Introduction

Since the early 1980s, a combination of osteological indicators have been used to provide indirect evidence for malnutrition in past populations. Non-specific metabolic stress is evident with the presence of dental enamel hypoplasias, radiographic Harris lines in the long bones and porotic lesions of the skull known as cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis. These lesions can only form in the developing child, and with the exception of dental enamel hypoplasias, will all disappear as the child recovers. Less commonly reported are the pathological lesions associated with specific malnutrition, including rickets (vitamin D deficiency) and infantile scurvy (vitamin C deficiency). Just as today, a malnourished child in the past was unlikely to have been deficient in one single dietary element, and we should expect a combination of lesions associated with a lack of iron, zinc, calcium, protein and a multitude of vitamins, including some lesions that may indicate deficiencies we have yet to identify.

The frequency and age at which these specific and non-specific metabolic lesions occur are often argued to coincide with weaning. Breastfeeding and weaning practices have been studied in depth by nutritionalists, biological anthropologists, palaeopathologists and, more recently, bone chemists. These studies have examined samples from the Palaeolithic, when the ‘hominid blueprint’ for weaning duration was thought to be established, to the introduction of artificial formulas in late-seventeenth-century Europe. Today, children are weaned at 1–5 years depending on the culture.