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THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF HUMAN BONES

The Archaeology of Human Bones provides an up to date account of

the analysis of human skeletal remains from archaeological sites,
introducing students to the anatomy of bones and teeth and the
nature of the burial record.
Drawing from studies around the world, this book illustrates how
the scientific study of human remains can shed light upon important
archaeological and historical questions. This new edition reflects the
latest developments in scientific techniques and their application to
burial archaeology. Current scientific methods are explained,
alongside a critical consideration of their strengths and weaknesses.
The book has also been thoroughly revised to reflect changes in the
ways in which scientific studies of human remains have influenced
our understanding of the past, and has been updated to reflect
developments in ethical debates that surround the treatment of
human remains. There is now a separate chapter devoted to
archaeological fieldwork on burial grounds, and the chapters on DNA
and ethics have been completely rewritten.
This edition of The Archaeology of Human Bones provides not only
a more up to date but also a more comprehensive overview of this
crucial area of archaeology. Written in a clear style with technical
jargon kept to a minimum, it continues to be a key work for
archaeology students.

Simon Mays is currently Human Skeletal Biologist for Historic

England, based in Portsmouth, UK. He is also a Visiting Lecturer at
the Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, and a
Honorary Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology,
University of Edinburgh. His research interests span all areas of
archaeological human skeletal remains. Previous books include
Advances in Human Palaeopathology (2008) edited with Ron Pinhasi,
and The Bioarchaeology of Metabolic Bone Disease, 2nd edition
(2020) authored with Megan Brickley and Rachel Ives.
THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF HUMAN
BONES

Third edition

Simon Mays
Third edition published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2021 Simon Mays

The right of Simon Mays to be identified as author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered

trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.

First edition published by Routledge 1998

Second edition published by Routledge 2010

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mays, Simon, author.
Title: The archaeology of human bones / Simon Mays.
Description: Third edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020029176 (print) | LCCN 2020029177 (ebook) | ISBN
9781138045606 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138045675 (paperback) | ISBN
9781315171821 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Anthropometry. | Human remains (Archaeology)-Methodology. |
Paleopathology.
Classification: LCC GN70 .M39 2021 (print) | LCC GN70 (ebook) | DDC 599.9/4-
dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029176
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029177

ISBN: 978-1-138-04560-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-04567-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-17182-1 (ebk)
To Bonnie, who had an enthusiasm for bones
CONTENTS

List of figures
List of tables
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgements

1 The nature of bones and teeth

2 The nature of the burial record

3 Archaeological fieldwork on burial grounds

4 The assessment of age and sex

5 Metric variation in the skull

6 Metric variation in the post-cranial skeleton

7 Non-metric variation

8 Bone disease

9 Dental disease

10 Traces of injury on the skeleton

11 Stable isotope analysis

12 DNA analysis
13 Cremated bone

14 Ethics and human remains

Bibliography
Index
FIGURES

1.1 The human skeleton

1.2 The structure of a long-bone
1.3 Cross-sections of the humeri of a professional tennis player,
as inferred from X-ray data
1.4 A deposit of woven bone on a femur
1.5 The microscopic structure of cortical bone
1.6 Microscopic view of a transverse section of a femur from a
Mediaeval archaeological site
1.7 Development of a typical long-bone
1.8 The deciduous dentition of the maxilla
1.9 The right maxilla of a Mediaeval child, aged about 8 years
1.10 The permanent dentition of the maxilla
1.11 The structure of a tooth
2.1 Factors affecting an excavated collection of skeletons
2.2 The Fletcher Site, Michigan, USA
2.3 A cranium from a 19th century female burial from London
2.4 Two superimposed burials from Sutton Hoo, England
2.5 Scanning electron micrograph of a transverse section of a
Mediaeval long-bone from Wharram Percy
2.6 Well preserved skeletons of a child and an adult from the
Mediaeval churchyard at Wharram Percy
3.1 A Mediaeval skeleton from the Ipswich Blackfriars site,
England, after removal of the grave fill
3.2 A burial of a foetus from Roman Poundbury, England
3.3 A skeleton recording form for use in the field
3.4 Isometric view of burials from the St Pancras burial ground
3.5 Detail from a site-photograph of a 4th-century AD interment
from Stanwick, England
3.6 A 12th-century AD burial from Barton-upon-Humber,
England, within a well-preserved wooden coffin
 3.7 A 10th–12th century AD burial from Barton-upon-Humber,
showing parallel-sided effect and post-depositional
movement of the skull
3.8 Skeletons 8101 and 8102, West Amesbury Farm,
Stonehenge
3.9 Burial 8102, West Amesbury Farm, Stonehenge. Detail view
from the north
3.10 Burial 8102, West Amesbury Farm, Stonehenge. Detail view
from the south
3.11 Frequency of various skeletal elements in the Mediaeval
burials from the Ipswich Blackfriars site
3.12 An artist’s impression of Fussell’s Lodge long barrow as it
may have appeared when first constructed
3.13 Wayland’s Smithy, Barrow 1
3.14 Composition of assemblages from Fussell’s Lodge,
Wayland’s Smithy and Wharram Percy
4.1 Adult male and female pelvic girdles
4.2 Sex differences in the adult pubic bone
4.3 Adult female and adult male pelvic bones
4.4 Adult male and female crania
4.5 Bivariate plot of lower canine dimensions for burials from
Poundbury
4.6 Sex difference in the angle of the greater sciatic notch in
non-adults
4.7 Linear regression of gestational age in the foetus against
humerus length
4.8 Actual age plotted against age estimated from dental
radiographs using Gustafson and Koch’s dental development
scheme
4.9 Chronology of the development of the deciduous teeth
4.10 Chronology of the development of the permanent teeth
4.11 Radiograph of part of a mandible from a child from a British
archaeological site
4.12 An immature femur with an unfused distal epiphysis
4.13 Epiphysial fusion
4.14 Some methods which have been used to estimate age at
death in adult skeletons from archaeological sites
4.15 Casts of male pubic bones
4.16 Deviation of age estimated using the four criteria of the
Complex Method from real age in the Spitalfields adult
skeletons
4.17 Microscopic cross section of the root of a lower canine from
a modern individual showing the incremental structure of
acellular extrinsic fibre cementum
4.18 Diagrammatic sections through an unworn and a heavily
worn molar
4.19 A classification of molar wear
4.20 Illustration of the Miles method for estimating the rate of
dental wear in a skeletal collection, and hence for
determining adult age at death
4.21 Estimated correspondence between adult age at death and
molar wear phases for British material from Neolithic to
Mediaeval periods
4.22 Ante-mortem tooth loss
4.23 Distributions of ages of archaeological and modern perinatal
infants
4.24 The location of the deserted Mediaeval village of Wharram
Percy
5.1 Anterior view of skull, showing glabella, nasion and
nasospinale
5.2 Superior view of skull, showing position of bregma
5.3 Instruments for measuring skulls
5.4 MicroScribe G2 desktop digitiser for capturing three-
dimensional geometric morphometric data
5.5 Virtual 3D model of a human cranium with traditional
landmarks and semilandmarks superimposed
5.6 Three mandibular measurements, showing trends in British
material from the Neolithic to the 19th century AD
5.7 Anterior view of skull, showing nasal area and method of
taking nasal index
 5.8 Location of Yanomama villages studied by Spielman and co-
workers
5.9 Schematic representation of relationships between six
African populations as suggested by linguistic, historical and
other non-osteological data
5.10 Cluster analysis of craniometric data from western and
eastern pre-European contact archaeological sites from
South America
5.11 Japanese Jomon and Yayoi crania
5.12 Map of Japan
5.13 Dendrogram from cluster analysis of measurements from
Far Eastern and Pacific skulls
5.14 Summary tooth size from Japanese and Chinese samples
5.15 Beaker pottery from various British sites
5.16 Distribution of the Beaker phenomenon
5.17 Typical long-headed Neolithic and round-headed Beaker
skulls
5.18 Principle components analysis of cranial morphology of
Neolithic and Early Bronze Age British crania
6.1 An osteometric board for measuring long-bone lengths
6.2 Estimated stature plotted against dental age for the
Wharram Percy children
6.3 Results of experimental loading of the rat ulna
6.4 Femoral midshaft polar second moment of area for Middle
Horizon and Transitional Middle Horizon – Late Intermediate
periods at San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
6.5 Still-frame from a video record of the spear-thrusting
experiments of Schmitt et al. (2003)
6.6 Middle Palaeolithic stone scrapers
6.7 Southern Africa, showing coastal, interior and Namib Desert
regions
6.8 Rock art from South Africa
6.9 Ratio of second moments of area at the femur midshaft in
antero-posterior and medio-lateral planes in skeletal material
from southern Africa
 7.1 Posterior view of a cranium showing an ossicle at the
lambda and a lambdoid ossicle
7.2 Cranium showing retention of the metopic suture
7.3 Cranium showing a parietal foramen
7.4 Tibia showing a squatting facet
7.5 An atlas vertebra showing posterior atlas bridging
7.6 The bones forming the hard palate showing development of
a bony torus
7.7 A humerus showing septal aperture
7.8 An adult dentition showing reduced, peg-shaped maxillary
lateral incisors
7.9 A shovel-shaped maxillary permanent central incisor
7.10 A permanent molar showing a Carabelli cusp
7.11 A twin-rooted mandibular permanent canine
7.12 Location and site plan of the Naqada excavations of Sir
William Flinders Petrie
7.13 Location of Cahokia, showing Mound 72
7.14 Multidimensional scaling plot of mean measures of
divergence based on dental non-metric traits among the
burials from Mound 72 at Cahokia and from nearby sites
7.15 An auditory torus
7.16 Prevalence of auditory tori among burials from various
periods from the Iron Gates region of the Danube
7.17 Enthesis at the origin of the common extensor tendon
7.18 Enthesis at the insertion of the deltoid muscle
8.1 A classification of the diseases of bone
8.2 A mummified anencephalic infant from Hermopolis, Egypt
8.3 Osteomyelitis
8.4 Vertebrae showing signs of tuberculosis
8.5 A cranium showing several button osteomas
8.6 A cranium showing a large benign nasal tumour
8.7 A cranium showing metastatic carcinoma
8.8 The lower leg bones of an adult bowed as a result of
childhood rickets
8.9 A vertebra showing osteophytosis
8.10 The head of a radius showing osteoarthritis
8.11 Seven thoracic vertebrae showing DISH
8.12 A metatarsal showing gout
8.13 An illustration of the distinction between bone destruction
caused by a disease process and that due to post-
depositional damage
8.14 Clavicles with and without cavitation at the attachment of
the costo-clavicular ligament
8.15 A cranium showing an enlarged middle nasal concha
8.16 A tibia showing Paget's disease of bone
8.17 Scanning electron micrograph of a rib showing vitamin D
deficiency
8.18 Sequence of cranial vault changes in treponemal disease
8.19 A tibia with syphilis
8.20 An upper incisor in congenital syphilis
8.21 Bone mineral density at the femur neck in women from
Wharram Percy compared with a modern population
8.22 Healed vertebral compression fractures
8.23 Porotic hyperostosis of the orbital roofs (cribra orbitalia)
8.24 Location of burial grounds used in the study of porotic
hyperostosis in the Moquegua valley
9.1 A large caries cavity in a molar tooth
9.2 A periapical void in a maxilla
9.3 A mandible showing periodontal disease
9.4 A mandible showing ante-mortem tooth loss
9.5 Cone of South America, showing location of the skeletal
remains from Argentina studied for dental caries
9.6 Box-plots of caries frequencies in the regions identified in
Fig. 9.5
9.7 Dental caries in relation to sugar consumption in Britain
9.8 A caries cavity at the cemento-enamel junction
9.9 Caries cavities on the occlusal surfaces of some molar teeth
9.10 A fragment of wood tissue recovered from dental calculus
from a molar tooth from a Neanderthal
9.11 A mid-19th century AD skull from London showing a pipe
facet
9.12 Dental enamel hypoplasias
 9.13 Schematic representation of a vertical section of a
permanent upper central incisor
9.14 Location of the Nova Rača site
10.1 A femur showing myositis ossificans traumatica
10.2 An unreduced anterior dislocation of the left shoulder
10.3 Spondylolysis of the 5th lumbar vertebra
10.4 Common types of fracture
10.5 Stages in the healing of a fracture in a tubular bone
10.6 A left radius and ulna; the latter shows a pseudarthrosis
10.7 A tibia showing a firmly united fracture
10.8 A skull from Wharram Percy showing an unhealed blunt
injury
10.9 The inner surface of the Wharram Percy skull at the site of
the injury
10.10 A skull from Ipswich showing an unhealed blade injury
10.11 The anterior part of the cut surface of the blade injury in the
Ipswich skull
10.12 The right temple area of the skull of William Leschallas,
excavated from the Spitalfields crypt, London
10.13 A decapitated burial from a cemetery excavated at Stanwick,
England
10.14 An axis vertebra from a decapitated skeleton from
Towcester, England
10.15 The skull of another decapitated burial from Stanwick
10.16 An ulna parry fracture
10.17 A radius showing a healed Colles’ fracture
10.18 One of the mass-graves at Wisby under excavation
10.19 A cranium from Wisby showing several cuts in various
directions
10.20 The distribution of perimortal blade injuries according to
skeletal element and side in the skull and long-bones from
Wisby
10.21 Perimortal injuries at Wisby, Towton, Uppsala and
Sandbjerget
11.1 Approximate mean stable isotope ratios for some major
food classes
 11.2 Approximate human bone collagen stable isotope ratios
expected for archaeological populations consuming pure C3,
C4 and marine diets
11.3 Carbon stable isotope ratios for some burials from Missouri
and Arkansas, USA
11.4 Carbon stable isotope results from some human skeletons
from Mesolithic and Neolithic Denmark
11.5 Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data from Mesolithic and
Neolithic burials from the Iron Gates region of the Danube
11.6 Rib bone nitrogen stable isotope data plotted against dental
age for infants and children from Mediaeval Wharram Percy,
England
11.7 Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios in dentine from
permanent first molars from skeletons from the slave burial
ground at Newton Sugar Plantation, Barbados
11.8 Strontium and carbonate oxygen stable isotope ratios in
enamel from permanent first molars from skeletons from the
slave burial ground at Newton Sugar Plantation, Barbados
11.9 Annual mean oxygen stable isotope ratios for precipitation
in Italy
11.10 Oxygen stable isotope ratios in enamel carbonate from
human permanent first and third molars from Portus Romae
11.11 Strontium and oxygen isotopic data from the first, second
and third molars from the Middle Neolithic burial excavated
from near Stonehenge
12.1 The structure of DNA
12.2 DNA molecules bear genes, separated by intergenic DNA
12.3 The burial ground at Niederstotzingen
12.4 Tentative reconstruction of the family tree of some of the
burials from Niederstotzingen
12.5 The triple burial at Dolní Věstonice
12.6 Rx values from the three Dolní Věstonice individuals
13.1 X-ray diffraction patterns from bone samples heated to
different temperatures
 13.2 Crystallinity index (CI) plotted against carbonate: phosphate
ratio (C/P) for bone samples heated to different
temperatures
13.3 A pyre site at the late Iron Age cemetery at Westhampnett,
England
13.4 Two cremation burials from the Roman site at Birdoswald,
on Hadrians Wall, England
13.5 Bone from a cremation burial after sieving
13.6 Commonly occurring fragments in cremation burials
13.7 X-ray diffraction pattern from a cranial fragment from a
Mucking cremation
13.8 A section through a cranial vault fragment from one of the
Mucking cremations showing a fused mass of glass on its
outer surface
13.9 Crystallinity index plotted against carbonate: phosphate
ratio for bone samples from four sites from Roman Britain,
and from Anglo-Saxon Elsham
13.10 The distribution of bone weights from the adult cremation
burials from Godmanchester
13.11 Pot volume versus the weight of bone recovered from adult
Godmanchester cremations
14.1 St Peter’s Church, Barton-upon-Humber
14.2 Part of Avebury stone circle
14.3 Visitors to the excavations of the Early Anglo-Saxon
cemetery at Oakington, England
Tables

