1958–1961

Dear Rooley: This is just to thank you for the enclosed Sofia photograph

February 18, 1959Dr. Porphyrios Dikaios Director, Department of Antiquities Cyprus Museum Nicosia, Cyprus

Dear Dr. Dikaios:

By now the Cypriote bones which you very kindly sent to me (several years ago) for study will have left the University Museum on their return trip to you. I feel very guilty for my slowness in finishing their study. The Sotira material of course I did immediately, so that it might have been returned two years ago. The exceedingly fragmentary material from L.C.III tombs at Bamboula and at Kouklia I studied hastily in June of 1956. But I frankly was too lazy as well as too busy with other things to take this material down to my own laboratory for full study and photographs. And we felt it most convenient to return all the material in a single crate, as it came.

Starting right after our final exams in anatomy, I have just finished a full week of work on the Kouklia material and had practically completed the Bamboula material last summer; one could go on with analysis of fragments to a point of absurdity. I hope that Dr. Charles can get more out of this material than I did: in particular I might have taken more semi-microscopic photographs of such things as the banded tooth enamel of some of the Kouklia skulls. I did photograph almost every individual.

Putting together the Bamboula and Kouklia bones I find a total of 18 children (1-14 years), 12 youths (15-29), 31 adults (30-44), and only 2 males over 45. Likewise there are only 3 newborn infants, undoubtedly because these tend not to last well in chamber tombs; probably there should be 40 infants to be proportionate to the large number of children. The adults show 34males to 11 females, again perhaps because of the soil shifting in chamber tombs with floods as well as the succession of family burials: female, aged and infant bone is softer.

Among the 12 Bamboula children (there were only 5 adults here) two show a very marked degree of osteoporosis symmetrica, in one case I think to the degree seen in hemolytic anemias or thalassemia: I feel reasonably certain that this is thalassemia, since the other possible cause, malnutrition, ought to be more general in the group.