The Bones Speak

The skeletons raised their voice at the New Haven Museum on Halloween night.

They said: We died young. We probably didn’t get enough to eat when we needed it. An epidemic like scarlet fever or dysentery, but not yellow fever, may have claimed one of us.

One of us, a 3- or 4‑year-old child, was given a beautiful marble ornament to take on the journey to the next life.

Those poignant findings, translated from the scientific language of bio-anthropology, emerged at a panel discussion that drew a standing-room-only crowd of 150 people on Halloween night to the museum’s second floor auditorium.

The attendees who chose history over trick-or-treating were privy to a Power Point presentation called ​“Getting to the Root of It,” the preliminary findings by State Archeologist Nick Bellantoni, Yale researcher Gary Aronsen and area scientists.

They revealed the findings to date of the team charged with iinvestigating the human remains and time capsules discovered on the Green after winds from Super Storm Sandy blew down the Lincoln Oak in October last year.

The scientists revealed no stab wounds, fracturing blows to the cranium with a blunt instrument, or other Halloween-esque scenarios.

After a year of intensive study, the team identified bones belonging to two adults and three children, along with fragmentary other remains, all of which they have identified as individuals A,B,C, D, E, and so forth.

Despite using the best tools and analyses available based on teeth, limb length in relation to stature, striations in bone surfaces, and other signs of disease, ​“these people [are able to] tell us [only] about populations in New Haven [in the 1780s or 1790s], not about individual people,” said Gary Aronsen, a research associate a the biological anthropology labs at Yale and the lead scientist on the team.

Click here, here, and here for articles on the two time capsules that emerged from the 1909 commemorative planting to celebrate Lincoln’s centennial.

Those articles, including a bullet and grapeshot from the Battle of Gettysburg, and the program and other papers from the event, are now on display at the museum (pictured).

The piece de resistance for the evening was the collection of bones, which scientists have been studying for a year.

Even as the scientists spoke in technical terms of osteology and paleo-anthropology, there was a palpable sense of wanting to know the remains not only as data but as people.

Aronsen and the other scientists reported the condition of the molars and limb length in relation to stature. Expectations had to be tapered to the paucity of of the remains, the fragmentary evidence, and the scrunched condition of many of the bones that had turned up.

A ​“Clean-Looking Dude”

Meet the ​“family” that Sandy turned up: Aronsen called Individual A ​“a clean-looking dude.” He said there was little to show in the bones that the skeleton, a man likely 25 to 30 years old, had done much physical labor. Either he was sickly and couldn’t work, or his status in post-Revolutionary War New Haven meant he didn’t have to do physical labor that would leave its marks in the bones.

Individual B was about 9 years old and was getting a first molar, Aronsen reported. The child was possibly male; you couldn’t be sure of the traces of gender in the bones until puberty set in.

Individuals C and E, also children, were both around 3 or 4 years old. E was definitely female based on the shape of the clavicle.

That there were more child graves than adults bore out the high rate of child mortality known from many Colonial written sources and any tour of a New England cemetery.

Early speculation when the bones turned up was that the burying ground was full up from the yellow fever epidemic that had struck many cities including New Haven in 1794.

Aronsen’s findings, using the extensive written historical and health records kept in New Haven, make him skeptical. Yes, disease likely took some of these people. But yellow fever’s victims were largely adults, whereas epidemics of scarlet fever and dysentery, which had struck a few years earlier, were more likely to have killed children.

To say yellow fever is in evidence here is ​“contrary to our sample,” he said. Then he hypothesized it was one of the other two epidemics. ​“I’m suggesting our sample is coming from these kinds of events,” he said.

Genetic research, the next step, will help determine what people ate and, if these individuals are related to living New Haveners. That’s provided the living New Haveners offer some DNA to do a comparison.

That latter kind of research is not a priority now, according to Aronsen.

Aronsen said the bones tell us that resources in New Haven were finite. Sometimes food was stretched thin. People lived in crowded, seaport circumstances where disease was rampant. In the 1790s epidemics were widespread and lethal, and there was nowhere to put all the bodies.

So in 1797 James Hillhouse came up with the novel idea of a ​“city for the dead,” a plotted district away from the center of town, which became Grove Street Cemetery.