New research by geneticists hints at the deadly work of Yersinia pestis 5,000 years ago.At the end of the Stone Age, some 5,300 years ago, the populations of Scandinavia and northwest Europe plummeted, and farming communities evaporated. “People stopped building megaliths, like Stonehenge,” said Frederik Seersholm, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. “Settlements were abandoned. Everyone vanished.”The so-called Neolithic decline, which lasted several centuries, is believed to have allowed a nomadic herding culture known as the Yamnaya to migrate west, altering the genetic makeup of early Europeans. The cause of this demographic collapse has been an open question, with the suspects including wars and agricultural crises.A new genomic study published in July in the journal Nature makes the case for another candidate, which had been found in people living at the time but was never thought to have been widespread: the plague.Until now, it was unclear how virulent the Neolithic plague was within a human population. “There is a hypothesis that the oldest plague bacterium lacked epidemic potential,” said Dr. Seersholm, the lead author of the paper. “That hypothesis no longer holds.”The researchers propose that a Stone Age pandemic originated in small farming villages and spread to mega-settlements and far-off lands along with traders who traveled by horse-drawn cart. “We can’t prove that this was exactly how it happened, not yet, anyway,” Dr. Seersholm said. “Still, it’s significant that we can show it could have happened.”‘Bring out your dead’Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The bubonic and septicemic forms — mainly infecting the lymph nodes and blood — are typically transmitted through fleas and rats. The more deadly pneumonic form, which affects the lungs, travels on airborne droplets and is contagious in people and animals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

We tend to think of scribes as being in the mold of Bartleby the Scrivener, the eponymous Wall Street law clerk in Herman Melville’s 1853 short story. Working “silently, palely, mechanically,” Bartleby is an industrious employee who consumes legal documents “as if long famishing for something to copy” — before he eventually turns into an inscrutable refusenik who is relegated to a desk behind a screen that looks out at a brick wall.In ancient Egypt, scribes were more than dreary papyrus-pushers. By and large, they were dignitaries, ranked above artisans and merchants but below priests and nobles. Their status derived chiefly from their literacy, a skill still in its infancy during the Old Kingdom, 4,200 to 4,700 years ago. Influential families sent their teenage sons to train for entry-level jobs at the royal court, where they performed vital administrative functions, such as drawing up contracts, measuring fields for tax purposes and recording the biennial cattle census. There were few if any female scribes.For all their prestige, the scribes of the third millennium B.C. faced many of the same occupational hazards as the desk jockeys and keyboard warriors of today. A new study in the journal Scientific Reports found that the repetitive tasks carried out by Pharaonic-era scriveners, and the postures that they assumed while scrivening, might have caused degenerative changes in their joints, spines and jaws.Museum and university researchers from the Czech Republic examined the remains of 69 adult male skeletons buried from 2700 to 2180 B.C. in a necropolis in Abusir, a complex of pyramids and tombs a few miles south of Cairo. Thirty of the deceased were presumed to have been scribes, judging by their burial location, inferred social rank, or, in six cases, titles found in their tombs.Two scribes in a relief from the Tomb of Akhethotep in Saqqara, Egypt. Scribes performed vital administrative functions, such as drawing up contracts and measuring fields for tax purposes.Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./AlamyThe skeletons of the scribes were compared with those of 39 non-scribes from the same region and time period. “These 39 individuals belonged to the lower strata of society,” said Veronika Dulikova, an Egyptologist at Charles University in Prague and an author of the new paper. “They were buried in humble, mud-brick tombs with a simple niche instead of an inscribed false door, as in the case of members of the elite.” False doors were believed to act as portals between the afterlife and the living world, allowing the soul of the deceased to freely enter and exit the tomb.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

