Emily AtkinsonANT 320Professor PerezResearch Paper19 December 2011

Patterns of Violence: Osteology, Torture, Burial and the

Realization of Perceived Deviance

Torture, genocide, execution, sacrifice, mortuary ritual—all

share a deep and inextricable relationship to order. Hannah

Arendt located radical evil in the totalitarian impulse to reduce

humans to predictable, identical, reactions1. Less totalitarian

episodes of genocide seek to efface the marginal, or to erase a

threat to dominance and so destroy the marginality of the

perpetrators’ earlier experiences2. Colonial, punitive torture

is an assertion of one order as superior to another; political,

deterrent torture combats dissidence through fear and pain.

Sadistic and terroristic torture, and torture as a punishment for

something that is not a crime—these are twisted proclamations of

selfhood, and of total self-importance., on the part of the

perpetrator. In fact, nearly all torture is a declaration of

one’s self in opposition to the marginalized Other, and is

actualized through the Other’s physical effacement. If the bog

bodies of prehistory are sacrifices or executions3, if Wari

trophy heads come from outsiders or opponents4, the impulse

behind these killings and deviance-making disposals of remains is

1 Daniel Brandes, Kahn Institute lecture and discussion, 21 and 22 November, 2011. 2 As with the Hutus in Rwanda, who were marginalized by the Belgians in favor of the minority Tutsis, many years prior to the genocide, as described in Philip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. 3 Discussed in Mike Parker Parker Parker Pearson’s The Archaeology of Death anBurial, 2000.

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the same—the eradication of a different order, a threat, an

Other, to assert one’s own selfhood, dominance, and paradigm of

order. Genocide is the ultimate expression of this dark desire.

Torture and the culturally inappropriate burial and disposal of

remains manufacture the deviance the perpetrators need to

perceive in the victims. These processes create that deviance and

make it tangible. Ironically, once such deviance becomes

tangible, it can be used to reflect back on the perpetrators and

make them deviant. The paths to the focused violence of torture

and genocide are manifold, but the marks of such violence on the

bone are not always immediately apparent or distinct. Just as

context is important in tracing the lines of violence through a

culture, it is vital in examining and determining what

constitutes an osteology of torture, as is finding the cultural

normal in order to determine what is deviant. Such context

includes not only an understanding of what torture does not look

like—road traffic accidents, ‘ordinary’ murder, falls—but also an

understanding of telling abnormalities in the disposal of

remains, the identification of the victim, and witness

statements. Antemortem traumas are important, as is what happened

after each of those traumas—a lack of medical treatment, an

exacerbation, a cause of death. Wound patterning, together with

burial context and witness testimony, is the most significant

4 Tiffiny Tung’s work, particularly the 2011 article “Identifying locals, migrants, and captives in the Wari Heartland” from the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, discusses evidence for this in great detail. Radiogenic strontium isotope analysis was applied to burials and trophy heads to demonstrate that trophy heads came from multiple different locales, and that, unlike the captives who became trophy heads, voluntary migrants appear to have largely been assimilated. This provides an illustration of how osteological and archaeological data canbe used to understand social context (2011:247).

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piece in determining torture as distinct from anything else, to

the standards demanded by the World Court and forensic

investigation. For both the injuries sustained by torture and the

postmortem processing of torture victims, there are two sets of

questions to be asked concerning proving and understanding what

occurred, creating a socio-osteological understand of the impact

of realizing perceived deviance on the body, in life and death.

In the first case, the contextual questions are, who is torturing

whom? How did they get the power to do so, and why are they doing

it—for information, satisfaction, dehumanization, or punishment?

What information? Why dehumanization? Punishment for what? Is the

victim being tortured because of their individual identity, their

cultural identity, their ethnic identity, their political

identity? How is the victim being tortured, and why those

particular methods in this particular culture at this particular

time? Do the methods have symbolic, cultural, or historical

significance? Osteologically, torture can be proven by ruling out

other potential causes of death and traumas through examination

of wound patterning which may correspond to torture methods such

as beating or, more specifically, falanga, amputation,

kneecapping, electric torture, or postural torture. Further

documentation will come from examination of remains for signs

indicating structural violence or the exigencies of a conflict

period, or being held against one’s will, such as malnutrition

and absence of medical treatment, both of which can manifest on

the skeleton. The timing of injuries—antemortem and how long

before death an injury occurred, whether traumas occurred

perimortem and were associated with death, and what the cause of

death itself was, if possible. A similar interrogation of the

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circumstances of disposal of the remains should be undergone as

