Okay, great. Just a brief land acknowledgement. The Archaeological Research Facility, of course, sits on the ancestral and unceded land of Huchin, the territory of the Chochenyo-speaking Aloni people, successors of the historic and sovereign Barona band of Alameda County. So, without further ado, I am happy to be able to introduce today Trent Trombly, who was a Fulbright doctoral scholar in our program, and he's completing his doctoral degree in the Department of Anthropology here. Beginning in August 2023, Trent will be an assistant professor of anthropology at Augustana University. For those of you that don't know, Trent's research focus is on bioarchaeological approaches to funerary, typhonomy, paleochistology, skeletal, and dental health, with a focus on the medieval period of Italy and Portugal. He has been a busy beaver and he's got numerous publications in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Journal of Medieval Archaeology, and Bioarchaeology International. Some of you probably might not remember that Trent was a junior transfer student of an undergraduate with us, so he's been with us for a long time. He's been an integral member of the Archaeology and Bioarchaeology cohort. He's been a great teacher for us in our department, so this is very bittersweet for us. We actually don't want him to go. It's kind of the lynchpin in the Skeletal Biology Lab.  So we're very proud of Trent. We've learned a lot from over the years. We're excited to hear about your dissertation work today. And the title of this talk is Crossing the Divide, a Bioarchaeological Approach to Religious Life Ways and Death Ways in Medieval Santorim, Portugal. Thank you for that lovely introduction, Professor Agraw, and it too is bittersweet for me as well. And I'll try to make sure that I convey some of that in the acknowledgments here at the end. I want to do a quick disclaimer before we start this presentation that this presentation will contain images of human remains, specifically human skeletal remains. My dissertation research focuses on bioarchaeology and skeletal dental remains. I don't use these images lightly. I use them with the explicit consent and permissions of my collaborators within central Portugal. And all the images you'll see here today are specifically from medieval contexts within Portugal. The general arc of this presentation is going to follow five major themes. We'll start by defining bioarchaeology before maneuvering into medieval history in the funerary context. We'll then look to operationalize a bioarchaeology of both life ways and death ways before moving into the methodology and results, and then finally conclude with interpretations and some historical considerations. Let's start by defining bioarchaeology. Bioarchaeology broadly is the study of human skeletal remains from historic and archaeological context. In order to reconstruct lives and as I will try to argue here today, death experiences for the communities in the past. And this stems from the idea that what we do, what we eat, how we move becomes embodied and recorded in our bones and teeth, many times without us even knowing it. Bones are organs and therefore they are alive, plastic and dynamic. This is a big departure from a lot of popular conceptions of bones and teeth as being somehow static or inert. And bioarchaeology then is more than just skeletal anatomy, we're not just interested in bones themselves, but focusing on the interaction between bones, teeth, biology and behavior or biology and culture. And as a result, bioarchaeologists are often champions of a biocultural approach which seeks to blur the boundaries or natural separation we often have in popular culture between biology and culture or nature and nurture. This stems from the idea that our skeletons are shaped across our life through their response to both internal and external stimuli. Internal stimuli such as maintaining homeostasis, skeletons are an amazing source of things like minerals and calcium and phosphate, but also external stimuli. That is the physical activities we do, the foods we eat all become embodied and recorded in the physical and chemical matrices of our bones and teeth, which then transform our experiences in our bodies. So bioarchaeologists are really at the front of trying to champion this biocultural approach. But I think while bioarchaeologists have done well to blur these boundaries, I would argue that we fail to similarly integrate life and death into our theoretical toolkit. Bioarchaeologists are generally more concerned with reconstructing aspects of life ways or livelihood as recorded in bones and teeth and not death, dying and funerary processes. So this is best seen a quote by John Robb who states quote, we've not had an archaeology of dying or even an archaeology of death. What we've had is an archaeology of already dead persons, and quote, and this is certainly something that rings true for those of us who work on human skeletal remains. And so I think the framework in term by Michael Parker Pearson the late 90s of deathways is really useful here. He termed this as the pluralistic process and negotiation that accompanies death and dying as a sort of foil to livelihood or life ways. This is a stem from a recognition that death is a social act. And as we all see today in case the Middle Ages, a daily aspect of medieval life. I think this helps to tackle the tendency to treat the living is vibrant and the dead is somehow inert. And what we see as many cultures today and especially in the medieval period, death and life are not always so neatly separated. The way I'll try to do this today is through the framework of funerary toponymy toponymy was originally coined by a Soviet paleontologist Ivan Efremov as quote the study of the transition from the biosphere to the lithosphere and quote. This is somewhat jargony but essentially what Ivan Efremov was trying to get at is that how do you things go from being in the realm of the living to become paleontological specimens or fossils. The post meaning burial, no most meaning laws of so effectively the study of the laws of burial. And he did this by trying to articulate a triad or three different temporal processes starting with necrology, or the study of the death event of the organism. This is followed by biostratinomy which comes out of geology as the post death but predepositional or pre burial processes that is the interval between the organisms death and before it becomes buried. Finally, diogenesis looks at the post depositional or post burial processes. In other words the interval between when the organism was buried, and when it was discovered by paleontologists, or as we'll see by archaeologists. This becomes a pretty interesting theoretical adoption for archaeologists in the 20th century, because it was reminiscent of a lot of the problems that archaeologists were also encountering. And so archaeologists the 20th century expand to find me to non biological organisms ceramics, etc. And in that light we see a tendency to separate cultural from natural taffanomic agents or see and and transforms and we'll talk about this a little bit more detail in a second. And so then to font me by archaeologists is typically seen as distortion or bias a reduction of what was originally there. The subject of interest for many archaeologists is in fact humans and human behavior in the past, as such archaeologists attended to find the autonomy as the non cultural or natural factors that affect preservation. And archaeology then tip topony is typically framed in a distortive manner as the cumulative processes that win away our abilities to get it to live communities of the past. The idea being that you could figure out what natural processes occurred between deposition or burial and excavation, which could then be stripped away almost like layers of an onion to get at the core cultural depositional history. We can see this diagram here of for paleontologists on the left and archaeologists on the right we have a biological community that doesn't know how a whole circle, but successive processes such as death decomposition burial are going to win out the overall sample collected by paleontologists and archaeologists have used a similar sort of framework to understand these different assemblages. But this gets into a sort of interesting philosophical realm between paleontological organizations of taffanomy and archaeological ones. And I think we can consider something like rodent non marks such as observed in this bison bone here, these sorts of marks here from a rodent. We can remove material of the bone and alternates, but how should we conceptualize it, should we see these as a reduction of information, or an addition of information, while archaeologists and by archaeologists frequently conceived of taffanomic agents such as these non marks as reductive traditional toponymus typically CDs actually is out of it. After all, while sample has been lost we've learned a lot about the presence of rodents their two dimensions the exposure on the surface, and their exposure remains to different I think to paraphrase a really good friend and actual previous graduate of this department, one scholar's noise is probably another scholar signal if they're interested in. And so this really reaches its zenith for us in archaeology with the Pompeii premise, and we see this articulated through two major scholarly debates in a series of publication between two principal scholars Michael Schiffer and Louis Binford. Schiffer argued, generally that modifications by both natural or n transforms and non natural or c transforms, ultimately distort the systematic context into what is observed as the archaeological context somewhat reminiscent of that previous winnowing we saw earlier. Whereas Louis Binford debated, no distortions are the archaeological record that everything else can only be likened to the sort of exceptional and rapid deposition of something like Pompeii which had this very exemplary sort of preservation as a result of the eruption of mapasuvius and ash layers. So to quote Lucas here as a retrospective looking on the Pompeii premise quote where binford season irresolvable palimpsest suggesting that the systematic context actually needs to be studied at a larger temporal scale. Schiffer sees the challenge as dissecting the palimpsest to understand the small scale events that produced it in the first place. And this begs a rather interesting questions, especially for someone like me as a bio archaeologist, how do we deal with this in terms of human remains. We have an image here of the famous philosopher diogenes the Greek philosopher and one of the founders of cynicism who requested that after his death his body be cast over the walls of Athens with complete callous disregard. He purportedly mocked most of Greek society's concern for funerary treatment of the dead, positing why should anyone care what happens when they are dead. Of course we know this is not what most humans do human remains, although certainly not more special than any non human materials or remains are often not casually discarded. They are typically intentionally disposed of and indeed buried in a deliberate culturally informed manner. Of course the basic tenet of funerary archaeology is the dead do not bury themselves and to counter our paleontological colleagues humans do not solely occupy the biosphere, but more of a sort of bio cultural sphere. And if, if they didn't funerary archaeologists I think would be out of the job. What I would argue here today is that results at Largo Pindida's rise in central Portugal suggest that to phonomy, at least in these human skeletal remains is likely best understood stood in eschatological terms. Eschatology here I'm defining as the concern by medieval communities for how the body was prepared for the end times resurrection and intercession of the soul in the afterlife. That is to say medieval cultural religious nontological concessions of death, funeral preparation and burial are