You could read every piece of paper left from the English city of York in the Middle Ages–every tax roll, every parish register, every will–and almost never see the name of a woman. “The historical documents were written by men and about men,” Anne Grauer told the Chicago Archaeological Society recently, “as if there were no women there at all.” But Grauer, a Loyola biological anthropologist, knows where to find them: in the cemeteries.
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Grauer had taken an interest in the bones while she was still an undergrad, after reading an article about the excavation in Scientific American. Early in her graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst she decided to focus on British material, pulled out the filed-away article, and contacted the director of the trust for permission to study the bones. She spent the early 1980s working with the trust’s 1,014 recognizable skeletons. When she started she thought that medieval York might have been a “population sink” like colonial Virginia or the Wild West–the kind of filthy and chaotic place whose disease and violence killed so many that it needed a constant stream of immigrants just to keep things going. Young men with few prospects in the countryside would’ve flocked to York to make good, and most of them would’ve died trying.
But this picture didn’t survive a close read of the bones. Of the 320 adult skeletons to which she could pin an age and sex, 150 were men and 170 were women. Their approximate ages at death didn’t fit the frontier pattern very well either. Men were most likely to die between the ages of 35 and 45, which doesn’t support the notion that they were showing up fresh from the farm in their early 20s and being done in by the shocks of urban squalor.
Grauer has found feminism to be a useful tool in revealing notions we take for granted, but it can generate misleading assumptions as well. When people hear about the fracture study, they invariably ask if there were many injuries from spouse abuse, she says. “We tend to think that if a woman is injured, it has to be a man who did it. But there’s some work in cultural anthropology suggesting that [in medieval times] tensions between daughters and mothers-in-law were much more likely to lead to violence.”
Grauer’s been working with the York skeletons for more than 20 years. She’s not surprised to find herself still on the project. “Each new answer comes packaged with a hundred new questions to ask and directions to follow,” she says. “I’ll probably end my research when I join them six feet underground.”