This is a love story: During the spring of 2008, long before they produced evidence of humanity’s first recorded kiss, Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll clasped lips in their first good-night snog. They met a week earlier at a pub near the University of Copenhagen, where both were undergraduates. “I had asked my cousin if he knew any nice single guys with long hair and long beards,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “And he said, ‘Sure, I’ll introduce you to one.’”Dr. Arboll, in turn, had been looking for a partner that shared his interest in Assyriology, the study of Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them. “Not many people know what an Assyriologist actually does,” he told her.“I do,” said Dr. Rasmussen, who had taken some of the same classes.Dr. Arboll, now a professor of Assyriology at the university, said, “When I heard that, I knew she was a keeper.”Three years later they wed. Dr. Rasmussen is now an ecologist at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Aalborg University in Denmark.One night over dinner in 2022, the couple discussed — as scientists in love do — a new genetic study that linked modern herpes variants to mouth-to-mouth kissing in the Bronze Age, roughly 3300 B.C. to 1200 B.C. In the paper’s supplementary materials, a brief history of kissing pinpointed South Asia as the place of origin and traced the first literary buss to 1500 B.C., when Vedic Sanskrit manuscripts were being transcribed from oral history.The researcher, at the University of Cambridge, suggested that the custom — a lip-kissing precursor that involved rubbing and pressing noses together — developed into hardcore smooching. She noted that by 300 B.C. — about when the Indian how-to sex manual, the Kama Sutra, was published — kissing had spread to the Mediterranean with the return of Alexander the Great’s troops from Northern India.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The Mütter Museum, a beloved 19th-century collection of medical curiosities and human remains in Philadelphia, wants to adopt a more “respectful” approach. Some fans won’t have it.The Mütter Museum, a 19th-century repository of medical oddments and arcana at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, attracts as many as 160,000 visitors a year. Among the anatomical and pathological specimens exhibited are skulls corroded by syphilis; spines twisted by rickets; skeletons deformed by corsets; microcephalic fetuses; a two-headed baby; a bound foot from China; an ovarian cyst the size of a Jack Russell terrier; Grover Cleveland’s jaw tumor; the liver that joined the original “Siamese twins,” Cheng and Eng Bunker; and the pickled corpse of the Soap Lady, whose fatty tissues decomposed into a congealed asphalt-colored substance called adipocere.“People are just intrinsically more interested in the unusual,” said Dean Richardson, a professor of equine surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine’s New Bolton Center. “Who could look at a two-headed calf without wanting to know how that happened? Biology is a marvel and better understood if you recognize that its complexities must inevitably lead to some ‘errors.’”The celebrity magician Teller, a Philadelphia native, called the Mütter a place of electrifying frankness. “We are permitted to confront real, not simulated, artifacts of human suffering, and are, at a gut level, able to appreciate the epic achievements of medicine,” he said.But, like museums everywhere, the Mütter is reassessing what it has and why it has it. Recently, the institution enlisted a public-relations consultant with expertise in crisis management to contain criticism from within and without.The problems began in February when devoted fans of the Mütter’s website and YouTube channel noticed that all but 12 of the museum’s 450 or so images and videos had been removed. (In one jokey video, staff members pretended to brush the teeth of skulls; in another, they feigned drinking from one.) Rumors quickly circulated, and three months later Kate Quinn, who was hired last September as the Mütter’s executive director, posted an explanation. The clips, which had amassed more than 13 million views, were being re-evaluated, she wrote, “to improve the visitor experience.”Kate Quinn, the executive director of the museum.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesAn autopsy kit on display.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesMs. Quinn had tasked 13 unnamed people — medical historians, bioethicists, disability advocates, members of the community — with providing feedback on the digital collection. “Folks from a wide background,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview. The purpose of what she called the Mütter’s “post-mortem,” set to finish by Labor Day, was to ensure that the online presence of the museum was appropriate and that its 6,500 specimens of human remains on display were being treated respectfully.Blowback to Ms. Quinn’s ethical review was ferocious. An online petition garnered the signatures of nearly 33,000 Mütter enthusiasts who insisted that they loved the museum and its websites as they were. The petition criticized Ms. Quinn and her boss, Dr. Mira Irons, the president and chief executive of the College of Physicians, for decisions predicated on “outright disdain of the museum.” The complaint called for the reinstatement of all web content and urged the college’s board of trustees to fire the two women immediately. (To date, about one-quarter of the videos have been reinstated.)Moreover, in June, The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece entitled “Cancel Culture Comes for Philly’s Weirdest Museum,” in which Stanley Goldfarb, a former director of the college, wrote that the museum’s new “woke leaders” appeared eager to cleanse the institution of anything uncomfortable. Robert Hicks, director of the Mütter from 2008 to 2019, voiced similar sentiments this spring when he quit