Unveiling life's struggles: a multidisciplinary approach to explore trauma in the Longobard period.

This talk aims to introduce a ground-breaking approach to investigate in-life dietary changes in skeletal collections presenting healed traumas. In bioarchaeology, there are no methodologies for determining when a trauma has occurred throughout an individual’s lifespan. Recently, high resolution sampling of dental tissues for multi-isotope analysis has been increasingly used to investigate short term dietary variations for life-history reconstructions. The analysis of sequential primary and secondary dentin in adult individuals helps to cover a longer time interval in the life-span, from childhood to early adulthood/death according to the teeth analysed. It has been observed that variations in the isotopic signals may also reflect stress events. This raises the question of whether it is possible to detect the stress signal of trauma by imagining a possible change in diet due to the period of recovery. This presentation explores potential dietary changes associated with traumatic events, unrecognisable from the traditional bone analysis, by using a multi-isotope analysis of primary and - when present - secondary dentine of adult individuals. This pilot study is applied to three individuals from the Longobard period showing traumatic injuries. There is an older male skeleton from the necropolis of Povegliano Veronese (VR, northern Italy, end of the 6th – beginning of the 8th C CE), an older male from Selvicciola (VT, central Italy, end of the 4th – beginning of the 8th C CE) and a mature adult male from Castel Trosino (AP, central Italy, 6th – 8th C CE). The choice of these individuals is motivated by the palaeopathological presence of a completely healed trauma, and the availability of complementary isotopic, archaeological and osteological data. The results will show the potential and limit of isotopic analysis on paleopathological case studies, and promote future research by multidisciplinary approach helping shed light in unveiling past lives struggles.