The cities of eastern Europe are filled with corpses. Humans have lived in cities like Prague and Warsaw for centuries, and hundreds of thousands of bodies have found their final resting place in cemeteries there. Over time, the pressures of increased population density resulted in construction on top of these cemeteries. In turn, underground excavation for new construction has unearthed some of these burial grounds centuries after they were lost.

Before work on modern construction can continue, local anthropologists remove the human remains and begin to conduct research on them, hoping to preserve their historical significance. And when these anthropologists want a more detailed evaluation, they call Dr. Tracy Betsinger, professor of anthropology at State University of New York at Oneonta.

“In bioarchaeology we can determine trauma and violence to the skeleton,” Betsinger said. “[I'm] looking at fractures in the skeleton, whether it’s from falls or from some kind of violent interaction from a weapon.”

Betsinger will present a lecture entitled “Our Violent and Dangerous Past” at the University tonight. She arrives at the University through her association with the Archaeological Institute of America, and plans to present this lecture elsewhere in the country after delivering it for the first time at The University. The lecture focuses on Betsinger’s work with human remains from medieval Poland and prehistoric Tennessee, and particularly the sometimes traumatic injuries sustained by those remains.

“I think it’s a topic that’s been overlooked, and I think the way she’s looking at it is great,” said Genevieve Holdridge, a third-year doctorate student from New York in the Department of Anthropology. “We have similar injuries today, how people handle it, why it happens, thinking about the context, and even just saying it’s violence versus an injury. that’s just an interesting thing to go about.”

Through her research, Betsinger helps to develop an understanding of the history and culture of the people whose remains she studies. For instance, remains from medieval Poland should display significant amounts of traumatic death, considering the violent warfare of that time period. However, the remains Betsinger studies have shown otherwise.

“With my medieval Polish, it’s during a time where there’s supposed to be a lot of warfare going on, but in my sample that I looked at there’s very little evidence of injuries from violence,” Betsinger said. “Looking at a number of different factors, the idea that I’ve figured out is that probably people are dying on the battlefield and not being taken back and buried at their home cemetery. They’re probably being left on the battlefield, especially if they’re in another country.”

Battlefield burial sites, however, would be extremely difficult to find. “When you’re talking about something that was 500 years ago or a thousand years ago, where the locations are and where they’re described in historical texts may not translate easily into modern geography,” Betsinger said.

Betsinger can also determine more significant trends from her research. “Bioarchaeology can be used to figure out what’s going on with health in the past,” she said. “Trauma’s just part of the whole picture of health in the past.”

“It says something about culture, doesn’t it?” Holdridge said. “Is [the injury] religious related or is it just common-day affairs, or is it more. political influence, with war versus not?.. You can kind of see how things are playing out.”

Neither the University, nor American academia in general, heavily focuses on bioarchaeology, so to have a distinguished American bioarchaeologist, like Betsinger, is relatively rare. “I think [archaeology] should be its own department in a sense.. In Europe, that’s the way it is,” said Holdridge. “Here, there’s a huge focus on cultural anthropology and ecological anthropology.”