inextricably linked with funerary taphonomic consequences. And we will be looking up some of the larger research on to the actual context of medieval history. We'll be looking here at the site of Largo Pindida's rise about 80 kilometers northeast of the country's capital Lisbon. And this site was excavated in 2004 and 2005 by my esteemed collaborators and colleagues who work directly with the municipalities that that is they are municipally sponsored archaeologists who do a lot of the work here in response to urban development and the constant urbanization of surveys or destruction that might otherwise be incurred. So in the upper left hand photo here we see a backhoe digging a trench as a result of putting in new pipelines and renovating this area into a roundabout to alleviate traffic congestion. They ended up finding a large cemetery complex with north of 600 burials. These burials were excavated because it would have otherwise been destroyed by the subsequent construction, but as we can see this excavation went on for well over a year and was done in a very public facing manner. There's a lot of pedestrian activity and food activity and as a result we even see some of my collaborators here interacting with local passersby as well as news agencies and the Islamic community of Lisbon who came into the documentary. I'm happy to speak more about that. I'm going to try ambitiously to condense about 2000 years of history into one slide. So, so let's try our best so we're going to start with a very brief religious political timeline of medieval sentinine. This is a Roman period which occurs in the roughly second century BCE when Romans take control of the city or establishment of sentinine is established as the city of Scalobus. They're able to maintain control until around the mid fifth century when Visigothic conquerors and converting the city into a Visigothic domain. We don't know a lot about the Visigothic period today due to a lack of materials and documents, but it's certainly at least in central area of interesting future inquiry. They're able to maintain control until early eighth century when Muslim forces arrived from North Africa. Now, whether this was done through full blown battle or more through peace treaty negotiation is very, very heavily debated. So, while the jury's still out I think on how the city was converted into an Islamic cultural domain. I think it's safe to say that it certainly became an important religious political and trade and militaristic center for the for the caliphate in the eighth century, and maintains under Islamic control until the mid 12th century. It's not until the mid 12th century where we see various factions within the Muslim community and a series of revolts. We can the al-Mulhab rulers of the city. This makes the city sort of ripe for the taking from Christian kings who are slowly starting to conquer southwards from the northern portions of Spain and Portugal. This is often articulated as part of the larger reconquista, and I put the reconquista here in quotes because I explicitly reject this term in accordance with many other scholars who see it as a 20th century invention from the political Catholic fascist regimes. There will be a lot more piecemeal and palimpsest in terms of these conquests and not one unified event in the name of Christianity. So we see this sort of fantastical depiction that I've chosen for the for the banner image here of the Christian King specifically don't fun zone reach the food become the first king in Portugal with various crusader forces taking over the city in a sort of epic manner, which is probably quite fantasize. This is a sort of Christian pilgrimage and religious center throughout the later Christian middle ages, and we see in the late 15th century of course with Ferdinand Isabella the formal expulsion of religious minorities from the idea of pencil in the late, late 15th century. So this tends to paint things in very antagonistic terms and I would, I would also want to caution that much of the conflict between faith communities probably more politically and geographically motivated than religious and we even see some various depiction here of various religious communities, playing various board games with one another likely speaking to some of the conviviality and some of the intercultural multicultural nature of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. There's some mutable evidence, in the case of burials within the city of Santhraim and many other parts of Iberia that really speak to the differences in religious ways of approaching death and dying. And so when we maintain our understanding of the shifting periods of religious political autonomy throughout the Iberian middle ages, we see two principal necropolis represented at the site of larger conducive stress. The majority of burials 422 of them are in the medieval Muslim tradition, whereas about 217 burials were in the more typical late medieval Christian tradition. These are quite different in terms of the way the body and the tomb itself was prepared Muslim burials in the middle medieval period in many parts of the world today are buried on their right side with the face oriented towards the southeast if we think of this white arrow is pointing north oriented towards the southeast facing mecca Christian burials a bit more variable in their orientation. The Islamic graves are typically ritually washed stripped of clothing and wrapped in a Yemeni cotton shroud or kafan, whereas Christian burials could be more variably wrapped in shrouds but also their clothing or some sort of funerary vestments and we see evidence of things like belt buckles that probably attest to this even though the textiles themselves do not preserve Christian burials also tend to have a lot more commingling that is additional individuals within the same tomb or or grave. The later Christian individual buried on their back which is very typical arms crossed across the breast or lower abdomen flanked by two additional skulls on either side of the upper arm bones and additional jumble of bones at the foot of the grave. This likely is something that starts to happen more and more in the later Christian middle ages as cemeteries become increasingly associated with churches and proximity to churches and the importance of consecrated ground. We end up reutilizing the same graves and tomb structure to take previous occupants out, put a new individual in and jumbled bones at the foot of the grave. So very distinct styles of funerary treatment here, but both with the long term idea of preserving the body for resurrection. And so when we think about this in a larger ethnic historical context, we see that much of the Islamic tradition stems from the work of Malik Ibn Anas, a Sunni theologian who was born around the onset of the Islamic settlement of Iberia, which is where narrow graves in order to keep the body on its right side facing Mecca, as we'll see and try to problematize a bit shallow graves, potentially to hear the call to prayer continued in death, and could be supplemented with funerary manuals and oral and scriptural interpretations as well. Whereas in terms of Christianity at the most upper level, we have ecumenical decrees and people bulls coming directly from the papacy, whether these actually cascaded into what people practice in medieval Portugal I'm a little more skeptical but they definitely advocate for a very particular style of treatment of the body. Most of these individuals are representative of the local Christian laity or parishioners who would have subscribed to this particular parish and so they're often buried in these sort of parish churchyards in the case of consecrated grounds, and as a result follow their parish rather than customs. So painting with very broad strokes I would say from the ethnic historical and in some of the material things we see throughout Iberia, Islamic graves tend to be highly prescribed, whereas Christian graves tend to be a lot more varied. So this helps set up some of the context onto operationalizing a bioarchaeology of both life ways and death ways. And so what's to me really interesting about the site is we have and I'm going to borrow from my collaborator here who was the lead excavator of the site and wrote the series of reports where he defines this as distinct cultures in the same space. And sometimes we quite literally have that. Here we have an Islamic burial that's later reduced or bisected by a Christian grave after the Christian conquest so within the exact same grave sort of sequence by happenstance we have very different funerary treatments. And in fact, these Christian, those who constructed this Christian tomb seem to have actually kept the lower extremities of the Islamic as an individual and cashed it with the Christian individual here which is quite interesting. Another interesting opportunity then to examine how to distinct religious burial custom within the same geographical space shed light on both life ways and death ways. In other words, my research question predominantly from my dissertation was, what is the relationship between religious funerary treatment and skeletal indicators of lived experience and post mortem bodily integrity. So let's do this in terms of juxtaposition of life ways and death ways life ways seeks to illuminate aspects of people's livelihood in the past as recorded in their bones and teeth. And the methodology for this is a bio archaeology of the life course that is taking a detailed understanding of how different bones correspond to different portions of our embodied experience and sampling different skeletal regions to build a composite of lived individual. So just some examples here indicators of metabolic stress such as defects and tooth enamel or the stature of an individual or height diet oral health and hygiene whether by looking at the teeth themselves or maybe the chemical matrices of bones and teeth that are embodied, as well as activity, things like how you use your muscles and how those might affect certain muscle markers, the actual amount and quality of cortical bone. So there's a lot of different ways we can go about reconstructing life ways through bio archaeology. In terms of death ways the objective is really to understand death dying and funerary treatment and what happens after death and the methodology here would be funerary archaeology as well as funerary toponymy. And we can look at this by looking at the grade construction was it in the earth was it a tomb, what are the dimensions of those tombs, we can borrow from late 20th century French archaeological excavation techniques called archaeo and mythology. This is an incredibly meticulous detailed version of excavating human burials that tries to reconstruct each and every joint sequence between bones to understand how the body decompose and decompositional and anatomical manner. Then we can look at macro and microscopic preservation in other words are the bones there, if not why is there any sort of pattern to them not being there are they well preserved but they fragmentary, are they eroded in any sort of way. Do we have any sort of a penetration of the microstructure loss of the protein content of bones so there's a lot of ways and both life ways and death ways we can go about this, I've collected a lot of data on both sides of this but I'm only representing a small subsection here in terms of life ways, looking at metabolic stress specifically via stature and iron deficiencies and malnutrition, and in terms of death ways looking at the grave construction, as well as some indicators of macro preservation. So let's get into some of the methodology and results and we'll start with life ways here. And I'm going to be starting again with stature as well as two additional indicators product hyprostosis and periosteal inflammation. We're able to measure various elements of the skeleton in order to reconstruct the stature or height of an individual provided the bonus complete adult stature is a really complex