Page 45 - Osor v fokusu znanosti

The Bioarchaeology of Human Skeletal
Remains from the Western Roman Necropolis

Željka Bedić and Andrej Janeš 2025
Invited Lecture
November

Abstract The 2022 rescue excavations on the island of Lošinj uncovered 188
cremation graves and 14 inhumation burials. A range of grave goods dates
the necropolis from the last decades of the 1st century BCE to the mid-2nd 4–5
century. Anthropological analysis used standard methodological criteria to
estimate the biological sex, age, and pathological changes of the individu- Koper,
als. The ability to estimate these parameters depended on the preservation
of bone elements in the grave, which was affected by the degree of frag- •
mentation caused by the burning process in the cremation graves. While it
was possible to calculate the frequency of certain pathologies in the inhu- Spotlight
mation sample, this was not feasible for the cremated material. Neverthe-
less, the presence of certain indicators of physical stress, such as Schmorl’s
nodes and osteoarthritis in the joints and vertebrae, as well as indicators of
subadult stress, such as cribra orbitalia and linear enamel hypoplasia, was
documented. These findings also provide insight into aspects of daily life in Scientific
Apsorus. Apart from the human remains from the cremation graves of the
Relja necropolis in Zadar, no results of analyses of 1st- and 2nd-century bone the
samples from the eastern Adriatic have yet been published. This makes the
Osor sample particularly significant. in
Osor
Keywords Apsorus, necropolis, cremation graves, inhumation graves, an-
thropological analysis

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