as a museum consultant. His embittered resignation letter, which he released to the press, stated that Dr. Irons “has said before staff that she ‘can’t stand to walk through the museum,’” and it advised the trustees to investigate her and Ms. Quinn, both of whom Dr. Hicks believed held “elitist and exclusionary” views of the Mütter.Neither Dr. Goldfarb nor Dr. Hicks had tried to reach out to Ms. Quinn or Dr. Irons to discuss their concerns directly.Amid the professional grumbling, 13 employees left and panicky rumors surfaced on social media: that Dr. Irons planned to turn the Mütter into a research museum closed to the public; that Ms. Quinn had been quietly removing “permanent” exhibits featuring malformed fetuses; that administrators wanted to deter “freaky Goths” and subvert the organization’s mission, which is to help the public “understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and to appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease.”The museum, an arm of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, was established in 1859 by Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgery professor, as a teaching tool to show doctors-to-be what they might encounter.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesWax faces on display showing various eye injuries.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesIn an email, Dr. Irons insisted that the hearsay was just that. “I categorically deny any intention, as Dr. Hicks asserts, that I hate the museum or that my purpose is anything other than to ensure that the materials we display meet professional standards and serve the mission of the college and the museum,” she wrote. “In my view, much of this controversy is being fueled by resistance to any changes in the status quo to the point where we can’t even engage in a discussion without triggering recriminations and accusations.”The museum was established in 1859 by Thomas Dent Mütter, a surgery professor, as a teaching tool to show doctors-to-be what they might encounter. Dr. Mütter, who was the first surgeon in Philadelphia to use ether anesthesia, endowed the museum with $30,000 and a trove of 1,700 anatomical oddities and medical curiosa that he had used in his classes.The collection expanded by subsequent donations and acquisitions, some of which, such as the saponified corpse of Soap Lady, were obtained through subterfuge and bribes to grave diggers. In an age before medical consent was codified, the unclaimed corpses of inmates, paupers, suicide victims and Native Americans were often made available to medical schools as cadavers for dissection and anatomy lessons.The Mütter opened to the public in 1863 and was initially intended only for “medical practitioners”; by the 1970s it was drawing 5,000 visitors annually. “Many people have their first interest in something because it’s weird or edgy or titillating, but that sometimes leads to investigation of more substantive matters,” Dr. Richardson said. “I’d wager there have been plenty of young people whose first impetus to think about the human body was provided by the Mütter.”In 1986, Gretchen Worden, who was then the curator, had the Mütter renovated in the theatrical aesthetic of a Victorian-era cabinet of curiosities, with red carpets and red velvet drapes. “The displays are jarring reminders of mortality, proof that a human being is truly no more than a sum of its parts,” she said at the time. She increased attendance with a popular if somewhat ghoulish museum calendar and mischievous appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” in which she menaced the host with lobotomy picks and tonsil guillotines and grossed him out with hairballs and human horns.Dr. Worden’s antics were considered undignified by some trustees and counter to the health-oriented image they wanted to encourage, but she prevailed. Almost one-third of the college’s revenue now derives from the Mütter’s admissions, store and library services.But museums that display human remains increasingly face public reckoning and scrutiny. Some museums have scrapped the term “mummy” to describe preserved corpses from ancient Egypt, deeming it dehumanizing. In 2021, Jo Anderson, a curator at Great North Museum in Newcastle, England, said, “A significant number of visitors question whether mummified people on display are real.”“What was respectful 100 years ago, or even five years ago, may not be so today,” Dr. Irons said. At the Mütter, she said, the challenge is to make visitors see damaged body parts for what they really are — not objects or curiosities, but real humans who were once alive.An iron lung exhibit.