product of genes environment and nutrition working together. And stature is particularly sensitive to environmental insults during growth development, such that comparing stature across different groups with differing sources of information can help elucidate differential patterns of compromise growth. Other skeletal indicators here terms product hyprostosis and periostitis here can be seen in the skull and lower leg bones, respectively and are marked by bony activity and a proliferation of this sort of porosity. The theology these conditions are highly variable ranging from parasites pathogen loads iron deficiencies and malnutrition. And so we tend to score these conservatively as part of a larger class or sweets of indicators of physiological and metabolic disturbance. In terms of some of the results here I'm going to be showing a couple of graphs on the left, we're going to have a comparison of the funerary groups on the right will do a comparison of sex and this is going to be so far just for stature. And these is the x axis is going to be corresponding to stature in centimeters, if you're shifted towards the right of the x axis you're going to have an average of taller stature. Okay. Now these are Bayesian posterior distribution so what we want to see here is how this distribution maps for the Islamic group versus the Christian group and we see the mode here is effectively the middle value and so we can see that Islamic groups are on average, greater than Christian stature on average, which has two different genetics but also nutritional access during the growth and development phase. In terms of males and females we see quite a stark difference these distributions do not overlap whatsoever. And both Christian males and Islamic males are significantly taller than their female counterparts which is typically something we attribute to sexual bimorphism differences within the sexes. They're not variable they're not universal but at least in these samples there seem to be quite stark which we do tend to see in highly gendered sort of societies as we do in the Middle Ages, with an average of 10 centimeters of difference. But curiously Islamic females are significantly taller than the Christian female counterparts. So this again might be part of the story of genetics but also nutrition during the growth and development period, and especially when we layer on the indicators additional indicators on specific stress it starts to paint this picture a little more clearly Christian skeletons exhibited at 182% increased risk of product hyperostosis and a 23% increased risk of periosteal infections relative to their Islamic counterparts so I think, altogether the increase in stress associated with Christian skeletons and in stature may be part of this tumultuous arrival of the Christian conquest which fundamentally altered a lot of the landscape after the 12th century and I'll talk a little bit about that in the discussion. So anyways I'm going to be going into a little bit more detail here. So we'll start with burial metrics. My collaborators did a very meticulous job of excavating and following this sort of late 20th century French paradigm to our even after you've taken the body out of the grave, doing detailed drawings of the grave dimensions and various transects of every portions of the grave to see how bodies effectively decompose in space. On the left here we have an Islamic burial example on the right a Christian and this is going to be as if you're looking down on the grave with the body taken out, and these are various transects that we can see to understand some of these funerary architectures. And as a result we can actually take measurements of these and this is what I'm going to be presenting on here. The burial length, in other words how head to toe length of a particular burial, doesn't seem to differ much between the Islamic and Christian groups. Here the Islamic are portrayed in these graphs in this sort of aqua Christian and this gold color. And the y axis can correspond to our metric of interest in centimeters. And what we see is that these distributions here are roughly equal with the small little data points here. We can see major differences is in burial width and burial depth that is the Islamic ones are shifted down in terms of being more narrow and more shallow than their Christian counterparts on average. And in fact in terms of width, it seems to be a much more narrow distribution or narrow sort of rectangle here again maybe speaking to some of this highly prescribed nature of constructing the graves in a very narrow manner. Why. To get some of the extreme examples from photos we can see this a little more clearly we see an Islamic grave here is quite narrow and quite shallow in terms of its proximity to the surface this Christian grave is a more deep example of a much deeper and wider to. And in fact during the 12th century, I've been on doom was writing about this the quote the length and width of graves must be increased a little because I've seen that one corpse had to remove three times to the two from the tomb to fix the hole and another corpse had to be closely squeezed into the grave begs the question why keep them so narrow and this is in part to keep the body oriented on its right side facing Mecca if you make the burial too wide, even in this individual you can see they've sort of decompose and slumped against this wall. But if you make it much wider the individual will fall almost completely dorsal your onto their back and maybe only the skull remains. As a result, we actually see throughout many portions of the Iberian Peninsula and in Portugal and in the site, evidence of small sherds bricks or rocks placed underneath the head to keep your crops towards the right side oriented towards Mecca. So that might explain some of the narrowness what about the shallowness and if we go back to our transects here, this up here towards this F would be sort of the surface and how deep it is this white portion here. In the Islamic again these are two extreme ends of the distribution but you can see just how shallow something like 402 is Islamic grave is compared to the Christian one here. And I think this is a there's a mix of things going on here there there's a lot of ethnophistorical and archaeological evidence for intentionally making burials shallow in order to continue to hear the call to prayer, as well as funerary goers that is people who go to the cemetery to give some sort of prayer being shallow enough to still hear them. But I think also landscaping terraforming and grading have also altered this landscape over the course of millennia so it's probably something a mixture of these two in tandem. Transitioning to the bones themselves one of the things we can look at is erosion this is going to be an interaction of roots and local acids within soils that start to corrode the actual bone itself. So, we usually score this on a scale of zero meaning minor erosion or no erosion to five plus major erosion so something like this individual would have a score of one there's minor bits of etching here. This would be something more like a score of five given the sort of crumbly nature. Here's something like five plus the entire structure is effectively been corroded by root activity and acids. It's a tremendous deal of sense because roots are oftentimes secreting acids and navigating through the rhizosphere, but also looking for dense sources of nutrients for themselves and burials can often be a really dense source of nutrients for variety of organisms. And in many cases I actually observe roots that were still in situ that had tunneled right through bones. And so we compare these by the funerary groups we see on the x axis here erosion score again the Islam is going to be this aqua color is the whole distribution for the Islamic has shifted more towards the severe side of erosion whereas the Christian bones are shifted towards the the minor side of erosion. To more severe erosion is on the graves, again maybe interaction with acidic soils, but closer proximity to the surface and root systems and here's an example of an Islamic grave here. So as we look at this area here we see some roots tunneling just above the grave itself, and in many cases we see more heavy inundation. But it's not just roots. And this is one of, I think the most interesting things about this site is not only the presence of various faith communities in the same sort of cemetery space but the peculiar preservation of a lot of invertebrates specifically snails. So as we look at this particular grave here and zoom in we see a proliferation of snail shells situated in the pelvic cavity. And as I started working on more of these remains part of the collaboration agreement early on was we can we can try to figure out something that's going on with life ways but we got to figure out what the heck these snails were doing in the burials and these do not appear to be intentionally placed here as of course, as opposed to more of a funerary treatment. So I started to ring true when I started to look at the remains in more detail I started finding snails and all sorts of peculiar paces embedded in the body in this case lodge between two teeth. This was from endocrineal matrix that's within the brain case. This is one lodged in sort of the ear canal that had gotten stuck. And this is one from within a tunnel or void that it had made a creed into the pelvic cavity or matrix now there's seems to have been a lot of different sorts of shells and types and I have to commend my collaborators who under municipal time and financial constraints went to the pains of collecting snails, despite none of us being archaeomalacologists. But this is something that we've been trying to slowly work at so what I did for every complete shell that was recovered that I encountered was measured the height, lesser and greater width and count the number of swirls or spirals, and take all this data and put it into a statistical form to see if we can try to elucidate species ID. And I'm happy to chat a little bit more about this the Q&A it's notoriously difficult to identify species on show alone, but using as many indices as possible, can help. This is a principal component analysis I won't go too much into the detail here what I'd like to show you is that when we put all these dimensions together we see roughly seven different groups or clusters here, potentially corresponding to different species Now I started collaborating with a gentleman and a professor of archaeomalacology and snails at the University of Coimbra who was a specialist in Portuguese snails and we were able to get a preliminary seven different species ID. And this is something that we're really excited to try to follow up on. Because if they are indeed archaeological they're probably going down and burrowing as a result of decomposing or eating this decomposing material and we have observed snails and slugs to be necrophagus that is they eat decomposing material, because they're dense sources of calcium to help build their shells. And what's rather interesting is that we have some species room and deck a lot of here which is a voracious predator that feeds on other snails that are feeding on decomposing materials so we have a really complex ecology going on here within these burial environments. So we're trying to see how we might be able to understand not only what the environment of the cemeteries were like in the medieval period, but also again their proximity. And so what I did here was try to do a comparison of these snail shells and see is there any sort of difference by funerary group and turns out there's quite a few differences. And so they're more than twice as likely to have snails than their Christian counterparts. Additionally, the density of snails and Islamic graves much higher 833 snails from what I analyze versus only 181 and Christian context. And then what I tried to do here is look at the various dimensions to see if we can get a rough distribution of overall size that is our bigger shells associated with any group and it turns out they're associated with the Islamic group here that is this black line here and all these snails seem to cluster higher in terms of being larger in the Islamic group context. So as long as grades having a higher prevalence density and size of snail shells. I think this is really interesting in terms of bioturbation that is biological organisms that cause a sort of mixture and soil at a local level, but also proximity to the surface and where they're able to actually burrow down. These are air breathing land snails.  