answers a different question, and only by reading them together could the researchers distinguish local dietary change from the arrival of new people.

That distinction proved crucial. Both millet consumers and non-consumers in the study shared broadly similar archaeological and genetic backgrounds, and the earliest consumers carried strontium isotope signatures compatible with local origins. The data therefore offer little support for a simple migration-based explanation, in which the crop would have arrived with an incoming population that brought its own farming traditions. Instead, the evidence points to an innovation adopted from within, by communities already rooted in the region, in response to pressures and opportunities they faced in their own environment.

The environmental dimension of the story is where the study’s implications expand beyond diet. Broomcorn millet grows quickly, matures within a single summer season, and tolerates relatively dry conditions and poor soils far better than wheat or barley. Those qualities meant that cultivating it opened up parts of the landscape that had previously seen little agricultural use. According to the researchers, the different strontium isotope compositions found in the skeletal tissues of millet consumers compared with non-consumers likely point to the use of distinct geological zones within the same territory, rather than to different places of birth. In other words, the crop’s adopters were farming different ground.

Lead author Dr Depaermentier of Vilnius University frames the shift as a deliberate strategy. In response to increasing food demand and potential changes in climatic conditions, Bronze Age societies adopted a new resilient staple crop to optimise the use of previously marginal parts of their environment and improve food security. The phrase captures a logic that will feel familiar to modern agricultural planners: diversify the crop base, exploit underused land, and buffer the community against the risk of harvest failure. What the isotope evidence adds is proof that this logic was already operating in European prehistory, centuries before written records could document it.

Just as striking is what the study reveals about who adopted the crop. Millet consumption was not restricted to any particular sex, age group or social status, as co-author Prof Makarowicz of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań observes. Together with the strontium isotope evidence, this pattern indicates that access to particular parts of the landscape, rather than social identity, was the determining factor shaping who ate the new grain. The division between consumers and non-consumers mapped onto geography, not hierarchy. Senior author Prof Motuzaitė Matuzevičiūtė, also of Vilnius University and principal investigator of the ERC-CoG MILWAYS project, notes that the study is the first to link such a division of the landscape to the cultivation of a new summer crop and to the exploitation of areas that had previously seen little agricultural use.

That conclusion reframes how archaeologists think about prehistoric innovation. The spread of new crops is often narrated in terms of diffusion, trade or conquest, as if ideas and technologies simply travelled across maps. This study instead documents adoption as a local, negotiated process, unfolding over generations, unevenly distributed across a society, and driven by the practical realities of soil, water and subsistence. A handful of individuals began eating a new grain; their communities learned to grow it on land their ancestors had left uncultivated; and over time the practice spread until the crop became a staple. No single dramatic event marks the transition, yet the cumulative result was a fundamentally different relationship between people and their environment.

The findings also carry a contemporary resonance. As modern agriculture confronts climate change, water scarcity and degrading soils, crop diversification has returned to the centre of policy discussions, and researchers increasingly look to the past for evidence of how societies have managed similar challenges. The Bronze Age farmers of southeastern Poland offer a case study in successful adaptation: they identified a crop suited to marginal conditions, integrated it gradually into existing systems, and used it to expand production without abandoning their traditional cereals. Understanding how such transitions succeeded in prehistory, the authors suggest, can inform current debates about building resilient food systems. A grain that travelled from Inner Mongolia to the Carpathian foothills three and a half thousand years ago turns out to have lessons that still speak to the present.

Subject of Research: The adoption of broomcorn millet and its impact on Bronze Age land use in Central Europe

Article Title: The adoption of a new crop reshaped land use in Bronze Age Europe

Article References: The adoption of a new crop reshaped land use in Bronze Age Europe. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: broomcorn millet, Bronze Age, Central Europe, isotope analysis, bioarchaeology, land use, food security, paleodiet, strontium isotopes, crop adoption, Science Advances, southeastern Poland