1.1 The bones of the adult human skeleton

3.1 Frequencies of some major skeletal elements at different
sites
4.1 Relationship reported between pubic symphysial phases and
age in the material studied by Suchey and co-workers
4.2 Relationship found between age at death and pubic
symphysis phases in the Todd Collection. Males only
4.3 Relationship found between age at death and pubic
symphysis scores in the material studied by McKern and
Stewart. Males only
4.4 Relationship found between age at death and pubic
symphysis scores in the material examined by Gilbert and
McKern. Females only
4.5 Relationship between age at death and auricular surface
morphological phases
4.6 Comparison between mean real ages and mean age
estimated from dental wear using the Miles method in
Paraguayan Lengua Indians
4.7 Age distribution of Wharram Percy adult burials
4.8 Age distribution in Russell’s (1937) demographic study
5.1 Distance statistics between six African populations derived
from 15 cranial measurements
5.2 The cranial indices of British Neolithic and Bronze Age skulls
5.3 Principle components analysis of Neolithic and Early Bronze
Age British crania
6.1 Mathematical equations for estimating stature from long-
bone length in White and Black adults
6.2 Femur length: stature ratios for children of northern
European ancestry
 6.3 Median values for some humeral cross-sectional properties in
males in European Palaeolithic and later material
7.1 Standardised mean measures of divergence for the three
cemeteries at Naqada
7.2 Cahokia, Mound 72 burials
8.1 Frequencies of cribra orbitalia in the prehistoric Moquegua
valley
8.2 Prevalence of periostitis at Wharram Percy and York St Helen-
on-the-Walls
9.1 Dental caries and tooth loss in four burial sites in northern
Chile
9.2 Dental enamel hypoplasia frequencies at Nova Rača
13.1 The ash weight of the human skeleton
14.1 Surveys of visitors to museums in England to gauge support
for display of archaeological human remains in museum
galleries.
PLATES

1 A mandibular premolar showing identification of acellular

extrinsic fibre cementum
2 Relationship between nasal index and temperature and
absolute humidity
3 A painted cranium from Hallstatt
4 Periostitis, unremodelled and remodelled
5 The Apple Down skeleton, pathological frontal bone and radius
6 Canine and incisor teeth showing deposits of dental calculus
7 Tibiae, illustrating perimortal fracture versus post-depositional
damage
8 δ18O (‰versus SMOW) of drinking water across Britain and
Ireland
9 Principle components analysis of autosomal SNPs from
prehistoric and modern Eurasians
10 Visceral (internal) surfaces of two rib fragments showing
periosteal new bone
11 Ceremony to mark the handing over of Australian human
remains from Manchester Museum, England to Australian
Aboriginals
12 Lindow Man on display at the British Museum
Preface

Archaeology is about people and how they lived in the past. The
study of the physical remains of those people therefore forms a key
part of the discipline. This primarily involves the analysis of skeletal
remains (osteoarchaeology), as bones and teeth are the only human
remains that survive in most circumstances. The aim of this book is
to illustrate the sorts of information that can be obtained from the
study of ancient human remains and how this can be harnessed to
address questions of general archaeological interest. We shall
generally be concerned with the remains of anatomically modern
man (Homo sapiens sapiens), rather than with tracing the story of
human evolution.
Since the publication of the second edition of this book in 2010,
nearly all the different areas of osteoarchaeology covered in this
book have seen important methodological developments. In some
cases, such as the advent of next generation sequencing of DNA,
they have supplanted earlier techniques, but in most instances they
have supplemented rather than replaced existing methods so that
we now have a much broader array of techniques to help us learn
about the past from human remains. Debates about what the results
of scientific studies of human remains mean for our understanding
of key events and processes in the past have also moved on, as
have debates on the ethical treatment of excavated human remains.
Every chapter in this book has been updated to reflect key
developments in these areas. In addition, there is a now a separate
chapter devoted to archaeological fieldwork on burial grounds.
Several other chapters, including those on ancient DNA and on
ethics, have been completely re-written. Others have been expanded
to encompass new areas (for example the study of dental calculus in
Chapter 9), or to include areas that have matured into significant
research foci since the publication of the second edition (for example
the study of entheseal changes to investigate activity patterns in
Chapter 7). The aim has been to produce not only a more up to
date, but also a more comprehensive account.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The illustrations were reproduced with kind permission. Every effort

has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permissions.
Any omissions in this regard that are brought to our attention will be
remedied in future editions.
I am grateful to: John Wiley & Sons for permission to reproduce
Figures 1.6, 2.5, 4.17, 5.5, Plate 2, 7.14, 7.17, 8.12, 8.17, 8.20a,
8.20b, 9.10b & 10.14; Museum of London Archaeology for Figures
2.3, 3.4 & 9.11a; Martin Carver & Philip Bethell for Figure 2.4; The
Wharram Research Project for Figure 2.6; Suffolk County Council
Archaeological Service for Figure 3.1; Dorset Natural History and
Archaeological Society for Figure 3.2; Warwick Rodwell for Figures
3.6, 3.7 and 14.1a; Elsevier for Plate 1, and Figures 6.5, 8.7, 8.15
and 10.16; Immersion Corporation for Figure 5.4; Paleo-Tech for
Figure 6.1; Charles C Thomas for Figure 8.6; The Natural History
Museum and the Council for British Archaeology for Figure 8.8; the
late Nick Bradford for Figure 8.14; Springer for Figure 8.19; Novium
Museum, Chichester District Council for Plate 5; Antiquity for Figure
9.10a; Suffolk Archaeology CIC (Cotswold Archaeology Suffolk) for
Figure 9.11b; the late Don Ortner for Figure 10.2; The Natural
History Museum for Figure 10.12; Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och
Antikvitets Akademien, Stockholm, for Figures 10.18 and 10.19; The
British Geological Survey for Plate 8; Nature for Plate 9; Manchester
Museum for Plate 11; Joseph Elders for Figure 14.1c; The National
Trust for Figure 14.2; The British Museum for Plate 12; and Oxford
University Press for Figure 14.3. Other illustrations are Historic
England or else public domain.
I am grateful to the following for supplying illustrations,
information or publications: Dušan Borić, Megan Brickley, the late
Don Brothwell, Carolyn Chenery, Steve Churchill, Margaret Clegg,
Yilmaz Erdal, Jane Evans, Karen Hardy, Illinois State Museum,
Margaret Judd, Julie Kennard, Scott Maddux, George Milner, Theya
Molleson, Stephan Naji, Iñigo Olalde, the late Don Ortner, Stefano
Ricci, Duncan Sayer, Dave Swinson and Gordon Turner-Walker. I
thank the following for reading and commenting on sections of the
text: Gill Campbell, Neil Linford, Alistair Pike and Camilla Speller.
Thanks go to Eva Fairnell for her help in dealing with copyright
issues and to Stefanie Vincent for taking some of the photographs.
1 The nature of bones and teeth

The human skeleton

There are more than 200 separate bones in the adult human
skeleton (Figure 1.1, Table 1.1). They may be divided into three
classes according to their basic shape. Long bones are found in the
limbs and take the form of hollow tubes closed at both ends. Flat
bones take the form of broad bony plates (for example the bones
which make up the skull vault), and irregular bones, as their name
suggests, fit into neither of the above categories on account of their
irregular shape. Examples of irregular bones are the vertebrae and
the bones of the skull base.
Table 1.1 The bones of the adult human skeleton
Skeletal region Bones Number
Skull Various 28 (including mandible and ear ossicles)
– Hyoid 1
Vertebral column Presacral Vertebrae 24 (7 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar)
Figure 1.1 The human skeleton
Sacrum 1
Coccyx 1
Thoracic cage Ribs 24 (12 pairs)
Sternum 1
Pectoral girdle Clavicle 2
Scapula 2
Pelvic girdle Pelvic bone 2
Upper limb Humerus 2
Radius 2
Ulna 2
Carpals 16
Metacarpals 10
Phalanges 28
Lower limb Femur 2
Patella 2
Tibia 2
Fibula 2
Tarsals 14
Metatarsals 10
Phalanges 28
Total 206
Note: In addition to these main elements of the skeleton there are a
number of small bones embedded in the tendons of the hands and
feet, called sesamoids.