So now we're going to be looking at macroscopic preservation indices, the bone representation index and preservation index, instead of just looking at these sort of boring formulae what I'd ask you to do is think of the top one is, is there bone at all and the bottom one says how much of the bone is there. In other words, when we come to a skeleton, we expect the average adult skeleton to have 206 bones, and we want to see how much of those bones are there to begin with. And then if so, how much of that bone is actually preserved is it poorly or well preserved this all comes from our zoo archeological So if we take something like the humorous the upper right arm bone, we can draw an imaginary line through about halfway of that bone and say a bone is well preserved if more than 50% of it is present blue checkmark here versus not well preserved if less than 50% of it is present. So we can aggregate these kinds of scores for every single bone in the skeleton and for every skeleton that we analyze at a site. And so we have a series of indices that we then classify well preserved bones are bones that have 50% of their elements present like our blue checkmark, whereas a well preserved skeleton is a skeleton having at least 50% of its bones, well preserved, such as the blue checkmark, we can do a similar level of rationale for the representation of bonds. And we use these different ones in concert because they tell different stories and I think we can show that in the data here. So what we're going to see is a heat map that I've constructed. And these are based on adult primary burial so something that hasn't been disturbed too much. 227 Islamic individuals and 136 Christian and these are the aggregate values for each of those bones that I analyze darker blue in this case corresponds to a better representation more likely the bone is present darker red values, less likely that the bone is represented. We see a ton of differences between the funerary groups at this level. We see in fact some similarities the breast bone here this turn in a manubrium isn't all that well represented as well as the knee caps. Pretty expected these are very fragile bones with not a lot of dense cortical bone they tend to not represent that well because they don't preserve that well. So they're curious those if you drew an imaginary line down the midline of the Islamic skeleton you start to notice that almost all the left side is a lot less represented in the right side, which makes sense to be buried on the right side the left side is going to be exposed to the surface and any sort of subsurface damage where we see differences in the preservation. So the bone might be there for these groups but that doesn't mean that they're preserved really well which again speaks to why we use these indices in concert. The Islamic bones on average are just really really poorly preserved. On average only 26 to 43% preserved versus Christian bones on average 36 to 55% preserves. And we can model this a little further by looking at the number of well preserved skeletons excavated from the site. So on the x axis here with the proportion of well preserved skeletons. If you had a site where every skeleton was perfectly well preserved you'd be way over the right by one. And if you were to have a site with zero preservation all the way to the left. So the number of distribution and the shaded area corresponds to a density and the shaded law or the dash line here is the average value and what we see is that the proportion of Christian skeletons is shifted way towards the right with little overlap here, ranging between 36 to 53% of skeletons versus Islamic only 16 to 28. In fact Christian skeletons have a 240% increased odds of being well preserved compared to the Islamic counterparts, a pretty stark finding considering they're buried in the exact same sort of geography and sediment. So that gets into the results let's go on to some of these interpretations here. And I want to discuss this as consideration specifically for urbanism in both life and death. And what I would argue here is that skeletal evidence can help complicate historical narratives. We have this beautiful tile bench that I've been coming to and this is this is done in a very traditional Portuguese as well as your blue tile depiction that is sort of a mosaic. This is made from a bench within the major citadel or historic area of Centrine, sort of fantastically canonize the importance of the Christian conquest and the arrival of Christianity to thwart off Muslim invaders. And this is why I avoid this term because I think a lot of historians have shown throughout the 20th century that these terms were, this term is very laden and somewhat invented in a fantastical manner to help try to Christian Christianize the sort of history here. So taking that prefix is a bit odd because there weren't necessarily Christian people in the same way occupying the landscape prior to the Muslim occupation. So it's very interesting and I think what skeletons can do is provide a bottom up means of reconsidering history since they embody the accumulated actions habits and diets of everyday people. Historical documents undoubtedly give a rich rich picture of many aspects of daily life, but I think can fail to get at a textured cross section of a large portion of medieval lady. And in terms of life ways here I would say the Christian data seem to have result seem to suggest a worsening of health outcomes after the Christian conquest not a bettering of it despite the historical narratives. This is part of an emerging pattern from other data sets as well throughout portions of Spain and Portugal they're employing similar comparative studies. And I think this has to do a bit with urbanism after the Christian conquest in the 12th century sent that I became restructured as an important Christian religious pilgrimage center under the Portuguese crown drawing on numerous mendicine orders and establishing upwards of 15 parishes and numerous condense and monasteries throughout the city in the later medieval period. This is a somewhat of a dated map but we have here is a our site of larger communities right outside the historical city center. This is that Citadel where that bench would be. And we can just see this sort of dense the point I'm trying to show you is dense almost labyrinthine network here. And this seems to really increase throughout the Christian later middle ages. And I've been interpreting this in terms of recent scholarship such as the bio archaeology of urbanization which looks at some of the biocultural consequences of living in cities in the past. And I think the scholarship has been really helpful for me in terms of understanding the life ways but it doesn't really get at how urbanization affects whether or not the dead got there in the first place or how and this gets back to our questions of death ways of defonomy. And I think it's really crucial to keep in mind in a region such as Spain and Portugal during the Middle Ages, Ruiz taboada who works in Toledo and Spain states quote Muslim cemetery sees to be a part of Spain's historical landscape centuries ago, due to both the purposeful destruction of funerary markers by Catholic monarchs were anxious to eradicate any funerary remains of non Christian communities and to urban development. And I think this urban development is what we're seeing especially here. As a sort of counterpoint if you were to go to the historic cemetery today in central, you would notice quite how dense and very cement like it can be in many areas and something that's, I think quite jarring for those of us in the United States where you have multiple placards of occupants of that tomb throughout various time frames and these are not necessarily related individuals. This is in part because Portugal like many other portions of Mediterranean Europe utilize a leasing program that is a usually three to five year window to permit you to skeletonize where you will then be taken out and placed elsewhere to allow the tune for a new occupant issues of horizontal space due to urbanization and the importance of consecrated ground or both at play here. And this is something that's not new. This is something I think that's been going on for about a millennia. These are illuminated manuscripts, not admittedly from Portugal, but from different books of ours throughout different portions of central northern Europe. And what you can see is these wall demarcations here and each of these probably showing that the general perimeter of the parish church are associated with the church, and a funerary procession of an individual being buried in a sort of simple But if you look closely in each of these cases you'll see jumbles of bones at the surface depicted oftentimes is a taking out of the previous occupants to put a new individual in not unlike what I showed earlier in the case of our cemetery here. No work in this be seen better than the case of a couple of the sauce or the chapel of bones, I think in our case and ever in southern Portugal, constructing the 16th century Franciscan monks who aggregated aggregated 5,000 burials for 43 cemeteries and ever in order to repurpose that valuable land into something else. So again, these issues of horizontal space and repurposing the dead as form of architectural features. So I would say organization goes beyond just life, but also death, deathways in terms of deathways Christian conquest and organization also affected and continues to affect the dead and buried. And it seems to disproportionately affect Muslim burials in our observed data, again back to our 240% decreased odds of being well preserved. What I'm going to try to articulate here is a set of taffanomic trajectories that is when the living community is presented with a dead body, the preparation of that body is already going to differ along religious or faith lines. In the case of Islam stripping of the body ritualized washing and shrouding and a brief post mortem interval that is putting the body into the ground as soon as possible. Versus in Christianity occasionally stripping and washing, sometimes wrapping the body but also bearing clothing with a more variable or interval based on social and religious status. Muslim graves are meant to level previous inequalities in life such as the wealthy the poor the aristocrats are all buried in the same sort of grave structure or to like structure. Versus in Christianity proximity to the actual altar and church and tomb start to become a huge thing in terms of class. So in terms of bodily internment here is on the graves of large candidates are generally narrow and shallow, possibly to facilitate the body in an accordance and direction with Mecca as well as being able to hear the call to prayer and landscaping, whereas Christian burials are generally wider and deeper. This then cascades I think it's what we observe in terms of the body alteration. In the case of Islamic graves more by observation and snails and invertebrate invertebrate activity, more erosion from penetrating root systems, in the case of Christian graves better prone reservation and better whole skeleton preservation. To suggest the taffanomic filters, I think are considered best considered a temporal manner that extends beyond just the post depositional processes as cultural and religious funerary customs for preparing the dead body in the grave itself, altered the very later