well. Again, the cultural norms regarding mortuary practice must

be understood in order to see deviance, particularly as regards

disposal location, aims of concealment, and destruction of memory

or marginalizing symbolic characteristics of disposal. Of

particular interest is the physical evidence of cultural

processing, or the absence of typical processing, that may attend

the remains. This paper attempts to understand the osteological

effects of torture in life and death through a lens of violence

theory, focusing on how bodies are considered and inscribed in

patterns of violence, the interplay of structural violence and

direct violence, and a historical and contemporary examination of

mortuary norms and what deviance from those norms typically

indicates. I will discuss multiple contexts and case studies in

each, but with a particular focus on contemporary torture in

Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Peru, and on historic

burials in Rome, Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

Torture, with the possible exception of totalitarianism5, is

an attempt on the part of the perpetrators to humanize themselves

by dehumanizing the Other. Such extreme attempts at asserting

selfhood and dominance often derive from a previous cultural

experience of collective dehumanization or devaluation, the

imposition of a kind of structural violence. Physically

uncovering remains can also be an important restitution of the

personhood stolen from the decedent, at least so far as survivors

and family members are concerned. Taussig notes that a powerful

5 According to Arendt, totalitarianism goes further in that it asserts one order over any and all selfhood, even that of the perpetrators.

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instrument in silencing surrounding dirty wars and the

disappearance of the disappeared is the way in which people

“believe and disbelieve at one and the same time” that such a

thing is happening, “but proof comes sure enough with…bloody

disembowelment--- all of which I take to be paradigmatic of what

General Landazabal refers to as ‘the dirty war’ which he says

‘is said to be going on’” (1992:21). Bodies say what is going on,

when they can be seen; on the body in the concealed grave is

proclaimed torture and murder by the perpetrators, and unearthed

bodies can say what was done to them, sometimes incontrovertibly

and loudly enough to effect change. When this occurs,

marginalized bodies are again given a space in the social order,

are made to reappear and give evidence and are then, because the

people who inhabited them cannot reappear alive, are replaced

within the social order as best as can be done, with a proper

funeral. They are renamed, rehumanized, and re-placed in this way

as the perpetrators are, through the exposure of their actions,

publically dehumanized and displaced as deviant, even if their

actions were not at the time deviant at all. This re-placement of

the disappeared is what Taussig calls “filling the public void

with private memory” (1992:27).

Torture is defined by the 1987 UN Convention Against Torture

as: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical

or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such

purposes as obtaining for him or a third person information or a

confession…when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the

instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public

official or other person acting in an official capacity” 6; 6 Quoted in Baraybar & Kimmerle 2008, p. 202.

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however, this definition is an extremely narrow one and does not

even take into account all of the circumstances in which state

actors may exert unlawful violence on their subjects. Punitive

torture and deterrent torture may not include an interrogatory

component, and can be used with equal effect to terrorize a

population and to attempt to coerce groups or individuals to

behave a certain way, or to cease certain behaviors through fear.

As noted by Wisnewski and Emerick, dehumanizing torture, or

torture devoted to the destruction of the victim’s personhood,

can also be used as a form of deterrent or terroristic torture

(2009:6-7). The different modes of torture they describe7 can,

clearly, overlap in other ways; sadistic individuals may become

official torturers; interrogation can be a mask for what is

essentially punitive, deterrent, and/or dehumanizing torture; and

punitive and judicial torture can also be understood as deterrent

torture. A state or other powerful group’s torture of someone

they perceive to be deviant or an Other tends to have at its root

a dehumanizing impulse, the analogue of which is the urge to

humanize of empower oneself and one’s group in relation to the

now-dehumanized Other, as described above, or to punish deviance

within one’s group in order to strengthen it and clearly define

its limits, by marking or casting out those who do not remain

within those limits.

As the motivation behind torture and the relative identities

of the torturer and the victim are important, so are the

logistics: the how, the where, and the when. These elements of

7 In The Ethics of Torture, Wisnewski and Emerick divide torture into six primary categories: judicial/evidential, punitive, interrogational, dehumanizing, terroristic/deterrent, and sadistic (2009:6-7).