The composition of bone

Bone is a composite material formed from an organic and an
inorganic (mineral) part. By weight, dry bone is about 64% mineral
and 26% organics; the remaining 10% is water bound within the
Another Random Scribd Document
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 What were the citizens doing while Henry III and his dear wife
ruined the bridge by confiscating her revenues? Did they believe that
everybody’s affair was nobody’s business, and that they would be
asked to mend the bridge if they drew attention to her condition? As
to Edward I, he kept his hand away from his own pocket, and
personated charity that for ever begs. “Each for Himself” was a
policy that suited Edward; and his orders to the clergy proved that
he knew it to be a policy which his loyal subjects followed as a habit.
Hence the “pious exhortations,” with indulgences also, we may rest
assured. The whole story is pitifully ironic. London had no other
bridge over the Thames, yet the people looked on while a king and
his wife played the part of bridge wreckers. Some protest there must
have been, for London Bridge—a great street of timber houses—was
more populous than many a village; and the tenants, like other
Englishmen of those days, had no wish to be plunged into cold
water. According to Stow’s “Annals,” five arches fell, so many houses
also were lost, perhaps with their inmates.
M. Jusserand believes that during the Middle Ages our English
highways fared no better than London Bridge. His verdict runs thus:
“Though there were roads, though property was burdened with
obligatory services for their upkeep, though laws every now and
again recalled their obligations to the possessors of the soil, though
from time to time the private interest of lords and of monks, in
addition to the public interest, suggested and directed repairs, yet
the fate of a traveller in a fall of snow or in a thaw was very
precarious. The Church might well have pity on the wayfarer; and
him she specified, together with the sick and the captive, among
those unfortunates whom she recommended to the daily prayers of
pious souls.”
There is a great deal of evidence to justify this verdict, but
evidence in history depends on its choice; and in Thorold Rogers
there are other facts that leave England with some efficient
mediæval roads, along which horsemen could travel rapidly. Perhaps
Rogers may have set too much store by his data; but when we study
all the evidence, when we balance it carefully, and visualise all its
pictures of well-tested negligence and crime, one thing is beyond all
doubt: that the social rule, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself,” was a
national catastrophe. Its first principle had a very precarious life,
though incessant compulsion tried to drive it home to the people’s
fear of revengeful laws; whereas the second principle—“Each for
Himself”—was so popular as a creed that even the divine mysteries
beyond death were assailed by egoists, who thought they could buy
a place in heaven by giving lands and goods to the Church, no
matter what harm they had done in a brief life upon earth. Study
Erasmus in his wayfaring letters, and you will breathe the
atmosphere of the Middle Ages.

old london bridge, begun by peter colechurch in 1176, and finished by

a frenchman, called isembert, in the year 1209
 pont sidi rached at constantine, algeria. built in 1908-1912
The span of the great arch is 70 metres. The work illustrates the longevity of
custom and convention, being inspired partly by Roman aqueducts and partly by
the two famous bridges over the Tech at Céret, in France, one of which dates from
the year 1321. The span of its great arch is 45m. 45cm.

III
CUSTOM AND CONVENTION
Yet a pontist must be exceedingly careful when his tramps through
any period bring him in touch with ethical problems. He should try to
live on the highways of history, not in order to pass judgments on
vice and on crime, but because he wants to see clearly, under the
form of visual conception, why social concord and equity have never
fared well, even the best forms of civilization being only half-
educated barbarisms that allow their strife to be drilled by a vast
number of active laws. These phases of compulsion go on
increasing, yet they fail to resolve into harmony those rapacious
egotisms that compete against each other in the body social like
microbes in living tissues. As soon as a pontist understands his
wayfaring through history, as soon as he feels at home in the
general atmosphere of the human drama, he is glad to be a realist;
then nothing that societies do or have done seems unexampled and
inexplicable. To him, for example, the infanticide practised age after
age by savage tribesmen is not more terrible than the death of
babies in the slums of civilized towns, or than the degradation
brought before his mind by the alert philanthropy that saves little
English children from cruelties. To him, again, the slaughter on a
great battlefield is not more woeful than the annual sacrifice of lives
in street accidents, and railway smashes, and mine disasters, and
sea tragedies; as well as in games and sports, in nursing the sick,
and in all trades and professions. He is not scared by the fact that
the sum of human life is war, but he is scared by the primordial
customs and conventions that make the incessant war infinitely less
humane than it could be and ought to be. So a pontist in his attitude
to history is a sociologist, and not an abstract moralist. Each body
social and its systems of circulation are to him what patients are to
medical students in a hospital; he has to learn to be attentive to all
disease and to make his diagnoses thoughtfully. Even then frequent
mistakes will occur. One thing he must regard as his clinical
thermometer: it is the truth that civilizations in their intercourse with
right and wrong have been governed by habits and customs and
conventions, which have caused most men to be other men; so that
most human actions, whether studied in old history or in the current
routine of living, are mere quotations from other human actions,
instead of being like original ideas in a well-ordered composition. In
other words, the ordinary human brain has tried to be automatic, as
if to be in harmony with the rest of the vital organs.
Now the architecture of bridges, like that of huts and houses and
cottages, never fails to keep before our minds the awful slowness of
each reluctant advance from custom to custom, and from convention
to convention. I have no words to describe the terror that comes to
me when I find in daily use a type or species of bridge so aboriginal
in its poor workmanship that a forerunner not only similar to it, but
as rudely effective, may well have been employed by the earliest
Flint Men, whose delight in imitation was stimulated by all the
bridges which Nature had created. Even more, at this moment in
England, and even in busy Lancashire, where to-day’s machinery
abounds, there are primitive bridges which are not even primitively
structural; bridges which need in their making not more thought
than is given to a difficult sneeze when we are troubled by a cold (p.
60). When I look at them and think of the myriads of generations
which in different parts of the world have used bridges akin to these,
I am so awed with fear that I feel like a baby Gulliver in a new
Brobdingnag where everlasting conventions are impersonated by
brainless giants whose bodies are too vast for my eyes to focus.
Often, too, I say to myself: “In the presence of this dreadful
conservatism, this inept mimicry that endures unruffled by a thought
for many thousands of years, you are as futile as a single microbe
would be on a field of battle. Or imagine that the microbe is in
Westminster Abbey, and that it has a blurred sense that makes it
dimly conscious of all the many historic things there gathered
together; then you have a figure of yourself in your relation to the
mingled good and bad in history. For the Abbey shows in its
architecture that convention, though a bane to ordinary minds, is the
grammar of progress to the rare men of genius who from time to
time shake the world free from its bondage to fixed customs and
routines, and compel it to move on to other routines and customs,
where it will dawdle until other geniuses come out of the dark and
find in new mother-ideas a compulsive force that works a new
liberation.”
 old bridge over the clain, near poitiers