contours of taffanomic influences, we can then overlay our taffanomic triad as coined by our paleontological colleagues to see the sequence of events in a more protracted manner. In doing so I say bioculturalist in here I'm trying to insert cultural here, rather than bio stratinomy as humans do not exclusively occupy the biosphere but always embedded in a cultural context, and culturally imbued. So when I think about these results I can't help but think back to some of my initial readings here at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and stemming from some of the my initial exposure to biocultural approaches and I'm going to talk about Lisa sobo here by logical anthropologist, who asks, what contributes more to the area of a square, the height or the base. And the answer of course is a trick question, and she uses it to try to show how both biology and culture can be very difficult to tease apart when we're thinking about the human body because no human body is ever devoid of culture. If we can try to do something similar with our archaeological understandings of cultural and natural or non cultural and non natural, and understanding their co contribution and co constitution for the taffanomy of the human body as well. I think it becomes very difficult to tease apart what is natural and what is cultural when you start to understand things on a larger temporal scale. And it's here I think we're an integrated integrated anthropologically informed taffanomy goes beyond distortion and can be operationalized into a worthwhile means of anthropological inquiry. It's here where I think the dialogue between the desires of the living need to be away with the eschatological desires of the denizens of the past, a challenge facing many areas of the world today with the dead and our ancestors live just beneath our feet. And thankfully, that deliberation has been happening here for decades and continues to happen. The research presented here today, my role in it is but a small part of a larger municipally sponsored archaeology team and contract archaeologists that work within and for community members as the city continues to urbanize and subsurface renovations take place over the last eight years I've had the immense pleasure and opportunity to work alongside these archaeologists municipal staff and community members and feel honored to be called many of them dear friends. As I look forward and I look forward to future and continued collaboration and dialogue for many years to come. I'm happy to speak more about this. I want to conclude by just a tremendous gratitude and acknowledgments principally here starting with my dissertation orals committee doctors from Agrawal or a will key marine Miller Kent Lightfoot and Dr. James, as well as my enumerable collaborators and colleagues at the camera me support center I'm an additional archaeologist that I've had the pleasure of working with in city hall staff. And then thanks as well to my wife and many of the other lab members and friends and mentors who made this research possible, and the undergraduates as well. I still very much look fondly on my own exposure to undergraduate research and mentorship through Berkeley and I think it's one of the strengths of this school and so thank you specifically to Ashley Blake, will Gerardo, Cecilique Martinez Diaz, Lily Connell Barons for helping make this research possible. Funding agencies as well really help make sure that this research could be done and then thankfully I just want to thank as well the department for response from you over these 10 years it's been a tremendous journey and I thank you all. Thank you. Any questions? Thank you. That was really great to see what you've been doing. Given your information about the tunes you're putting it all together. Okay, and your final point about taking bodies out and putting bodies in. Yeah, I mean, in urban cities. Do you think the bodies you've dealt with the ones that were activated were the last bodies of many that were putting these tunes and therefore are they dated to like the end of each of these phases, or are they a melee stir and that urban world of three. Yeah, what's operating there. Yeah, it's a great question. I think what's weird is not to only see these cemeteries as palimpsest which they are, but then particularly these Christian tunes which get even more complicated, right. I think in some cases what we have is probably the individual that we see most articulated and is probably the final sequence of that particular burial and the other one to two occupants are probably the previous occupants. My hope was to be able to and I was using stall funding as part of the way to try to understand some of these Christian tunes more deeply but with the pandemic I wasn't able to get samples to do the Christian burrows we we got some of the preliminary radiocarbon datings for the Islamic cemeteries without the city which has been really helpful. And we were able to one Christian one, which is way back in one of the ones I showed you the multi faith one with the Islamic one being by cut. The other Christian individual dates right to after that is the Christian individual dates to right after roughly 80 to 100 years after the Islamic individual, but whether that other Christian visual we didn't get to sample yet so that would be the next part because I want to know more about this sequence because a lot of the hypotheses are that oh these these are probably relatives these are familial relatives utilizing the same family structure. It's possible and some people have tried to do some biological DNA or bio distance data to elucidate that I haven't seen anything that's conclusive it seems to be very variable some cases maybe they're familiar but then when you do radio carbon dating it's okay they can be familiar but why do you have a 200 year gap or something like that so I think there's some variations. I think they're probably structured in a way but I bet some are much more complicated and some of these Christian ones tend to be in more. So there's maybe coinciding with things like epidemics or plague things like that but we just haven't had the dating yet to those. Does that help answer. Thank you. I'll try to keep an eye on chat to the. Yeah. I'm curious about that square, you know, yeah, some of the axes by which these things happen and you talk to each other, the picture they ask you. So, now, excavating in West Africa value so long barrels earns. Yeah. Okay. So, might the axes in one direction or another be pushed by, okay, well they have facilities for these both right and then by these various ways and some of those facilities are kind of like comment facilities versus facilities that are more limited to the communal kind of aspect. So, so in, you know, maybe talk a little bit more about how those types of practices down the road, what you might see in these communities as they're recovered. And then of course you said the wonderful thing about, you know, class, and you know some folks are very close to that. Right. Right. Yeah. That's what the money's at, right. Yeah. You know, thinking about donors and the university and I don't want to get my things. Right. This may be the same case. Yeah. Or get buried at the church, you know, you're back to me and move. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I think in the case of later medieval Christendom, there's an interesting argument by the scholar house mayor who argues who coins this term topographies of the afterlife. And she's basically saying that Christianity in this period has this very idealistic idea of death leveling the universal leveler. But then you start to get very specific political economic structure to cemeteries and proximity to alter and it's typically like I said either members the clergy or religious aristocracy or often be social leads to be buried within the church walls and then who gets buried outside of the parishioner cemetery. There's also this additional layer of debate going on, I think specifically in about the 13th 14th century, within the papacy of trying to figure out do, are we allowed to take people out or dismember them, in a sense. And this really comes from, from this particular scholar Brown's work and she looked at papal bowls coming from Boniface, and who's really trying to say, I don't think you should be taking people apart anymore. I think it became this huge theological discussion, does God have the power to reconstitute a body that is effectively in different places in different pieces. And you have a lot of theologians struggling with that and that starts to cascade into how they treat the body. Do you are you able to treat the body in a way that has to be leave it intact in its own specific burial, or can we come and not worry about it because we got issues of space pressing here and he's going to be fine and doing so you have a lot of this debate going on I think in the late 13th, you know, 12th century or so. And whether or not that cascades to particular parishes is a little more debated I think I think what's interesting is to see the tremendous variation in Islamic treatment. There's a little consistency that we see in Iberia, at least in Portugal there there is a sort of north to south variation. But what I've been trying to slowly look at is this in terms of sample dispersion that is really trying to see how what's like the standard deviation for these sorts of graves for Islamic ones versus Christian and when they tend to be quite half sometimes less than half or Christians to be two to three times and very more variable, and even things like their metrics or dimensions compared to the Islamic ones and so there seem to be some heavy prescriptions going on at least in certain regions but other places that's completely thrown out the window. You might have co mingling. We have some individuals who are buried with tile coverings. We have some, some with more stone tomb structures so there was clearly some in the Muslim treatment as well and then I think is the some of the interesting aspect, but a lot of those are going to be excavated only in these sort of municipal contexts where it's more of a trying to rescue or trying to get anything that would otherwise be done just does that help answer for sure for sure. Maybe. Yeah, so I think most of the ones here. I have 422 and I could double check with my collaborator most of them seem to be pretty discernible and this is where that French technique comes really really helpful because what we end up seeing as many Christian individuals they're laying on their back and decomposition. The head will often decompose to the right or the left based on the articulation with the Atlas, whereas the Islamic burials you can have an individual on their right side but then decompose backwards so they can look eerily similar to one another. And then a very anatomical approach to particular joints and body starts to help so one of the things we ended up that I ended up looking at this case was the femur or femur. The right femur was often in its sort of socket, but the left one was articulated up, which shows you that during the decomposition process that femur left its socket and then the individual fell. You can have one femur that looks like it's in prone position or supine position and one that looks like it's in the guvitas or right position. And so, even though the final thing might look very similar between the Christian Islamic, you can start to look at particular bones and elements, the patellae as well unfortunately didn't preserve as well but they're probably some of the most informative bones in terms of burials on decomposition.  