The Bones Speak

A 35-year-old female who liked to smoke a pipe. A tough-as nails-survivor of a rib-fracturing who lived to a ripe old age.

They died centuries ago. Their newly discovered skeletal remains have revealed their stories anew.

Those aren’t profiles of the people whose two-centuries-old bones suddenly appeared on the Green last week in the roots of a tree upended by Superstorm Sandy.

They are preliminary findings from another dig begun 15 months ago. That was when construction equipment, not a raging storm, unearthed remains of four people buried in the cemetery of New Haven’s first Catholic church, built in 1834, where Yale-New Haven Hospital’s emergency room stands today.

Read about the discovery of those skeletal remains here.

On Sunday, the team working on those remains revealed new findings in a presentation sponsored by the Connecticut Irish-American Historical Society and the New Haven Museum. The event drew about 100 people to the museum’s second-floor auditorium.

The presenters included Tony Griego, a retired New Haven cop and amateur historian who originally made the find while working security at the hospital. He knew not a contemporary crime scene but a 19th-century burial ground had been discovered.

Other presenters Sunday included Dr. Gary Aronsen, a research associate in anthropology and archeology at Yale; State Archeologist Dr. Nick Bellantoni; and local historian Dan DeLuca.

Bellantoni and Aronsen have also just begun an investigation of the remains newly found on the Green. Those remains also came from a cemetery burial but three decades earlier, at the time of the American Revolution, Bellantoni said.

2 Men, 2 Woman

The team made its presentation Sunday before a rapt audience. It included photographs of the remains. (Aronsen and the others asked the Independent not to print the photographs both because they are preliminary to a fuller presentation planned for the spring, and out of deference to the remains that ultimately will be buried according to Catholic rites.)

Bellantoni said four individuals were identified, their graves neatly and closely stacked on each other, as revealed by the position of the coffin nails, and laid out in the east-west axis of Christian burial. The only personal effect found other than the coffin nails and shroud pins was a medallion from a rosary.

Aronsen said that as a biological anthropologist he can, based on the bones, determine the individuals’ gender, age, possibly types of occupation, health condition, and cause of death.

Or as he put it, ​“I will tell you what the bones say.”

As he reported the results of chemical and other analysis of bones and teeth done thus far at his lab, he peppered what might have been a grisly clinical description with good humor. ​“If you don’t brush your teeth,” he quipped, ​“it’s a gold mine for people like me.”

One 35-year-old female had ​“gorgeous teeth,” but he surmised that she was also an habitual pipe smoker.

The low bone density or osteoperosis helped peg the age of one approximately 70-year-old female. He identified bone changes in her skull that also might be telltale signs of menopause.

The third individual was a young man with what Aronsen described as ​“big heavy bones, massively built.” The cause of death is still unknown but he hopes to be able to present that at the professional symposium planned on this material next year.

A Tailor?

The fourth individual Aronsen called his personal favorite, a 70-year-old man who died in excellent shape even after recovering from fracturing his neck and many ribs.

When the bones rub against each other from intense repetitive motion, they create a surface that has a glassy polish called eburnation. Aronsen’s favorite displayed this in the wrist.

He speculated the man may have been a tailor. The ankle joint also told Aronson there was a chronic infection from a disease like typhus or even end stage syphilis. Whoever he was, Aronsen called him ​“one of the toughest men I’ve ever seen.”

Aronsen said more work needs to be done in genetic analysis and possible facial reconstruction done with a 3‑D scan. The team has submitted grants, one to the City of New Haven, to advance this work.

More Topsy Turvy, Fragile

Meanwhile, Bellantoni spoke a bit about the newest find on the Green this past week. He reported that the field work there has concluded. In what he termed the cranial and post-cranial remains, two individuals, an adult and a child, have been identified.

More work remains to determine if more individuals will be accounted for.

“Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle because the tree was upended,” Aronsen said.

As of Saturday, all the bones from the Green have been transferred to Aronsen’s lab except for those that the medical examiner initially took when the site was considered a crime scene. Those will be reunited shortly with the ones at Yale.

The next task is to separate the wood and metal from the bones and to begin analysis. Bellantoni’s portfolio includes the wood and metal, Aronsen’s the bones. Aronsen termed them ​“very fragile,” much more so than the bones discovered beneath Yale-New Haven Hospital. They are also more mixed up, given how they were unearthed in the storm and among tree roots.

Aronsen held out hope that these remains could ​“speak” as much as the ones he reported on. ​“The issue is what’s preserved. The goal is to say as much about those individuals as possible.”

When the work is done, the Green’s human remains will also be reburied. By whom and how may depend on what’s discovered in the coming months. ​“We’ll treat it with the same professionalism and tender loving care as we do all remains,” Bellantoni said.

Aronsen said the team will work as quickly as possible, with preliminary results expected in about two months.