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesDr. Mira Irons, the president and chief executive of the College of Physicians.College of Physicians of PhiladelphiaDr. Irons, a physician who treats children with rare genetic diseases, acknowledged that she had difficulty viewing certain exhibits, particularly fetal specimens presented as medical novelties. She wants such displays to provide a fuller picture of the individual, the condition in question and the therapeutic advances that would affect today’s afflicted.Ms. Quinn was hired after a dozen years as director of exhibitions and public programs at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. “I see my role as getting us back to what we were prior to taking that left-hand turn with regard to the mission,” she said, referring to the era of Dr. Worden. “We’re actively moving away from any possible perception of spectacle, oddities or disrespect for the collections in our care.”On arriving, Ms. Quinn was surprised to learn that the Mütter had no ethics policy, let alone a human-remains policy. What’s more, the museum had only fragmentary data about how many residents — as the staff refers to the human specimens — came to the Mütter or the circumstances of their lives. “We owe it to the remains to learn as much as we can about each individual who’s here,” Ms. Quinn said. “And yes, it matters to a lot of people.”The museum has arranged to return the remains of seven Native Americans to communities in New Jersey and California, as required by federal law. Ms. Quinn is trying to keep ahead of the rapidly changing legal and ethical landscape by conducting the first comprehensive audit of the museum’s objects since the 1940s. She expects this process to take at least four years to complete given the record-keeping and the complexities of the Mütter’s 35,000-object collection, most of which is in storage in the basement.Dr. Hicks remains unhappy with the new perspective. “Dr. Mütter would have been confused at the dictum that the museum should be about health, not death,” he lamented in his resignation letter. “The principle emblazoned at the entrance of many anatomy theaters, ‘This is where the dead serve the living,’ is readily understood by museum visitors without special guidance by Dr. Irons.”Ms. Quinn said: “Robert Hicks? Someone once said, ‘Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.’”

Doctors are generally held in high regard today, but Romans of the first century were skeptical, even scornful, of medical practitioners, many of whom ministered to ailments they did not understand. Poets especially ridiculed surgeons for being greedy, for taking sexual advantage of patients and, above all, for incompetence.In his “Natural History,” Pliny the Elder, the admiral and scholar who died in 79 A.D. while trying to rescue desperate villagers fleeing the debris of Mt. Vesuvius, endeavored to speak out against the medical profession “on behalf of the senate and Roman people and 600 years of Rome.” Their fees were excessive, their remedies dubious, their squabbling insufferable. “Physicians gain experience at our peril and conduct their experiments by means of our deaths,” he wrote. The epitaph on more than one Roman tombstone read: “A gang of doctors killed me.”Medical remedies have improved since those times — no more smashed snails, salt-cured weasel flesh or ashes of cremated dogs’ heads — but surgical instruments have changed surprisingly little. Scalpels, needles, tweezers, probes, hooks, chisels and drills are as much part of today’s standard medical tool kit as they were during Rome’s imperial era.Archaeologists in Hungary recently unearthed a rare and perplexing set of such appliances. The items were found in a necropolis near Jászberény, some 35 miles from Budapest, in two wooden chests and included a forceps, for pulling teeth; a curet, for mixing, measuring and applying medicaments, and three copper-alloy scalpels fitted with detachable steel blades and inlaid with silver in a Roman style. Alongside were the remains of a man presumed to have been a Roman citizen.The site, seemingly undisturbed for 2,000 years, also yielded a pestle that, judging by the abrasion marks and drug residue, was probably used to grind medicinal herbs. Most unusual were a bone lever, for putting fractures back in place, and the handle of what appears to have been a drill, for trepanning the skull and extracting impacted weaponry from bone.Some of the newly excavated instruments included forceps, a curet and three copper-alloy scalpels fitted with detachable steel blades and inlaid with silver in a Roman style.Rusznák Gábor/ELTEThe instrumentarium, suitable for performing complex operations, provides a glimpse into the advanced medical practices of first-century Romans and how far afield doctors may have journeyed to offer care. “In ancient times, these were comparatively sophisticated tools made of the finest materials,” said Tivadar Vida, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Eötvös Loránd University, or ELTE, in Budapest and leader of the excavation.Two millenniums ago Jászberény and the county around it were part of the Barbaricum, a vast region that lay beyond the frontiers of the Empire and served as a buffer against possible outside threats. “How could such a well-equipped individual die so far from Rome, in the middle of the Barbaricum,” mused Leventu Samu, a research fellow at ELTE and a member of the team on the dig. “Was he there to heal a prestigious local figure, or was he perhaps accompanying a military movement of the Roman legions?”Similar kits have been found across most of the Empire; the largest and most varied was discovered in 1989 in the ruins of a third-century physician’s home in Rimini, Italy. But the new find is described as one of the most extensive collections of first-century Roman medical instruments known. Until now, the oldest was thought to be a trove of objects dug up