If they're still there in the position oftentimes that means they're buried in dirt or some sort of soil that help keep them there as the soft tissue slowly went away. So, in terms of the quantitative I have to go look but most of them we have pretty good evidence that they were. There's other parts of the world where it's not so much and in many portions of North Africa, the Near East with Muslim burials they advocated for burying in a supine position and just maybe trying to have the head or as professors and Sarah was saying and earns two structures there's tremendous variation. Here we have a little bit more easy to discern. But I've seen other parts of portions of Spain, where it's more tricky, where they say I can't say which funeral group is these individuals belong to because we have such a complex thing of decomposition or to structure, etc. Does that help. Yeah. Hi. Nothing about before this. Industry by the photograph of all the bones that have been reassembled very artistically, you know, in. Yeah. I was just going to talk a little bit about that path was and was it one of the certain historical year and region. But it gets transferred to America. So this, this sort of repurposing of burials into particularly I would say into architectural features is something you see oftentimes with very particular orders, the Franciscans sister shins capuchins you see this happening through different orders different periods of time. It's not just going to be an Iberia there's a quite a few this one is the most proximate I would say in terms of the scope of how much they became incorporated the architecture there's quite a few in Spain. We went to one in Rome, the Capuchin crypt, a lot less number of individuals but repurposing bones in terms of into the architecture. The biggest one I've been to is in put in a horror and the Czech Republic, which has 20,000 plus individuals repurpose and if you go there. It's a very, very small chapel or church with a very small church yard and every square inch of that church yard are just tombs or burial structures burial plots. So they've just been utilizing the particular monks that have been utilizing those bones for many, many years and incorporating them into the architecture so I think it was part of a later sort of Christian movement. But it's oftentimes done by by specific orders at a different periods of time and sometimes in tandem with what's the available space and can we repurpose this in any sort of way. But I think that's partially what's going on as you have Franciscan monks who are doing it as this sort of confrontation with death that instead of putting it off to the side let's confront it let's acknowledge that it's a part of our existence and that is coming for us. So I think we need to repurpose 46 different areas that were previously cemeteries into different kinds of land so I think I think it varies a bit. Yeah, I think that or just trying to, in the case of some of the Franciscans, it's, I think it's really to put death in front of you. And you see this also with the order of plenty, the order of clinic reforms in the 13th century, really try to foreground that death is not something we should ignore but confront and should be on the present it should be there, it should you should be thinking about it. And so it gets incorporated with architecture in that sort of way. But I think again it varies tremendously on where those orders seem to have influence, the available material, if they're permitted to do so in the case of putting the horror in the Czech Republic. It doesn't seem like that was particularly sanctioned. I don't think most of the people who got buried there as Christians wanted to be dug up by another Christian in the name of Christianity so you have some some tensions there. But I think this is where things can get really complicated but interesting as well. And so there's there's some good works that are slowly starting to do a more Europe, at least the ones I've seen from my work, a Europe kind of wide approach to bone chapels and how systemic they are, but usually seen them as bone chapels in that case. Yeah. Let's see I was trying to see any questions well wishes. Okay. So, what a dear friend of mine or and who also works on in Spain in this case as what sort of next steps would you like to see this research take is enough evidence for comparing graves of other incorporated communities either Jews Romani or even lepers might this research help understand the life ways or death ways of converts willing or forced in the context of religiously dynamic I be in world. It's a great question for more and who works in a slightly later period than me on and in part on conversion. But this is absolutely not covering say the major other sort of tripartite access of religious faith communities of Jewish communities. And this is something that Ruiz tabawata who's working in Toledo is also acknowledged as well that the Jewish funerary customs seem to be a bit more difficult to pin down. In terms of Muslim burial customs in this period, which are defined as sort of stark opposition to Christian customs. Ruiz tabawata and a lot of other scholars working in Spain have a lot more research what ends up happening I think a lot times in Portugal is that you have a just not as much of a proliferation of the of the sort of scholarly literature that comes out outside of great literature reports from municipal excavations but also trying to understand what are the material dimensions of Jewish funerary treatment has been a bit trickier in some cases so it's something I'd like to look at more it's something I think there's probably a lot of interesting examples. In the case of, in the case of medieval Portugal. I think the second question about converts or can you try to even see that archaeologically this is something that Mark and I have talked about here and there about, you know, as their ways in which we can see that and some people have tried to do some of this in southern Spain by looking at activity. I'm specifically looking at the ways in which the lower joints tend to wear as a result of the call to prayer, which is a very repeated action that you're doing usually five times a day over the course of 40 years that's going to leave potentially osteological markers. And so can you see potential communities getting as long a size effectively as a result of this. And the other ones I think diet would be my most interesting way to look at that. And I couldn't, I think I still should be interested but as many different lines of evidence for amix how logical remains final remains would also help show this. So I think it's it's it'd be an interesting possibility to see and I think it would take a lot of different sources not just bones to help get a richer picture of that. Let's see. Anna asks how many proportion, how many slash proportion of the graves did you notice have overlapping burials. It's a great question I think Anna, it was pretty small, I think 8% it doesn't happen, it didn't happen. So that's where we had multiple an Islamic burial bisected by a later Christian one. But I think it was around, maybe 10 or so cases or maybe a couple more but it wasn't super super prevalent. I would posit I'm not saying my collaborators but I would posit that it seems to be very happenstance and accidental I don't think I mentioned reasons to have a lot of this quote that in Spain that you have Catholic monarchs anxiously trying to eradicate Islamic cemeteries. So this in the case of center aim. I don't think that's the case I think a lot of these were accidental. What's really interesting about the one image I showed you again as it seems that they not only put a Christian individual in but cast or kept the bones from the lower extremities of the Islamic individual. I don't think it was an intentional sort of damage, I think it just starts to become an issue of space what we do see undoubtedly in the later Christian middle ages is after the Christian conquest, they anywhere there was a mosque they tend to convert that into a church. So that means that if you have any burials associated with that mosque as an extramural mosque. Those are probably going to be bisected by later Christian one so I think it's part of this sort of dynamic of different religious communities approaching buildings places of worship and death scapes in different manners. Did you see similar presentation an infant or adolescent burials. Great question. This is from my mom so she's digging in. She she found a soft spot so we don't what's weird is we don't have a lot of sub adults at the site. Another that might be what we think is what tends to happen in a lot of Muslim cemeteries is that they actually spatially segregate children and adults to where they're not integrated to the cemetery so we do have a friend and a colleague who specialized in the analysis with some adults from these from these various sites in the city, but just a very an overall dearth of representation and we think it's probably because they were part of the cemetery either in another area that wasn't excavated. I think the cemetery and I think my collaborators obviously think it was probably much larger these burials probably way out this way in every direction but only the zone that was for impact was excavated so 622 it's probably a lot lot larger. But it was only the area that was going to be directly impacted which was excavated and so it's possible the sub adults for maybe both communities would have been found in some sort of other area. But I think that's probably why we don't see a huge proliferation of the sub adult remains in this case. Additionally, going back to find me there's issues of preservation sub adult bones, we think generally don't preserve as well they don't have as much of the. They don't have as much of the cortical bone or some other portions of bone that seem to help them survive as much as particularly in an environment like this, which is surprisingly volatile. All alkaline soils, you should theoretically preserve quite well. They were all capped under cement should preserve quite well we have 622 burials and over 400 Islamic burials and roughly 40 of them are well preserved by our well preserved skeleton metric so some things I think a number of things I think you're going on in this case and so it could be that some adults were present but just maybe weren't excavated or highly damaged your fragmentary over the course of millennia. Thank you.


Good morning everyone. Today my sharing will be how people help me to grow, how incidents help me to grow. So, first of all I thank you to Shavitri Bhavan and to all the team which has been organizing this special talks from us. So, I am from a very normal family background.  