Medical Imaging Technologies and Palaeopathology Gordon Turner-Walker*, Simon Mays # & Unni Syversen* * Medical Faculty, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7006 Trondheim, Norway. # Centre for Archaeology, English Heritage, Fort Cumberland, Portsmouth, PO4 9LD, UK. Introduction Developments in clinical imaging technologies hold considerable prom- ise for the examination of human skeletal remains. Radiography is per- haps the most obvious crossover from the world of clinical medicine and X-rays were employed as early as 1897 by Charles Chester Leon- ard and Stewart Cullin of the University of Pennsylvania to examine a Peruvian mummy - barely 18 months after the discovery of X-rays by Roentgen on 8th November 1895. Today, X-rays are a common diagnostic tool in investigating pathological lesions in archaeological bones. Increasingly however, these qualitative investigations of indi- vidual skeletons are being supplemented by quantitative radiography of specific bones at the population level. Such studies are of interest to the medical community since they provide evidence for the dynamics of some diseases over many generations. The advantages to the palaeopathologist in employing clinical tools lie in that they are non-destructive, reproducible and can be compared directly with similar data from living populations. The techniques avail- able for studies on ancient peoples range from digital radiography, through computed tomography (CT) to X-ray densitometry (DXA). The resulting images provide quantitative data on the geometry and inter- nal architecture of archaeological bones, and the amount and distri- bution of bone mineral. Here we concentrate on the measurement of bone mineral density (BMD) in the hip (proximal femur) in ancient pop- ulations and consider the validity of comparing BMD measurements in archaeological bones with those from living populations. This is espe- cially pertinent since recent years have seen several published papers on BMD and osteoporosis in Medieval populations. 1-6 When measuring BMD in single bones as opposed to patients, a soft tissue substitute is employed to compensate for the absence of muscle and fat. In clinical studies of dissected bones, water baths or acrylic blocks are frequently used as a tissue substitute. In studies of archaeological bones, dry rice has more often been employed since this avoids wetting the bones and allows the bone element, frequently a femur, to be oriented in such a way as to mimic its position in a living patient (Figure 1). The bone can then be scanned in the same manner as a patient (Figure 2). Figure 1: Archaeological femur positioned in dry rice. Figure 2: Femur positioned on DXA scanner. The dedicated PC can be seen in the background.