in 1997 at a burial site in Colchester, England, that date to around 70 A.D., very early in the Roman occupation of Britain. The most renowned set turned up in the 1770s at Pompeii’s so-called House of the Surgeon, which was buried under a layer of ash and pumice during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.Colin Webster, a classics professor at the University of California, Davis, and president of the Society for Ancient Medicine and Pharmacology, said the discovery illustrated the porousness of cultural boundaries in the ancient world. “Medicine has long been one of the most active vectors for intercultural exchange,” he said. “And this finding certainly helps show the physical evidence of these dynamics.”No license neededThe remains of the first-century man found accompanying the medical instruments, on display during a presentation of the team’s findings.Rusznák Gábor/ELTEThe Romans had high hopes for their medical experts. In his treatise “De Medicina,” or “On Medicine,” the first-century Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus mused that “a surgeon should be youthful or at any rate nearer youth than age; with a strong and steady hand that never trembles, and ready to use the left hand as well as the right; with vision sharp and clear.” The surgeon should be undaunted and empathetic but unmoved by a patient’s screams of pain; his greatest desire should be to make the patient well.A majority of these undaunted Roman physicians were Greek, or at least speakers of the Greek language. Many were freedmen or even slaves, which may account for their low social standing. The man buried in the Hungarian necropolis was 50 or 60 when he died; whether he actually was a medical practitioner is unclear, researchers said, but he probably was not a local.“Studying medicine was only possible, at the time, in a large urban center of the empire,” Dr. Samu said. Doctors were peripatetic and medical traditions varied by territory. “Ancient medical writers, such as Galen, advised that physicians should travel to learn about diseases that were common to certain areas,” said Patty Baker, former head of archaeology and classics at the University of Kent in England.Would-be surgeons were encouraged to apprentice with recognized doctors, study at large libraries and listen to lectures in such far-flung places as Athens and Alexandria, a hub of anatomical learning. For firsthand experience in treating combat wounds, medics frequently interned in the army and gladiatorial schools, which might explain the presence of medical tools in the Barbaricum.“There were no licensing boards and no formal requirements for entrance to the profession,” said Lawrence Bliquez, emeritus archaeologist at the University of Washington. “Anyone could call himself a doctor.” If his methods were successful, he attracted more patients; if not, he found another career.Surgeries included many performed in the body’s orifices to treat polyps, inflamed tonsils, hemorrhoids and fistulas. Beside trepanning, the more radical surgeries included mastectomy, amputation, hernia reduction and cataract couching. “Surgery was a male domain,” Dr. Bliquez said. “But there were certainly many female midwives, so who can say they knew nothing about surgery, especially as it pertains to gynecology.”Contrary to myth, cesarean sections did not enter medicine until long after Julius Caesar’s birth in 100 B.C. The Romans did, however, practice embryotomy, a surgery by which a knife was used to cut the limbs from an infant while it was stuck in the birth canal. “A hook was used to withdraw the limbs, torso and head from the birth canal once they had been cut,” Dr. Baker said. “It was a gruesome procedure used to save the life of a mother.”Surgery was often the last resort of all medical treatments. “Any of the tools found in the Barbaricum grave could have caused death,” Dr. Baker said. “There was no knowledge of sterilization or germ theory. Patients were likely to die of sepsis and shock.”Second opinions welcomeTivadar Vida, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, with camera, at the excavation site, about 35 miles outside Budapest.Samu Levente/ELTEThe tool-laden grave was discovered last year at a site where relics from the Copper Age (4500 B.C. to 3500 B.C.) and the Avar period (560 to 790 A.D.) had been found on the surface. A subsequent survey with a magnetometer identified a necropolis of the Avars, a nomadic peoples who succeeded Attila’s Huns. Among the rows of tombs, the researchers uncovered the man’s grave, revealing a skull, leg bones and, at the foot of the body, the chests of metal instruments. “The fact that the deceased was buried with his equipment is perhaps a sign of respect,” Dr. Samu said.That is not the only possibility. Dr. Baker said that she often cautioned her students about interpreting ancient artifacts, and asked them to consider alternative explanations. What if, she proposed, the medical tools were interred with the so-called physician because he was so bad at his practice that his family and friends wanted to get rid of everything associated with his poor medical skills? “This was a joke,” Dr. Baker said. “But it was intended to make students think about how we jump to quick conclusions about objects we find in burials.”

