Dem bones, dem bones

Nothing quite captures the enthusiasm of a Time Team audience like the discovery of human bones. Just as visitor numbers at the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum and similar exhibitions are highest around the displays of mummies, so too there's nothing like the uncovering of a well-preserved burial – preferably with some kind of mystery attached – to boost the viewing figures of a Time Team programme.

This isn't just a ghoulish fascination with corpses and death. Most people connected with Time Team believe that it represents a sense of connection with our ancestors. The interest shown by fans of the programme is almost invariably respectful, even reverential.

Certainly that's the attitude of those whose job it is to excavate any human bones and burials that are discovered in the course of a Time Team dig. 'It doesn't matter how decayed they are, or how little is left when we come to dig them up,' says Phil Harding. You can't get away from the fact that these remains used to be a living person, and you're always touched by that thought at some point.'

At Glendon Hall, one of the skeletons excavated by Time Team's burials expert, osteoarchaeologist Jacqueline McKinley, was the tiny pelvis of a baby. It had probably been born prematurely and survived only briefly – a reflection of the hard lives and high infant mortality rate experienced during the medieval era.

According to Jackie: 'You can find indicators of the hard lives these people led in the bones we excavated.' In one skeleton, not untypical, she found evidence of extremely bad dental abscesses, which would have been both very painful and given the sufferer foul-smelling breath; sinusitis, again extremely painful for the sufferer, indicated by the existence of very fine-woven new bone in the sinuses; and severe age-related wear and tear in the spine, revealed by the presence of osteophytes (new bone growth around edge of vertebrae) and the result of a life of very hard labour.

In all, the Team uncovered at least five layers of burials in the medieval cemetery at Glendon, representing the remains of more than 40 individuals. They were almost certainly all ordinary peasants who lived in the lost medieval village of Glendon. In common with so many others, the village was destroyed, and its 62 occupants evicted, in 1514 to make way for sheep farming.

The details of those who were buried in its graveyard were lost to history, and today no names can be attached to the remains unearthed by Time Team – an anonymous fate that was avoided by the occupants of another cemetery, still well-tended on the other side of Glendon Hall. This is the pets cemetery kept by the owners of the hall since Victorian times – the same people whose outbuildings unceremoniously cut through some of the human graves excavated by Time Team. Some bones are simply accorded more respect than others.

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