Paris: Scientists Recount Millions Of Bodies Dropped Down Quarry Shafts (image@doctroptard)
1000 years of death are being recounted in Paris. A group of archeologists, anthropologists, biologists and doctors is examining some of the skeletons of an estimated 5-6 million people who have been literally dumbed down the tunnel that makes up Les Catacombs of Paris.
They are looking into what killed them and how diseases that may have led to their demise have developed over the centuries.
Philippe Charlier, who is leading the project said they are looking in to 1000 years of the history of public health in Paris and its suburbs, of the medicine and surgery people underwent and the illness they suffered.
Les Catacombs is the “Empire of Death”. At the entrance of the biggest ossuaries in the world, a 300km (186 mile) network of tunnels 20 metres underground, a sign was placed warning its 550,000 annual visitors to the site in capital letters: “Stop! This is the Empire of Death”.
During the late 18th century, the city authorities decided to exhume bodies from the overcrowded city cemeteries, ostensibly for health reasons.
“The official justification was public health, but I suspect that with demographic pressure in Paris there was a real financial and economic interest in recovering the land for property”, Charlier told The Guardian.
In 1788, under cover of night, an operation began to remove millions of buried bodies. They were dug up and loaded on to ox carts that rumbled across the city accompanied by a priest to what were then the suburbs.
“They were just dropped down the disused quarry shafts that had served to bring up the stone used to build Paris and left piled up where they fell”, he said.
In 1810, Louis-Étienne Héricard de Thury, the inspector general of quarries, decided some respect should be shown for the dead and arranged skulls and long bones – femur, tibia, humerus – into decorative walls, known as hagues.
“He transformed it into a place that could be visited, not just for tourists but as a kind of philosophical cabinet with engraved inscriptions”.
While look into amputations, trepanations, autopsies and embalmings that the dead underwent, the study also includes what scientists call palaeopathology to determine what diseases and parasitic infections they suffered as well as poisonings by heavy metals, including lead, mercury, arsenic and antimony.
Maladies that leave a trace on human bones, including rickets, syphilis and leprosy, are easier to identify, but DNA extraction from teeth allows them to pinpoint infectious agents such as the plague that kill too rapidly to make a mark, The Guardian quotes Charlier as saying.
“We can also see, for example, if the syphilis that killed someone in the 16th century is the same as the syphilis of today or whether the infectious agent of the disease has micro-evolved,” he added.
The project is now in its third year. The team will produce the first preliminary findings before the end of the year
Charlier says that the work will outlive his career. “The task is enormous. It is work without an end. I think the student children of my students will continue this and that is good,” he said.
(With inputs from The Guardian)