I have studied in government schools and today I am working in Udevi school in Auroville as a principal. Sometimes even this I tell to my students it does not matter where we are studying. It does not matter whether you are in a rich school or private school or any other very rich school base. The more sincere I am in my studies I can become what I am now. So, this examples of myself I always share with my students. So, now I will start from my childhood. When my mother was pregnant she migrated to Pondicherry. So, she had some problem with her pregnancy. So, I think she was it was about seven months. So, there were still three four months to go that I had to be born. She had salt too much salt in her body. So, she had admitted in the GH in Pondicherry that is how she migrated to Pondicherry and she had to stay in the hospital for three four months taking treatment. So, she became one of the team. So, she became well, but then she also started helping the team the nursing team. It was in 1968. So, while I was while I had been born she was already one among the nursing team. So, there was a one herd nurse. Her name was Selvadi. So, she used to help my mom to get well. So, when I was born she gave me the name. So, my name is Dhava Chilvi. So, Selvi is part of that sister half of the sister name and Dhava is due to my mother's suffering. So, it is tapas in Tamil means to meditate. Selvi means to be young always to be young. The one who is called Kumari or miss. So, this is the name in Selvi. So, we sometimes call unmarried women Selvi and the name. So, my name is Dhava Chilvi. Now, only I realized that it is not that when the name was given I did not know. After when I came to Auroville and to research on name I knew that the name my name carries a particular value and how it came. So, then since then my mother started living in Pondicherry and there was a society guest house. It was getting started establishing. It is an ashram based guest house. So, where Nainaban and Ashramid was managing that guest house. So, my mother started working since then 1968. I was just a bond baby and we had the brothers. My brothers were there. So, we were growing up there and Nainaban used to take care of the family and we were there. So, I was growing in that atmosphere and our house was near where the reserve grew now. This was our house and we had to my mother had to go every day to society guest house which was near the beach park guest house where is now. So, we grew up and now I am coming to my childhood of maybe 8 year or 9 year or 10 year where I where I started growing up. So, when when I go to school I would say goodbye and Nainaban used to say there is a room. Priyama room is there which is mother and she remember this room. So, go say goodbye and go. This was simple instruction she used to give me. Then I would go there and sit for a few minutes then I go to school. So, this is how my connection to mother and share a window started and Nainaban used to also share stories of how she had connection with mother and how she had had a conversation with mother and how mother was guiding her and how she came to Pondicherry and Ashram through her father. So, these stories small small stories sometimes she used to share me. So, when I look back now Nainaban is a big inspiration to my life and then when I am taking my family members like my brother. So, in this time of the eras sometime we see men are more selfish they do not put women in front. But my experience is my brother being he studied in correspondence. He did not go through a regular education but he took care of me. So, when I remember one incident many many incidents are there but one when I finished my 10th standard I had to go to school. So, at that now we can apply online where we have in one application we can apply to all the schools. But then we had to go manually to apply each and every school. So, in Pondicherry maybe there were four five schools where we had to go manually apply get the place and again go. So, this my brother was happily doing it for me.  So, there was there is also one incident which was very touchy to me if I have even written a little story about it. When my brother was I was studying 5th standard I guess. So, we had to walk to my mother's place my mother's working place. So, we had to walk from like Sharguru know where is Sharguru now from that place to Roman Rolan street it is about four four five kilometers. So, once I told my brother I would like to go by myself. So, don't come with me I want to try. Then he said fine you can go I will sit in the library. So, there was a library on Parathy street. So, he was he went into the library and I started walking. As it is my first experience of walking by myself I was standing in front of each and every shop looking at the shops. I was trying to look continue to walk look continue. So, it took me a long time to reach my mother's place but I was enjoying all my way. So, then after this he came behind me he told everything I did whatever I did I he told me for me it was a puzzle you are sitting in the library how come you are telling all the incidents which I did. Then at that time I mean it was a lie but he said I was my body was in the library but actually I was following you in my spirit. This is the answer he gave me which I also trusted but now I knew he was following me. But this incident I always remember so that how much care people are taking. So, like this so many things happened which now I know it is a spiritual experiences. So, I would also like to share a few incidents where I had to be on my own and manage the situation. So, it was like college time. I was studying in Karakal. It was my first year D.A. So, my elder brother lives in Karakal. So, I had to I got an admission in Karakal college. It was about 10 days after I had I got admission in the college. So, I had all my new books on my cycle. I used to go by cycle from Kotticherry to Karakal where it was like 6 kilometers and I had all my new books in the cycle. I think it was July or the time when it rains. I was not prepared to get wet and I was coming after my college. It was maybe 5.30 and two other friends also came with me. We were all cycling and my cycle got my cycle did not work and it started raining. So, I could not paddle. I waited till the rain stopped but it did not stop. So, I had taken the courage to get wet. It is okay if my new books get wet but I just keep going to my house. So, I started pushing my cycle and came home. But this incident for me it was like a big thing. Young girl, new place, long distance. I had to decide what to be done. So, from where the courage came I did not know but I had taken the right decision even in spite of getting all my new books wet or me getting wet but the wise thing is to reach home in the evening. So, like this there were few incidents which happened where I realized some inner connection. Maybe not then when I think about now these things are quite a meaningful incidents to me. Then another incident same similar incident where I went abroad. My one of my friend invited to Germany. I went there and we are not supposed to work there but there was a person who had to go on a holiday for two weeks. So, this person asked me whether I can do a newspaper delivery job. So, to deliver the newspapers I had to start at 4.30 in the morning then finish by 6.30 in the morning. And again the same thing I had to cycle. There was a place where they have the newspaper and I had to take it and deliver it to the house. So, it is about 140 papers and I used to do that but just one paper the last paper I had to walk 10 minutes upward where there were no houses. Everywhere along the side forest but one house was at the end of the hill and after I delivered that I am my hand is empty no more newspapers. But just beside the house there was a viewing spot you can go and view I need to so beautiful. So, every day all the 16 days I would go and stand there and view that beautiful place in the morning and I came back. So, this whole newspaper delivering incident for me and I think about this you start with something heavy you end empty nothing inside and you start when it is dark I end in a light the lights are coming and I start down but I finish upstairs viewing all this beautiful nature. So, for me this was very meaningful and I never forget this in my lifetime. So, these are incidents which gave me courage and also to touch to have some touch in my inner connection. So, these are for me more important and value in my life. Then another I mean I am actually prepared with incidents I just would like to share all the incidents small small incidents where I really saw divine mother was with me. She was working through people through incidents and she was giving me courage through all this this is what today I have my sharing is about. So, in the same way once when I came from Germany I had to travel alone and I was so scared I did not want to travel alone by myself. Then we started my journey started in Switzerland Basel where I had to take a train to Singen and from Singen again another another train to Frankfurt from Frankfurt I had to take my flight. So, I was so scared to travel alone but as soon as I entered in the train at Basel I saw one Tamil Sri Lankan priest he used to work in in church I think Tamil spoken person with his family I was delighted to have this company. So, he came up to spot and up to Frankfurt then he left me in Frankfurt I was doing this check up know to care passport check ups and all that there I saw a person who did not look very how to say I would not really talk to him he looked a bit strange but then it happened to me that I had to sit next to him in the flight I was saying oh my god what is this but he was also a priest he gave me company this flight had to stop in Amsterdam because there was some problem so he actually the person who went with me and we were taking care of each other luggage we used to share our some of chatting and all that and then after in Sri Lanka he had to go and take another flight so he left me and I am traveling to Pondicherry by airplane and inside airplane someone is calling me Selvi with my name I was amazed because I didn't I didn't expect this then this person comes to my to Pondicherry where I knew so she I knew her very well she is traveling coincidentally on that particular day so then she accompanied me till Pondicherry so this is like I was scared but I had a strong prayer or I don't know I was scared but I I realized that I am not alone that is this incident told me that you are not alone you are always taken care yeah so this I always remember this I even have written a little short story on this called Vaiditunai Vaiditunai means on the way you have a company and somebody accompanies you so since I started till the end I had somebody or other to be with me this was a wonderful thing now this was all when during my studies or during my stay in Pondicherry then in 1991 I married I married and I came to Auroville so in Auroville we started living in in the nursery next to Minakchiaka so when I came to Auroville I started living in the nursery and Minakchiaka was next to my neighbor so as soon as I came she was giving me a task which till today I do she said mother has given me given names for flowers so you find out 550 flowers and the identification of mother so this was my first knowledge of flowers I knew there are flowers but I did not know they carry the name different name from mother so I was trying to find out the names till today if I don't know a name I try to find I try to go into the mother's flowers book I always try to keep so at least 100 maybe 100 150 flowers she has given a lot I think about 800 names but I know a little bit again and again I'm trying to search because mother has spoken a lot about flowers and one thing what she has said is they are more receptive than us so you can we can use them to get the receptivity as a medium so sometime when I would like to pray for harmony pray for purity pray for protection so I always use that image within myself either I take a flower in the hand or I close my eyes I imagine as if I'm offering these flowers to mother which really helps me so this was Minakchiaka started this work with me so for me the people are the instruments mother is nowhere divine mother I mean divine mother is nowhere divine mother is within us within me within you within all the people who I meet within all the incidents who I who occur to me so this is how I I am connecting my life on day-to-day work so like that there are so many people in Auroville in Pondicherry who has contributed to my growth like Anandi who lives in transformation she used to come and take me to all the yoga classes ashtanga yoga every week twice she would drive to my house she would say come let's go to the class so this helped me to keep my to keep me fit and when I was carrying a baby she used to come all the way my home she was singing devotional songs not to me to my daughter so the friendship which I had made meaning to me by these incidents it was like not just chatting your friend with someone it's not for just chatting or sharing your food or sharing your shopping experience it is much more than that so when sometimes with my neighbor I go for a walk or my husband Palani and my daughter sometimes when we take a walk in Auroville we take a small message that day message which I got in my through my email mother's message so we speak about that we try to understand what the message actually means to me what it delivers and did I have the same experience that particular day or previously and how I can change