Forty-one bent or twisted iron nails, unearthed from a second-century imperial burial site, were meant to keep the deceased in their place.When it came to the treatment of diseases, the ancient Romans had no shortage of magical remedies, several of which involved iron nails. To cure epilepsy, the first-century historian Pliny the Elder advised driving a nail into the ground at the spot where the afflicted person’s head lay at the start of the seizure. The Romans hammered nails into doors to avert plagues and pounded coffin nails into thresholds to keep nightmares at bay. Nails from tombs and crucifixions were sometimes even worn around the neck as talismans against fevers, malaria and evil spells.Recently, archaeologists excavated an unusual set of talismanic nails from a mountaintop necropolis on the outskirts of Sagalassos in southwestern Turkey. In an early Roman imperial tomb, 41 broken nails were found scattered among the cremated remains of an adult male who had lived in the second century A.D. and was buried in situ. Twenty-five of the nails were headless and deliberately bent at right angles; the others were complete roundheaded nails with the shanks twisted multiple times. The unusual funerary practice is the subject of a new study published in the journal Antiquity.“The nails were not used in the construction of the pyre, and had no practical purpose,” said Johan Claeys, an archaeologist at Catholic University Leuven and the lead author of the paper. “They would have been valuable enough to be recovered if still serviceable. But they were dead nails, and the way they were distributed around the perimeter of the tomb suggests that the placement was purposeful.” By “dead nails,” he meant that they had been believed to possess occult power.At the time, the ashes and unburned remnants of cremated bodies were commonly put in an urn and buried in a grave or placed in a mausoleum. In this case, the pyre was carefully sealed beneath a raft of two dozen bricks, arranged in four rows. The undersides of the bricks were discolored, indicating that they had been set atop the still-smoldering embers. The bricks were then slathered with slaked lime.“This wasn’t the thin, temporary layer normally used to cover the skeletal remains before they were recovered for burial,” Dr. Claeys said. “This lime was thick and secured the remains as much as a solid coffin would have.” Lime, he said, was seldom applied during Roman-era interments. Indeed, of the 180 or so tombs that his team examined at the cemetery, this was the only one that had been limed.A coin known as Charon’s obol, bottom; fragments of a glass flask, center; burnt remains of an unidentified worked bone item, front right; pinched nails, front center; and the bent larger nails that were found around the cremation.The Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project, KU LeuvenEach of these three features — the nails, the bricks and the lime — has been found in other graves in the ancient Mediterranean, but this was the first time they had been seen together, Dr. Claeys said. This strongly implied the use of protective charms to keep the “restless dead” from interfering with the living, he said.“Whether or not the cause of the man’s death was traumatic, mysterious or the result of a contagious illness or punishment, it appears to have left the mourners fearful of his return,” he said. “We are witnessing here at least three deviant interventions that each in and of themselves can be understood as means to pin the deceased to his final resting position. The combination swings the pendulum firmly toward safeguarding the living from the dead.”The new study provided significant evidence that “protective magic” was used in Imperial Rome necropoli, said Silvia Alfayé, a professor of ancient history at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, who was not involved in the project. “The Sagalassos cremation tells us a personal but also social story of care, hope, contempt, respect, grief and fear facing loss,” she said. “It reveals the choice of magic as the most suitable ritual technology to manage death anxiety and phantom menaces.”Yo, HadrianSagalassos was built on the slopes of the Taurus mountain range, about 5,000 feet above sea level, in the late fifth century B.C., when the region was part of the Achaemenid Empire. Captured in 333 B.C. by Alexander the Great on his march through coastal Anatolia, Sagalassos was loosely governed from afar, if at all, by members of his ruling clique and their descendants: Antigonus the One-Eyed, possibly Lysimachus of Thrace, and the Seleucids of Syria, who are credited with urbanizing the area.By the second century B.C., Sagalassos had become a city-state of the Hellenistic Attalid Kingdom. With the death of King Attalus III in 133 B.C., the settlement was bestowed on