This, indeed, is the only encouragement that I am able to

perceive when I watch in history the periodical strife between
inveterate conventions and the mother-ideas of genius. In the case
of bridges, for example, the first mother-ideas were those that
enabled a primitive craftsman here and there to copy with success
the least difficult of Nature’s models. What this man achieved was
repeated by his tools, the ordinary men of his tribe; then other tribes
got wind of the discovery and began to make similar bridges, until at
last several conventions were formed, and they became widespread
and stereotyped. When a convention was very simple and also
effective for a given purpose, no one wished to see it developed, so
it entered that domain of infertile mimicry where stone tools and
weapons remained unpolished for years to be reckoned by scores of
thousands. If experience had shown that chipped flint in a rough
state would neither cut wood nor break human skulls, then at an
early date polishing would have been found out by a savage of
genius who yearned to prove that his invention could be made
useful; but rough-hewn stones were rudely efficient, so mankind
settled itself in a routine and plodded on and on automatically. And
thus it was also in the case of many primitive bridges which became
so firmly fixed in conventions that now they seem to be
contemporary with nearly all the ages of human strife. Not in any
other way can we explain their present use by many Europeans, as
well as by the natives of Asia, and Africa, and America (p. 145). On
the other hand, when a primeval bridge did not serve its purpose
efficiently, when it was useless in tribal wars and dangerous in rainy
seasons, then a mother-idea paid it a visit from time to time, as we
shall see in the next chapter.
Whence the idea came we do not know. It entered a mind that
was ready to receive it, coming unbidden from a place unknown like
an abiding quest from a spirit world. The mind that welcomed the
idea was neither masculine nor feminine, it was both, a thing
androgynous, for genius has ever been a single creative agent with a
double sex. The tools with which genius has worked—the selected
traditions and conventions, the acquired knowledge, the original
observation, and the handicrafts of social life—have ever been plain
enough, of course; but to see and admire tools is not to understand
the advent of those imperishable ideas which not only transform
history, but turn all ordinary men into their mimics and mechanics.
For instance, whenever we light a candle or a fire we obey the
genius of a Palæolithic savage, who, with sparks beaten from flint
into some inflammable grass or moss or fluff from cocoons, brought
into the world the earliest missionaries, artificial light and heat.
Similarly, whenever we walk across a timber bridge, whether old or
new, we are servants to the earliest savage who with a stone axe
cut down a tree, causing it to fall from bank to bank of a river or
chasm. Delete from history even two mother-ideas—the invention of
wheels, for example, and the evolution of arched bridges from
Nature’s models—and how many civilizations would you cancel? Omit
from the annals of our “modern democracy” not more than three
mother-ideas: the discovery of steam as a motive-power, the
discovery of microbes, and the use of metal in bridge building. In a
twinkling we go back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when
hospitals were cesspools, [14] when surgery and medicine were wild
empirics, when travellers in stage-coaches longed for the general
Turnpike Act (a boon delayed till 1773), and when England was
unspoiled by jerry-builders and a factory system. A pontist, then, if
he understands his subject, looks upon genius as the solar system of
human societies, hence he cannot be a willing servant to any mob-
rule or mob-worship.
On the contrary, he would gladly see in every town a fine church
dedicated to the men and women of genius who with great mother-
ideas have tried to better the strife of human adventure. For two
reasons I used the phrase “have tried to better.” In the first place,
the constituents of new knowledge, when mingled with the old
customs and conventions, lose much of their good invariably; and,
next, the amalgam thus formed may become explosive. At this
moment we see in our new art, the art of flying, how precarious is
the charity that mother-ideas bring into the battlefields of
competition. What aeroplanes can do in war is already the only
consideration that the mother-idea of mechanical flight receives from
the most alert minds; and very soon military engineers will be called
upon to invent bomb-proof covers for every strategic bridge which
cannot be displaced by a tunnel. So we compel airmanship to
torment us with visions of wrecked cities, when she ought to delight
us with bird’s-eye views of happier countries.
In brief, the more we study mother-ideas the more clearly we
perceive that they in themselves are phases of strife, for they have
power to do harm as well as good. Providence for ever tries to
quicken the inept human mind, since no blessing is granted to us
without its attendant bane. Electricity has dangers of its own, so has
fire; Pasteurism has dangers of its own, so has food; radium is
curative and very perilous, like the sea or the sun; and all other
good things ask us to pick our way with care between danger and
utility.
The most tragic element of all in human indiscretion is the
mindless routine which has deadened the brain of ordinary men.
There is in Lancashire, for example, a charming valley where six or
seven old bridges make a few minutes’ walk a very long pilgrimage
through the history of primitive conventions. Wycollar the valley is
called, and antiquaries and pontists ought to go there at once, but
not in motor-cars that devour topography as well as miles. One
bridge is exceedingly low in the scale of thought and skill; indeed, no
prehistoric tool or weapon stands below it. Even the Adam of
Evolution, if he ever lived in rock-strewn places, had common sense
enough probably to choose a flat stone and to lay it across a deep
rivulet, so as to save his children from danger. Such is the most
primeval of the Wycollar bridges: three schoolboys could make a
smaller one between two April showers. For the stone is not a huge
slab ten feet long by four wide, such as we find not far from
Fernworthy Bridge, Dartmoor; nor is it like the single slab over the
Walla Brook on Dartmoor. It is a long lintel-stone, and in eight or
nine strides a little girl would cross it easily.[15] If the stone were
new, and also alone in the valley, no one would think more of it than
of a plank used as a temporary bridge; but the stone is very old, and
lintel-bridges are ancient customs in the valley of Wycollar. If Nature
once in a century allowed bridges to tell their tales, I should expect
two of the Wycollar historians to trace their lineage through a great
many ancestors until at last they came to a time when the first
nomads hacked their way with flint axes through the undergrowth of
Lancashire forests, and cursed in primitive words or sounds at the
virile brambles whose thorns were sharper than pointed flints.
The second bridge of lintel-stones at Wycollar is a simple
adaptation from one of Nature’s bridges, the bridge of stepping-
stones littered over the beds of rivers by earthquakes and floods.
When the stepping-stones are long you turn them on end and use
them as piers; when they are short and squat you pile them up into
piers; then lintel-stones are put from pier to pier, and from pier to
each bankside. Here is the A B C of primitive bridge-making with
slabs, boulders, and fragments of rock. It needs very much less
mother-wit than that which enabled primitive men to survive
innumerable hardships, and to breed and rear those true artists who
in Palæolithic times, about 50,000 years ago, [16] turned a good
many European caves into the first public art galleries, famous for
their rock-paintings and for their sculpture and engravings. Thus the
Altamira Cavern, near Santander, in Northern Spain, and the La
Madeleine cave in the Dordogne (about eighty miles east of
Bordeaux), are among the prehistoric museums, or art galleries,
which have given us work very far in advance of the Wycollar lintel-
bridges; so far, indeed, that trees and shrubs in the valley ought to
blush with shame by keeping autumn tints in their leaves all the year
round. This hint from Dame Nature might awaken some little self-
reproach in the Lancashire weavers and peasants whose heavy clogs
clatter day after day over the lintel-stones, wearing them into
troughs where rainwater collects pretty pictures from the sky.
 in the valley of wycollar, lancashire: the weavers’ bridge

Not long ago a busy official mind in the neighbourhood was

troubled by one of the bridges at Wycollar, named the Weavers’
Bridge, a dull-witted primitivity made with three lintel-stones and
two rough piers in the water. Though the busy official mind was
troubled it did not suggest that the bridge should be put under glass
and kept with as much care as the perfect skeleton of a mastodon
would receive; nor did it wish to build a successor in the cheapest
style of industrial metal-work. No; what the official mind advertised
as a fortunate inspiration was a foolish little act of commonplace
vandalism. It set a mason to chisel out of existence the trough worn
in the lintel-stones by generations of clog-wearers! I have two
photographs, now historic, in which the trough can be seen
distinctly; but the poor weavers have no such consolation. Their
ancestors’ work has to be done all over again, and they know that
their great-grandchildren will find in the lintel-stones not a trough
but a vague hollow scarcely deep enough to hold a few raindrops.
Mr. Sargisson wrote to tell me this pathetic story of a crisis in
antiquarianism. But it is fair to add that the busy official mind was
content with one foolish act; it spared the rude pillar on the left
bank, though this rough stone looks like a small menhir and
completes the primeval bridge.
And now let us look at the survival of convention under a form
that is even more distressing. Is it true that in many times and lands
human beings have been sacrificed not to bridges, but to the spirits
of floods and storms which have been feared as destroyers of
bridges? One good reference to this question will be found in Francis
M. Crawford’s “Ave Roma Immortalis.” The most venerated bridge in
ancient Rome was the Pons Sublicius, whose history dated from the
time of Ancus Marcius, who reigned twenty-four years—b.c. 640-616.
In much later times, long after the good fight that made Horatius
Cocles famous for ever, strange ceremonies and superstitions
lingered around the Pons Sublicius. On the Ides of May, which were
celebrated on the fifteenth of the month, Pontiffs and Vestals came
in solemn state to the bridge, accompanied by men who carried
thirty effigies representing human bodies. The effigies were made of
bulrushes, and one by one they were thrown into the Tiber, while
the Vestals sang hymns or the priests chanted prayers. What did this
rite signify? A tradition popular in Rome taught children to believe
that the effigies took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to
the river in May. This tradition is attacked by Ovid, “but the
industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove that
in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one
reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed
until the year of the City 657, when, Cnæus Cornelius Lentulus and
Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that
no man should be sacrificed thereafter.”
It is possible, if not, indeed, probable, that the effigies were made
at first in order to placate the common people who were indignant
over the loss of a festival. We can imagine what would be said to-
day if Cup-finals were stopped by Act of Parliament; and the
Romans, in their fool-fury over “sport” at second-hand, were always
glad to appease their curiosity with shows of bloodshed. Further, in
the folk-lore of later times bridges and rivers are connected with the
primitive rite of killing women and men as a sacrifice to evil spirits.
This dread tradition is related now in the Asiatic provinces of Turkey,
as I learn from Sir Mark Sykes, whose “Dar-Ul-Islam” is a book for
pontists to read. It was at Zakho that Sir Mark heard the following
legend:—
“Many years ago workmen under their master were set to
build the bridge; three times the bridge fell, and the workmen
said, ‘The bridge needs a life.’ And the master saw a beautiful
girl, accompanied by a bitch and her puppies, and he said,
‘We will give the first [life] that comes by.’ But the dog and
her little ones hung back, so the girl was built alive into the
bridge, and only her hand with a gold bracelet upon it was
left outside.
“At the foot of this bridge I found the local Agha, Yussuf
Pasha, superintending the collection of the sheep-tax, in
which as a large landowner he has an interest.”
Try to visualise in all their details these pictures, passing from to-
day’s tax-gatherer, a Pasha Lloyd George, into the drama of a very
terrible superstition. The workmen can be fitted with fairly good
primitive characters, for they do not suggest the sacrifice of a life
until the bridge has fallen thrice. As to their master, he is a fiend,
since he acts upon their suggestion at once, unmoved by the girl’s
beauty and the frisking springtime that accompanies her. A little
dead hand—and a gleaming bracelet—and the masons chanting at
their work, as bridge-builders chant now in Persia: so the drama
ends, or so it would end if we could not unite it with a similar legend
known almost everywhere in Europe.
Why in the Turkish story the workmen say, “The bridge needs a
life,” I do not know. Their superstition goes away from the river and
its evil spirits, and from those other demons, which in olden times
made winds so variable. Are we then to suppose that men have
defiled the charity of bridges with bad spirits other than those that
live in wilted conventions and in modern engineers? I prefer to
believe that a bridge that fell three times would muddle the
superstition of any workman. In fact, there are many bridges which
superstition—not modesty in men—has given to the Devil, and as a
rule they have been connected with the same legend, or bogie tale.
Mr. Baring-Gould takes a great interest in the bridges ascribed to the
Devil, and writes about them as follows in his “Book of South
Wales”:—

