Putting flesh on bones of the past

Lifestyles – Linda Lynch studies human skeletons to learn more about life and death in ancient times, while her excavation work at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home has helped shine a light on more recent events. Before addressing a history conference at Portumna Workhouse, she spoke to JUDY MURPHY about the stories in our bones.

You can learn a great deal about how a dead person lived by examining their skeleton, says osteoarchaeologist Dr Linda Lynch, who specialises in doing just that. Her work helps us learn how our ancestors lived, through the ages, individually and communally.

“My works starts in the field with the remains in situ and the more individuals we have, the more info we can gauge,” she explains. “The skeleton you have will depend on the life they lived – whether that was forced on them or not. It won’t tell you everything but it can tell a story, including what happened after they died, in the context of the burial.”

As an undergraduate archaeology student at UCC, Linda became fascinated by ancient skeletons.

“I became interested by how humans treat other humans in death. Skeletons can tell a story of living and you can learn about the past from looking at that evidence.”

She did a PhD in the subject, becoming a licensed expert in the field. Linda was involved in test excavations at the site of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, as well as working on finding the group known as ‘The Disappeared’.

These were 16 people kidnapped and murdered by Republican organisations in the 1970s and ’80s. The team of which Linda was a member, helped to locate, recover and identify the remains of most of those people.

Generally, her services are called on for older cases, as she explained during a visit to Portumna’s Irish Workhouse Centre, for a conference to commemorate ‘Black ’47’, the 175th anniversary of the worst year of Ireland’s Great Famine.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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