the incident by having this message so this conversation helps us to grow it is meaningful when when I grow my friend and when my friend grows me so I always we always share within our family or I strongly believe whoever in in front of me apart from negativity or positivity that person should help me grow and I should help him grow this is the purpose of my life that is how I so if I can't be in harmonies with my family members with my friends with the neighbors who are living it how can I harmonize the whole world so any small thing I should start with myself any small change which I want to see in others first it should be it should start from me so this is how my connection with my family members and my neighbors so I always try to look at my mistakes even if there is some dish how many between us the first thing which I do is to look into myself what change in me would bring the harmony so this is how I have taken things in lead so now comes my school and how I gained my knowledge in teaching my work experience so I started working in uh nutrition from 1991 so there there was a person uh England person her name was Greta Jackson she was also working there as a main coordinator in a nutrition school now it is called IKM so she taught me many things which I am now carrying out as a principal like how to work on timetable how to do substitute how to make the class more interesting so she used to have work called inset which is in service training she used to gather all of us and we used to work on a math problem how to deliver this problem in in front of the children so she was also my inspiration and she had to leave once or away she had left or away but she started working in Gujarat with some other institution some schools so she actually invited me there she paid for the ticket and she asked me to assist her teacher training workshops so it was like a few teacher training workshops where I assisted her through which I gained how to teach teachers which actually helps me in today's life like when I am a principal of a school I also need to know how teachers would work being myself a teacher is one thing but being a responsible person for many other teachers is another thing so this Greta Jackson and Heidi Watts who is now in united states she used to also come every year to Auroville where we had workshops among all the Auroville teachers 10 days in a year so we were all together transition teachers the bandam teachers ourselves and then she also sponsored me to go to united states for an training program in 1994 I was there in Antioch for about three four months where I had learned different styles of teaching so this this my work is my passion to learn this from these people added value to my teaching so I can go on tell about people and how they helped me and how mother has guided them to guide me so when I came there was once here in Auroville they wanted to give mother and Sherwood was education to newcomers there was a in entry service whenever we go they ask questions like what did you read what do you know about mother like that so I was thinking about this how we can inspire local people or the one who cannot read also should have a chance to read or to hear about mother's work and Auroville and all that so Surya Gandhi who works in dental clinic I shared some of my thoughts with her so we both were thinking and we created a way of learning and we work together so we had done a few workshops on this at a time we handled about 20 25 people they were from village they were from some of the students so what we did was we collected simple books of mother and share a window and Auroville maybe 50 100 books and we had a place like a hall we arranged all the books in a nicely manner like maybe a form like a circular or something and we also had arranged a lot of flowers then we also arranged a lot of craft work materials like color papers scissors real flowers jasmine all that and then we called we invited the local people and we told we started with a few minutes of silence and they can take any book the book which they're attracted to and read the book for about 20 minutes they can read if they don't know to read they can take books which have only picture they can just look at pictures mother's picture or share windows photos like that after 20 minutes for about one hour we don't speak no one speaks to anyone we only go and do the activity what are the activity whatever activity we feel related to or even if there is no relation but we choose something we try to do and if people cannot do craft work if people cannot do embroidery they can also go and make a garland that is why I have some thread and some flowers after we have done all the work whatever we had read in connection and thinking about that we do we carry out some work for about an hour then we come and share our reading what we have understood so the sharing after the experience of reading and being quiet the sharing was very valuable normally when you read and immediately you share they're not receptive they talk to each other or they make noise they don't focus their attention in a circle but after the strong experience of being quiet and carrying out some work and thinking of their reading the sharing was very meaningful even 20 people till the last person completed the sharing we were all quiet we were all listening so this we have I learned it working with Surya Gandhi and we both had done this work with some of the villages some of the students and this was also for me very important where at the same time we had 20 different learning outcome from each one of us where we had shared and the school which I am working now I am working in Udhavi school I have been teaching from grade 1 to 10 so I would like to share a little bit about my teaching style in my classroom so whenever I have my students in front of me I feel they are my strength I am not alone and I value their strength so much if I want to do some refinements refinements in them I always include their their input I ask them what differently we can do how differently we can carry out this work for example simple things like keeping the classroom neat and clean and small children know they don't know that very well unless we teach them so I give them like let's say our bags need to be put in line how we can do they give some ideas and then carry out one or two days but then again they make a mess then how I do I ask them please come out let's stand in front of our class look at the class look at the classroom see what do you see I ask when these are like seven year old so they are they say this is what I see bags are in different place my books are not in the right place board is not clean whatever they observe then I tell okay now five minutes everybody does one work we finish then they do it and here I show them different model one is to carry out all together at once and some other model could be I don't want to be disturbed with my class I am carrying out my class but everyone makes one change while my class is happening in the end of the class the change completely the change is happening the whole classroom is in shape so this is about day-to-day activity and also how to practice valuable sharing so there was one time I had a class children were not friendly with each other so there I wanted to practice love and kindness and I asked my children that we would like to learn and practice love and kindness so let's start having one person in mind every day so if I have like 20 students I had picked up one who is a very naughty person I told today we are practicing love and kindness with this person which means if that person does a mistake we forgive or give importance to that person during snack time during lunch time you ask him to go first so I had to also tell in which way we can help the person that the person feels he is taken care so not not just be love and kind that word does not mean anything to the kids so we need to give a little guideline which I always did and it worked so after practicing this somehow the root behavior of the children slowly changes in the end they become friends of each other so this was one of the thing I always tried to to work in my classroom so I have to share one another thing being in Udhavi school today my biggest inspiration is Mr. Sanjeev Agarwal who passed away since I came to Auroville he has been my friend my Anna he helped me in in many of my work so he was my mentor even when I used to work in ICAM and in Udhavi I always shared my teaching experience he was guiding me he would always tell what could have been different or he appreciated what was what he liked about and yeah today he is not there he is the one who who took care of Udhavi school so now it is with us and I also strongly feel inspirited he is there with us so by these examples how I would like to see my life when I look back at my life I see people behind me I see incidents behind me instead of seeing just myself so all day today small small incidents small small experiences with all these people made me strong made me grow and made me learn and I strongly believe this is the divine mother's force which guides through my family through my daughter through my husband through my friends and through all these people and through all these incidents so this is what makes me my life meaningful thank you


Aloha. Thanks for your consideration of the views expressed in this think-tech commentary which we are calling You Won't Like It at All If Trump Is Re-Elected. Let's think about what happens if Trump manages to delay, deflect, or escape from all the suits and prosecutions against him and nevertheless wins, or successfully but falsely claims to win the election in November. The problem is that people don't understand how dangerous he is, how hard he will work to make himself an instant and permanent autocrat on day one, and the awful things he will do to the country and the world if he gets back into office. If you hadn't noticed it, Trump is more experienced on breaking the rules and more adept and determined to do so. His actions and threats are worse now and he is very likely to carry them out even if they are self-interested, corrupt, and destructive. We should all be concerned. His threats aren't just theoretical. They are real. This will affect everyone in the country, even people who are so misguided as to vote for him. The irony is that we will all be the victims. There are many reasons to be concerned. Sadly, we have taken our civil liberties for granted, including those guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. If Trump gets back into office, many of those civil liberties will be lost and it will be too late to get them back. We will all regret not having done more to elect someone else. You won't like what happens.  It will affect your children and the generations to follow. You will be leaving those generations with an irreversible, crushing autocracy under Trump and his successors. Is this what you want? Think Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Putin's Russia. Think of children telling on their parents, friends telling on their friends. There are some things we can do. You can vote for someone else and never Trump. Given the lack of honesty, morality and decency in the Republican Party and their open loyalty to Trump, you should consider voting for Democrats instead. In any event, don't support or give money to Trump. Speak and write against his lies, threats and outlandish claims. Now and God forbid, even if he wins or claims to win later. Not my president. Ever. Here's the takeaway. If you're sitting on the sidelines or making the mistake of supporting or sending money to Trump, you really should reconsider what you're doing in light of what he's saying and what he might do later. In the end, it is you who will be the tragic victim of your own folly. Thanks for your consideration of the views expressed in this ThinkTech commentary, which we are calling, you won't like it at all if Trump is reelected. Aloha.