pont du diable, st. gotthard pass

“The Devil’s Bridge is twelve miles from Aberystwyth; it is

over the Afon Mynach just before its junction with the
Rheidol[17].... The original bridge was constructed by the
monks of Strata Florida, at what time is unknown, but legend
says it was built by the Devil.

Old Megan Llandunach, of Pont-y-Mynach,

Had lost her only cow;
Across the ravine the cow was seen,
But to get it she could not tell how.

“In this dilemma the Evil One appeared to her cowled as a

monk, and with a rosary at his belt, and offered to cast a
bridge across the chasm if she would promise him the first
living being that should pass over it when complete. To this
she gladly consented. The bridge was thrown across the
ravine, and the Evil One stood bowing and beckoning to the
old woman to come over and try it. But she was too clever to
do that. She had noticed his left leg as he was engaged on
the construction, and saw that the knee was behind in place
of in front, and for a foot he had a hoof.

In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled,

She called her little black cur;
The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew,
Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’

“Precisely the same story is told of S. Cadoc’s Causeway in

Brittany; of the bridge over the Maine at Frankfort, and of
many and many another.
“How comes it that we have an almost identical tale in so
many parts of Europe? The reason is that in all such
structures a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who
haunted the place. When a storm came down on the sea,
Jonah had to be flung overboard to allay it. When, in the old
English ballad, a ship remained stationary, though all sails
 were spread, and she could make no headway, the crew ‘cast
the black bullets,’ and the lot falls to the captain’s wife, and
she is thereupon thrown overboard. Vortigern sought to lay
the foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy. A
dam broke in Holland in the seventeenth century; the
peasants could hardly be restrained from burying a living child
under it, when reconstructed, to ensure its stability.[18]
“When the [Cistercian] monks of Strata Florida threw the
daring arch over the chasm, they so far yielded to the popular
superstition as to bury a dog beneath the base of the arch, or
to fling one over the parapet.”
There! We have followed a superstition—a vile convention in
ignorance and cowardice—from the Pons Sublicius in Ancient Rome
to the Pont-y-Mynach in South Wales; and the best we can say of it
is that in Pagan Rome it went from human victims to effigies of men
and women, while in Christian times it passed from human victims to
dogs.[19] Mr. Baring-Gould has told us that in bridges, and “in all
such structures, a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who
haunted the place.” Yet it was not in a structure—a finished building
—that Vortigern wished to offer his sacrifice; he “sought to lay the
foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy,” so his aim
was to placate the Spirits of Evil before his castle was built. As to his
conception of the spiritual agencies to be appeased, it would mingle
his own passions with the fears bred by his primitive fanaticism. For,
as Darwin says, “savages would naturally attribute to spirits the
same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of
justice, and the same affections which they themselves felt.”
Now in the case of bridges we have to identify primitive men with
the terror inspired by storms and floods; a terror difficult for us to
understand in our sheltered lives. Have you read Matthew Paris, who
lived in the reign of Henry III? If not, go to him and study the
tempests that he described, and see how villages were desolated by
winds and inundations. Amid these disasters the ignorant would
cling to ancient superstitions; fear would be pagan out of doors
whatever faith might say in church; and I have no doubt at all that
the many so-called Devil’s Bridges were as supernatural to the
mediæval peasant as were witches. The Dutch of the Middle Ages
were more advanced in domestic civilization than our own ancestors;
and yet at heart they were cruel pagans, even as late as the
seventeenth century, as Mr. Baring-Gould has shown. How very
humble human nature ought to be!
Let us pass on, then, to a convention that does not reek like a
stricken field. One of the best historians in architecture, Viollet-le-
Duc, found in the hills of Savoy a primeval bridge whose structure
had been changed very little, if at all, since the days when its
ancestors were described by Cæsar and used by the Gauls. It is a
timber bridge, known in France as un empilage, a thing piled
together rudely, and not constructed with art. Indeed, it needs no
carpentry, so it is far behind the social genius of prehistoric lake-
dwellers. To make a simple Gaulish bridge, as to-day in Savoy, we
must choose a deep-lying river with rugged banks; then with water-
worn boulders we make on each bank a rough foundation about
fifteen feet square, or more. Upon this we raise a criss-cross of tree
trunks, taking care that the horizontal trees jut out farther and
farther across the water, narrowing the gap to be bridged by four or
five pines. Each criss-cross must be “stiffened” or filled in with
pebbles and bits of rock; and across the unfinished road of pines
thick boards are nailed firmly. Viollet-le-Duc says:—
“Cette construction primitive ... rappelle singulièrement ces
ouvrages Gaulois dont parle César, et qui se composaient de
troncs d’arbres posés à l’angle droit par rangées, entre
lesquelles on bloquait des quartiers de roches. Ce procédé,
qui nest qu’un empilage, doit remonter à la plus haute
antiquité; nous le signalons ici pour faire connaître comment
certaines traditions se perpétuent à travers les siècles, malgré
les perfectionnements apportés par la civilisation, et combien
elles doivent toujours fixer l’attention de l’archéologue.”
 Does anyone suppose that Savoy would have been loyal to a
prehistoric bridge if all primitiveness had vanished from her social
life?
Not that Savoy is the only place where criss-cross bridges are still
in vogue. Much finer specimens are to be found in Kashmír, thrown
across the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Greek historians. At
Srínagar, the capital city, founded in the sixth century a.d., there is a
quite wonderful example, for it has many spans, and corbelled out
from the footway is a quaint little street of frail shops, rickety cabins
with gabled roofs, and so unequal in size that they are charmed with
an amusing inequality. I have several photographs of this bridge,
and in them I see always with a renewed pleasure its ancestry, its
descent from the prehistoric lake-villages, those heralds of Venice
and of Old London Bridge (p. 216). All the piers are made with
deodar logs piled up in the criss-cross manner; those that stretch
across the river are cut in varying lengths, and each succeeding row
is longer than the one beneath it, so the logs in a brace of piers
project towards each other farther and farther over the water, till at
last they form an arched shape; not an arch perfect in outline, of
course, since the head of it is flattened by the long bearing beams of
the roadway. Still, the arched shape is very noticeable.
A pontist should study these rude arches with care, and connect
them with similar arches in the Gaulish bridges of Savoy, and also
with the historic fact that the first arches built with voussoirs (i.e.
arch-stones) were evolved from vaults roughly constructed with
parallel courses of stone and layers of timber (p. 155). It is probable
that the parallel layers of timber or rows of logs came before the
parallel courses of stone, as the evolution of architecture passed
from wood to stone. Forests much more than rocks and quarries
have been an inspiration to primitive builders, as if the handling of
wood has quickened in human nature an arboreal instinct dating
from the family trees in the descent of man.
 at albi on the tarn, in france, showing on our right
the old houses, and on our left, beyond the bridge,
the great old church, famous for its fortifications