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torture can have cultural, symbolic, and evidentiary

significance; an act of public torture indicates something quite

different about not only the intent but the self-perceived

authority and righteousness of those doing the torturing than

does an act of torture deeply concealed and publicly denied.

Because it would be impossible to prove torture according the UN

definition, or to define with certainty the motive behind

inflicted wounds from examining bones alone, the context in which

human remains are found or injured bodies are examined, together

with the political circumstances of the time in which the wounds

were inflicted, the societal perception of the victim or the

group from which victims were usually taken, cultural markers of

normality or deviance, and the cultural itself are all vital to

understanding and potentially to proving that torture occurred.

It is impossible to look even at the most suggestive pattern of

wounds on bone and pronounce that the perpetrator of those wounds

inflicted them in order to gain information from the victim; for

such determinations of motivation, witness statements and

knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the infliction of

those wounds are necessary. Conversely, all such knowledge and

witness statements may not be enough to prove that torture

occurred without hard evidence in the form of bones and bodies

behind them, and the courage required to put forth accusations of

torture may only be unearthed along with the remains that provide

evidence to give those accusations the force of truth and power

that they need.

Osteologically, the most salient feature of torture is the

method by which a victim was injured, because it is that evidence

which can be located and explored on the bone. Of course, there

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are many methods of torture, including all psychological torture,

which are invisible on the skeleton, and there are many ways an

individual trauma or even group of traumas might show up which

are similar to torture but which in fact derive from an ordinary

crime or something devoid of intent, such as a fall or car

accident. Hence, careful examination of wound patterning and

knowledge of the soft-tissue effects and the sequelae of torture

is vital to making accurate determinations of its occurrence, as

is the context in which remains were found,. Similarly important

is the physical context of an individual’s injury, and the

careful reading of presences and absences. For instance, in cases

of torture, a person is often bound, and parry fractures to the

ulnae are not in evidence, even when cranial or facial injuries

are. Parry fractures are defensive fractures which typically

occur when an individual tries to protect his or her face and

head with a forearm, deflecting the blow, with the medial

diaphysis of the ulna taking the brunt, causing a complete

transverse fracture of that bone8. Transverse fractures such as

these tend to be the result either of prolonged, repetitive

stress or of a direct blow9. Where there is no other appearance

of stress, or the bone is located such that repetitive motion is

unlikely to have occurred, transverse fractures can provide

evidence of a direct blow. While people who are tortured by

beating may exhibit such defensive wounds, it is rarer than in

ordinary assault cases10. Thus, in the presence of blunt force

8 Baraybar & Kimmerle, 2008:173. 9 Riemer in Baratz et al. Orthopaedic Surgery: The Essentials, 199, p. 517. 10 Baraybar & Kimmerle, 2008:171.

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trauma to the face and head, the absence of defensive wounds

could potentially present corroborating evidence for torture11

The method of torture can be indicative of cultural context

or performance, and changes in typical methods can indicate a

transition period or change in that context12. Humans are

endlessly and horrifically creative, and can devise seemingly

infinite ways to hurt one another. Still, there is a tendency for

forms of torture to coalesce around certain patterns of

methodology. Baraybar and Kimmerle write that

Cultural differences have been observed in the mechanism of injury in cases of assault…Therefore, finding identical injuries in different populations suggests the injuries resulted from a consistent mechanism. For example, homicidalinjuries cause by blunt trauma occur more frequently to the head, whereas sharp trauma occurs more commonly to the thorax. (2008:204)

Though these methods of direct violence may appear similar or

even identical, they are intimately associated with specific

forms of cultural violence, which may or may not be apparent from

the injuries inflicted on the bone. In Northern Ireland, the IRA

and other nationalist groups tended to shoot through a joint in a

lateromedial direction, while loyalist paramilitaries shot in an

anteroposterior direction13, a technique that often caused more

damage due to the increased likelihood of perforating the 11 Baraybar & Kimmerle, 2008:204. They also note that the lack of defensive wounds in conjunction with antemortem trauma indicates the torturer’s intent to maim rather than kill. 12 As in Northern Ireland, when a 1994 ceasefire categorized any use of firearms by paramilitary groups as a breach of the peace, punishment shootings or “kneecappings” gave way to punishment beatings.13 Peyton describes the difference between many nationalist and loyalistpunishment shootings (2002:54).

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popliteal artery or vein in the knee area14. Thus minute

osteological details may be, with context, discernibly distinct.