the Roman Republic and, a century later, incorporated into the Empire. The bustling metropolis was later favored by the emperor Hadrian (117 A.D. to 138 A.D.), who named it the regional center of the imperial cult.The primary cremation, right, covered with bricks, and two middle imperial individual tombs, left, at the necropolis.The Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project, KU LeuvenIn late antiquity, Sagalassos, though still dynamic and resilient, faded in importance. From the sixth century A.D. on, it suffered an earthquake, a recession, epidemics and an invasion until it was abandoned in the 13th century. Largely protected from looting and vandalism by its extreme isolation, Sagalassos today remains remarkably well-preserved, with a library, an odeon and outdoor theater, two large bath complexes, a 60-room mansion, a monumental fountain and colossal statues of Hadrian, fellow emperor Septimius Severus and empress Faustina the Elder.Archaeologists from Catholic University have been systematically excavating the area around Sagalassos since 1990. In 2011, they began a fresh exploration of the city’s northeastern edge, a kind of premature suburban sprawl originally dedicated to agricultural terracing that had been converted for funerary and artisanal purposes. The dig uncovered relics, intact burials and traces of cremation pyres spanning six centuries.“As Sagalassos belonged to the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire, many of their funerary practices are more Greek in nature than Roman,” said Sam Cleymans, an anthropologist at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Belgium who also worked on the new paper.The so-called dead nails turned up in 2012. Dr. Cleymans, then a student doing fieldwork at the site, remembered reading a short description of nails that had been strewn around burials in the Roman necropolis of Blicquy in Belgium. “The account mentioned that some were bent and did not seem to have had a use as coffin nails,” he said. “The author interpreted these nails as a way to bind the spirits of the dead to the grave to keep them from wandering around.”According to Dr. Alfayé, the idea behind bent and broken nails was to erect a two-way barrier that would shield both the dead and the living.“These rituals were aimed at hermetically locking the grave and securing it against invasive threats such as robbery, vandalism and witchcraft, as well as blocking the possible escape of a runaway revenant,” she wrote in an email. “In the ancient Roman mind-set, nails, whether bent or twisted or decapitated, were invested with magical potency. The ones from graveyards were considered best for neutralizing supernatural harm by transferring their dead provenance to the evil and killing it.”The upper portion of the archaeological site of Sagalassos, where an ancient theater sits.The Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project, KU LeuvenA coin for CharonNails aside, Dr. Claeys said, the Sagalassos cremation was performed with at least some of the traditional funerary rites that might be expected from ancient sources and archaeological parallels.Although whoever buried the man may have feared him, they clearly put care into the process. The tomb was respectfully furnished with worldly goods such as baskets, perfume bottles, clothing, ceramic urns, vessels containing grains and nuts, and Charon’s obol, a coin placed in the mouth or near the body of the dead to ensure safe passage to the Underworld.The researchers could not ascertain whether relatives of the departed were buried nearby. Kinship typically can be established only through inscriptions or DNA analysis. None of the Sagalassos graves bore epitaphs, and genetic material is often destroyed by high temperatures in ancient cremations. “Teeth, especially molars, are arguably the best source for the extraction of DNA,” Dr. Claeys said. “We did not recover any molars.”On the other hand, he added, the cremation took place close to the eastern edge of the team’s excavation trench. “Who knows what lies just a few meters more to the east?” Dr. Claeys said. He is concerned that while extending the trench might provide answers, it could just as easily open up a whole set of new questions.“At some point you have to make choices, ideally based on research questions, but time and financial constraints will also play their part,” he said. “The basic principle is that it is better to leave the archaeological record untouched as long as it is not threatened, which explains the often limited interventions we undertake in Sagalassos.”Dr. Alfayé is fond of the Spanish expression “dar en el clavo” — to hit the nail on the head. “The meaning is to find the clue, discover something,” she said. In the ancient cemeteries of Sagalassos, something is always waiting to be discovered.