However, another criss-cross bridge in Kashmír ought to be

studied in photographs; it is carried on six piers over the Jhelum at
Baramula—quite close to the Himalayas; the piers rise from boat-
shaped platforms that meet the oncoming water as boats do, with
their blunt stems looking brave as rearguards. The parapet is a
simple latticework, and the abutments are masonry. Here we have a
type of bridge perhaps quite similar to the one from which the Gauls
got their rude methods, long after the craft of the lake-dwellers had
left its sheltered moorings and adventured across wide rivers.
Is there any concrete evidence to suggest that the bridge with
criss-cross piers has gone through many phases of change, of
growth or of decadence? Yes. At Archangel, in North Russia, the
criss-cross piers are more primitive; instead of being arched they are
upright and stiff; but as the bridge is nearly a quarter of a mile long,
and as it is taken down every spring (before the ice breaks up
noisily, and the Dwina thunders into a raging torrent), crude
workmanship in a hurried routine is excusable. The main point is
that a bridge akin to the Gaulish type and to the variation in Kashmir
exists in North Russia.
And another variation is met with at Bhutan, in India. Brangwyn
has drawn it, and we shall study it later in a page on gateway-
towers (p. 272). In the highlands of Eastern Kurdistan, the
borderland of Asiatic Turkey and Persia, travellers find a bridge akin
to the Bhutan variety. An excellent book on these highlands has
been published, [20] and its authors, very generously, have written
for me some valuable notes on the bridges. Before I quote them in
full, let me ask you to remember that in Eastern Kurdistan timber is
uncommon; hence the criss-cross bridge has been evolved into
another sort of primitive structure—a third cousin, several times
removed. A Kurdistan bridge is built as follows: “A site is selected, if
one can be found, where two immovable and flat-topped masses of
rock face one another across the stream to be bridged: an abutment
of unhewn stones is built on these, solid, until a height has been
reached sufficient to be safe from any flood.
“Then a bracket of four or more rows of poplar trunks is
constructed on each abutment; short stout trunks form the bottom
row, and those of each succeeding one are naturally longer than the
preceding. Unless the bridge is unusually wide in the footway four
poplars are enough to form a row, and the butts of the trees, which
are kept shore-wards, are weighted down with big stones as
counter-weights to hold them in place.
“The top of each row of trunks projects perhaps five feet beyond
the preceding one, so that when a bracket of four rows is
completed, it may project perhaps twenty feet over the stream.
“When the corresponding bracket has been completed, two long
poplar trunks are slung by withies from bracket end to bracket end,
a footway of withy hurdles, resting on faggots, is laid down over all,
and the bridge is complete. The length of this centre span is of
course limited by the height of the poplars available. I should think
fifty feet the extreme possible.
“If the width of the river makes it necessary, one or more piers of
stone,—I have seen as many as three,—are erected in midstream,
preferably on rock foundations. Each of these carries a bracket on
each side, but this double bracket is usually made of ‘whole trunks’
and these naturally need no counter-weighting.
“As a rule the footway is about four feet wide, and the whole
structure is very elastic, so that, as it is guiltless of handrails, it
requires a steady head in the passenger. Further, the central span
often acquires a pronounced ‘sag,’ and not seldom an equally
pronounced tilt to one side or other. Ancient rule says that the
passenger ought not to look down in crossing such a place, lest the
sight of water whirling below should unnerve him. In Kurdistan,
however, look down he must, and make the best of the hurdles that
form the footway; they abound in holes and other traps for the
unwary, and a stumble may mean disaster. These bridges, then,
though admirably planned (for they are true cantilevers), are not
built in the most convenient manner. It is characteristically Oriental,
this union of real fineness of design with great casualness in
construction and in upkeep. The piers are invariably of stone, never
of wood. Good timber is almost unknown in Kurdistan. The poplar
grows well, but it is at best only a good pole. Stone, on the other
hand, is embarrassingly abundant.
“Dry-stone arches are thrown over smaller streams, but their
builders, though acquainted with the principle of the vault, do not
venture on a span of more than thirty feet!”[21]
How do you like the antiquity of conventions? Does it not make
you feel that the greatest part of mankind has never shown a
particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved? Note,
too, that convention among men is inferior to the instinct of animals,
for animals invariably repeat themselves with a passionate interest,
whereas we in our formulas grow more and more unfeeling and
automatic. Even rabbits when they dig their burrows seem to be
guided by inspiration, as if routine work with them is an appetite,
like love and hunger; so very different are they from the
conservative peasants of Savoy, whose dull routine has delivered
down through the centuries a primeval bridge which an hour’s
thought could have improved.
One day, let us hope, most men will realise that it is woefully
commonplace to be as other men; then conventions will go out of
vogue. Courts and clubs will invent new and good etiquettes every
year; no game will be stereotyped; and laws will command that such
and such things be altered and improved by given dates. For
example, if an Act of Parliament decreed that during the next ten
years all the railway bridges in England must be made less uncomely
and less at odds with the needs of military defence, I have no doubt
that compulsion, the scout of civil progress, would discover among
engineers more than enough invention.
Railway bridges have been built in obedience to a brace of
conventional arguments. It has been argued, first, that because
traffic and trade are the main considerations, therefore art is not a
matter to be considered; next, that because boards of directors have
to please their shareholders, therefore a most strenuous economy
must be advertised in a very evident manner, even although its
results blot fine landscapes with the shame of uninspired
craftsmanship.
Thirty-four years have passed since the late E. M. Barry, r.a., in a
thoughtful book, asked the public to understand that modern
engineering was not architecture at all, but mere building; and he
chose as an example of horrible work the Britannia Bridge over the
Menai Straits. “Here we have the adoption of the trabeated principle
of large iron beams laid upon supports of masonry, which rise from
the valley beneath, and tower up above the beams to a height far
exceeding that which is necessary for their support. I well remember
the animated discussions in scientific circles as to the form and
design of these beams, which were ultimately decided upon as
rectangular tubes. In the many discussions of the merits and defects
of circular, elliptical and square sections, I do not recollect that a
word was said about architectural effect [or about military
convenience and strategy]. Had anyone ventured to suggest that
this, too, was an important matter, and that an unsightly structure
would be an eyesore for all time, he would have been promptly told
that the forms to be employed were an affair of science alone, and
that utility pure and simple would dictate their arrangement. In the
result a lovely valley was defaced....”
The same convention in mean tradecraft is shown in the tale
about Tennyson and the jerry-builder. “Why do you cut down these
trees?” the poet asked reprovingly. “Trees are beautiful things.” “Ah!”
answered the jerry-builder, “trees are luxuries; what we need is
utility.” And what this utility has done for us may be seen in a
thousand railway bridges as bad as those that disgrace even the
Harrow Road, near by Paddington Station.
It is not my argument that every railway bridge in England is
underbred and crapulous; here and there an engineer has made an
effort to be architectural, but the usual level of taste is exceedingly
vulgar, and not in railway bridges only. Even the Tower Bridge,
London, a vast feat in engineering, is so conventional with a
meretricious mediævalism that it needs the screening dust and mist
that veil the Thames. This is among the modern bridges that
Brangwyn has drawn and painted, raising them into art as a record
of current history. Nothing moves him more than the huge
mechanisms that seize upon to-day’s life and turn it into their
obedient slave. Men dwindle ever more and more in scale as
machines become fatal in their enormous bulk, like Super-
Dreadnoughts and the “Titanic”; not to forget such vulnerable
monsters as the bridges of New York, which airships sent forth by
Mr. H. G. Wells have already attacked with prophetic success. Is man
really doomed to be the tool of machines? Is this to be his final
convention?
 In one great picture by Brangwyn the High Level Bridge at
Newcastle represents our time. Historically the High Level Bridge has
much interest; it displaced the Britannia Bridge as an object of
scientific veneration, and from the first it has ranked high in the
conventional ugliness that the British public has accepted from
engineers. When the Britannia Bridge was proved to be a bad
railway line (trains were the decisive critics), and when men of
science after weighing their after-thoughts began to find fault with
the distribution of metal in the section of its tubes, then engineers
said, “And now—now we must have a good railway bridge,
completely scientific in all respects.” It was to be built with two
roadways, the one for common traffic passing under a railway, so
that business folk might be comforted by the noise overhead, which
would be as music to any believer in a pushful industrialism. Six
arches of metal would be united to five piers and the abutments;
their spans would have precisely the same width, i.e. 138 ft. 10 in.,
for minds long used to office hours and ledgers would enjoy a dead
uniformity. Indeed, everybody was pleased with these plans; and in
1849, when Queen Victoria opened the High Level Bridge, artists
alone were unexcited with joy. All the rest of the English world
imagined that science, at the cost of only £243,000, had achieved a
metal masterpiece. New London Bridge had cost six times as much
(i.e. £1,458,311), and her materials were stones, not metals, so
once more the north of England had scored heavily over the south.
“Besides,” remarked the engineers, “we have put into the
superstructure 321 tons of wrought-iron, and into the arched ribs
4,728 tons of cast-iron. Economy.... Scientific economy.... And we
have now in use a perfect example of the true bowstring arch in
which no cross-bracing is needed.” All this, when discussed at
dinners, enriched the flavour of champagne; and opinion became so
“heady” that even the “Encyclopædia Britannica” in its eighth edition
received the High Level Bridge as an inspired work, and gave to its
engineering as much space as the thrifty Romans would have given
to all their Spanish bridges and aqueducts.
 At last, and all of a sudden, a reaction came; enthusiasm not only
caught a chill, it passed in a hurry from its tropical summer into a
bad winter of discontent. Scientists went so far as to declare that the
High Level Bridge was a youthful indiscretion, advertised publicly in a
material which might endure for centuries; and this change of
opinion had a great effect on the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” whose
ninth edition gave only eighteen lines to its former favourite. Even
the bowstring arch was praised no longer, “being essentially more
expensive and heavier than a true girder.”

