Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric PeoplesNadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
History
Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples
Nadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
Archaeology; Prehistoric peoples
so-called perforation of the olecranon farces, which certain
anthropologists, as I think without sufficient reason, consider
characteristic of inferior races. We must mention yet one more
discovery which it will not do to omit. A human parietal with a piece
missing that had evidently been taken out, was found beneath the
rock-shelter of Entre-Roches near Angoulême. The skull bore very
evident traces of the performance of an operation which may or may not
have been executed during life. Was it done to remove the diseased
bone—for it was diseased—in the hope of prolonging life? Did the
patient die under the hands of the surgeon, or was the piece of bone
taken out after death to be used as an ornament or an amulet? Any one
of these hypotheses is possible, and all we can say for certain is that
there is no sign of the wound having been healed in any way. This is a
common thing enough, and the interest of the discovery arises from a
different cause. The rock-shelter of Entre-Roches is supposed to date
from Paleolithic times, and if it were certain that there has been no
displacement of the soil on which the parietal was found, it is to be
concluded that trepanation was practised in the Quaternary period when
man was living amongst the large extinct pachydermata and felidæ. But
it will be difficult to admit this unless other discoveries confirming
it are made. If, however, we cannot prove that trepanation was
practised in France in Palæolithic times, we can assert that it was
continued down to the earliest centuries of the Christian era. One
remarkable case of trepanation was found, for instance, in the
Merovingian cemetery near St. Quentin; and a trepanned skull was
recently exhibited at a meeting of the Anthropological Society in
Paris, which had been found beneath a Merovingian tomb at Jeuilly. The
patient had long survived his wound. The skeleton was found in a stone
trough, narrower at the foot than at the head. The skeleton of a man
between forty and fifty years of age was found in a Frank cemetery at
Limet, near Liège. On the left parietal of the skull was an oval hole
as big as a pigeon’s egg, bearing traces of having been medically
treated. The patient, like the man of Jeuilly, certainly survived the
operation. His tomb, as were the resting-places of his neighbors in
death, was covered over with a huge unhewn stone, and beside him lay
another skeleton. A few nails and bits of wood were the only things
found in the tomb. We may also mention the skeleton of a Frank of
between fifty-five and sixty-five years of age with a trepanned skull,
found by M. Pilloy, in a cemetery of the St. Quentin _arrondissement_,
which also contained numerous objects dating from the sixth century
A.D.
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