the tower bridge, london

Such are the comedies invented by our new playwright, the

genius of civil engineers. Still, the High Level Bridge at Newcastle
looks well on a misty day; by moonlight it is more impressive than a
Whistler nocturne; and in Brangwyn’s art it represents our industrial
age with a vigour that is manly and impressive.
For the rest, from the pictures in this book you will be able to
choose for yourself many a convention in the craft of bridge-
building. Study, for example, the arches and their shapes, noting
those which have a character of their own. These mark a new
departure, and are famous. Thus the bridge at Avignon is admired
by technicians because its architect, the great Saint Bénézet, gave to
the arches what Professor Fleeming Jenkin has described as “an
elliptical outline with the radius of curvature smaller at the crown
than at the haunch, a form which accords more truly with the linear
equilibrated arch than the modern flat ellipse with the largest radius
at the crown.” Good Bénézet! Seven hundred and thirty years have
gone by since he turned from the Roman tradition of semicircular
arches, and designed an excellent arch of his own, a beautiful thing,
with a look of triumph in its quiet dignity. Many writers think that
L’arc de Saint Bénézet is original also in construction, its vault being
composed of four separate bands put side by side in stones of about
equal bulk. Sometimes this method of building is condemned as
weak, though four of Bénézet’s arches have outlived seven centuries
of war; and what engineer would feel disgraced if he were baffled by
the terrific floods to which the Rhône is subject?
Moreover, Bénézet was not an originator in this matter; he
borrowed from the Romans. In his time there was a bridge that
carried the Via Domitiana over the Vidourle at Pont Ambroise; the
vaults of its five arches were built in precisely the same manner, in
four parallel arcs or bands that touched each other; and the bridge
was notable for other reasons, and thus attractive to all bridge-
builders. In the first place, a Bull of Pope Adrian IV, dated 1156, now
treasured at Nîmes in the Church of Nôtre Dame, has proved that in
the twelfth century a chapel was built either on or from the middle
of the bridge; it was dedicated to St. Mary, and it belonged to the
chapter of Nîmes Cathedral. A Roman bridge sanctified by a
Christian chapel recalls to one’s mind the devotion of the Flavian
family that placed the monogram of Christ among the ensigns of
ancient Rome. Unless the chapel stood out on corbels from the side
of the bridge, it must have been a tiny place of prayer, for the bridge
was only three metres wide, while the Via Domitiana had an average
width of six metres. Further, the roadway across the bridge was
peculiar; it followed in gentle curves the contour of the arches,
instead of being either flat (as in most Roman bridges) or with a
slight incline at the abutment ends (as in the bridge of Augustus at
Rimini).[22] We cannot suppose that this bridge, so noteworthy in
several ways, was unknown to Bénézet, head of the Pontist Friars.
Anyhow, the immense Pont du Gard, near Nîmes, a Roman
masterpiece, must have been known to him; and the arches of its
second tier have in the belly of each vault three parallel bands of
equal-sized stones. If this method of construction be unsound, how
are we to explain the heroic stability of the Pont du Gard, the finest
of all the Roman aqueducts?
Myself, I do not believe that Bénézet was inexpert as a borrower.
We shall meet him again (p. 236), but let us note here that his work
is rhythmical and charming; so it does not belong to the underbred
heaviness that bridge-builders often copied from the art of mediæval
fortification. This art was an unthrifty engineer; it employed far and
away too much blind masonry. Castle walls were ten feet thick, and
brave soldiers at home feared the light of day, merely to show
respect for arrows and machine-worked catapults. They were not
discreet; they made caution too timid and too uncomfortable. Did
gallant married knights forget to sleep in their suits of mail? Was a
honeymoon in armour a trifle more tiresome than were twelfth-
century castles with their arrow slits for windows? For many a year
home life was an ill-smelling twilight, particularly to persons of rank;
and from this we may infer that the custom of war during the Middle
Ages went hand-in-hand with a superstitious dread of death.
Bénézet needed courage as well as genius when he slighted in a
graceful manner the ponderous conventions of safety that ruled in
his day over castles (1177-1185). It was his arch that saved the
vigour of his design from being dull and clumsy.
 Some other arches in French bridges have provoked paper wars.
This is true of those in the bridges at Albi and Espalion, chosen by
Brangwyn partly because of their controversial interest, and partly
because they illustrate a mood of handicraft which may be called the
uncouth picturesque.
 an old town bridge in perugia, italy, to illustrate a pointed arch which has in its
curve a sort of lingering sentiment for the round arch of the romans

IV
CONTROVERSIES
Students are tested and judged by their attitude to controversies.
Common sense should keep them from partisanship; and when they
feel tempted to look on as mere spectators, they should remember
that crowds at boxing matches are very apt to form wrong opinions.
It is better by far to laugh at both sides by caricaturing the weak
points of a discussion. In a few days a student will learn which side
is the more difficult to caricature, and this knowledge will help him
to sift all rubbish from a controversy and to form a judgment of his
own on facts and on inferences. As Sir Thomas Browne said, a man
should be something that all men are not, and individual in
somewhat beside his person and his name.
The bridges at Albi and Espalion have caused some men to break
old friendships over a simple question, namely: “When were pointed
arches used for the first time in French bridges? At what date were
they brought from the East?” As the pointed arch was copied by
Europeans, not invented by them, the precise date of the mimicry
ought not to excite a pontist; it is a thing for antiquaries to be
flurried about. If the question ran in another form: “Was the pointed
arch in French bridges an independent discovery?” then a battle and
some exploded reputations would be worth while. But no such
hypothesis has been put forward by either side in a warm dispute.
One party declares that as early as the time of Charlemagne,
towards the end of the eighth century, or the beginning of the ninth
(768-814), a French builder seems to have played the part of the
sedulous ape to Eastern architecture, cribbing the pointed arch, and
using it without much skill in the bridge of Espalion, whose
construction (as documents prove incontestably) was ordered by
Charlemagne himself. In this bald statement there is no challenge,
no provocation; it is nothing more than a conjecture supported by a
documented fact.
If Charlemagne had been a weak ruler, like Louis the Indolent, it
would be fair to suppose that his commands were neglected more
often than obeyed; then we could not accept his character as a fact
of greater value in a controversy than a command of his mentioned
in authentic documents. Let us say that the Black Prince or his father
ordered a bridge to be built at a given place; we have documents to
prove this, and at the place named in the documents a very old
bridge is extant. Should we not read these documents by the light of
the reputation won by the Black Prince or by his father? Myself, I
should say at once, “His orders were obeyed.” And so, too, in the
case of Charlemagne. I accept his character as a guarantee that he
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