Beating is the most common form of torture, according to

Baraybar & Kimmerle. Brogdon et al characterize the typical

osteological results of beating as including residual deformities

of rib and spinal fractures; defensive injuries; facial

fractures; nondefensive injuries to extremities (2003:106).

Baraybar & Kimmerle are more detailed in their analysis,

asserting that injuries usually focus on the face, followed by

the chest, and that rib fractures constitute the majority of

injuries in most cases under examination.

In terms of facial trauma, Brogdon et al. note that domestic

abuse victims typically present with mandibular fractures (of the

mandibular body, angle, and ramus), along with fractures to the

nasal, orbital, and zygomatic bones and the teeth. In these

cases, unlike in the torture cases described below, rib fractures

are uncommon (2003:45). The patterning of facial injuries shown

by victims of abuse is vastly different from that shown in

victims of car accidents, who tend to display “massive and

multiple” injuries to the face and jaw, rather than the more

localized, presumably smaller fractures described above

(2003:45). Baraybar & Kimmerle describe the cranial fractures

resulting from blunt force trauma. Patterned wounds, which

reflect the shape of the object that inflicted them, are not

uncommon. Greater force tends to produce radiating fractures over

a larger area, while penetrating force and force that directly

14 Peyton notes that the loyalist method caused greater vascular damage;I looked at the illustration of the knee joint in Patton & Thibodeau tosee what type of damage might be thus incurred (2000:169).

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impacts the skeletal tissue tend to result in injuries that

remain fairly localized and to produce concentric and depressed

fractures rather than radiating fractures, which are more

commonly seen in falls and explosions (2008:159-62).

Specific patterns or directions of injury are difficult to

discern from rib fractures, as they are highly variable and

depend almost entirely upon the point of impact. As will be

discussed further in the case study from Kosovo, rib fractures

can be extremely dangerous when medical treatment is not

forthcoming, particularly to the elderly. Generally, rib

fractures follow a pattern involving more fractures concentrated

in anterior region, decreasing from the lateral region and

further decreasing in the posterior region. Baraybar & Kimmerle

further observe that anterior rib fractures tend to occur at the

level of the midclavicular line, lateral to the costochondral

joint, while lateral fractures tend to occur at the greater

curvature of the rib, between the axillary and the scapular

lines, and posterior fractures, when present, fall between the

midline and the scapular line. In cases of torture, multiple

fractures, healed to differing degrees, will often be present.

Anteroposterior pressure on the chest from an anterior or

anterolateral direction can cause fractures of the costal body,

which may cause spurs of bone to break off. Fractures of the

lumbar vertebrae are very rare as they must come from a direct

strike, and are far more likely to result from being hit by a car

than from a beating15. Fractures to the sternum often occur in 15 Baraybar & Kimmerle 2008, Chapter 5. This characteristic of lumbar fracturing was used in a case in Peru to determine that a soldier listedamong those killed in a raid on a home in Lima had in fact been in a road traffic accident.

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conjunction with beatings, and may be associated with rib

fractures. Sternal fractures tend to be transverse fractures of

the sternal body and to fall between the second and third

costochondral notches. Multiple fractures usually occur between

notches three and four or four and five, and usually result from

direct impact.

Baraybar & Kimmerle consider in particular 19 individuals

from Peru and Kosovo in “Skeletal Evidence of Torture”, and the

skeletal evidence from these individuals indicates that the most

common injuries were anteroposterior chest compression with rib

fractures near the costochondral cartilage, fractures in other

regions of the rib cage probably due to direct impact and

fractures to the sternum. 16 individuals had rib fractures, 4 had

sternal fractures, and one individual each had fractures to the

cranial vault, the teeth, and a lumbar vertebra. 18 out of the 19

are thought to have been tortured based on these fracturing

patterns. The Kosovan victims were thought to have been tortured

and executed by the Kosovo Liberation Army. There were 11

victims, 8 of whom had been identified. In all 11 cases, there

was blunt force trauma to the ribs, sternum, tibia, and teeth. In

most cases, several days’ healing was in evidence on the

fractures tp the ribs, sternum, and tibia (2008:205-6). The 8

Peruvian individuals were taken from across the country and

represented multiple incidents. Two of these incidents had

corroborating witness testimony; one old man was arrested and

beaten at his arrest, and was thought to have been shot. In

another case, five people were arrested and severely beaten; four

were shot. In five cases, cause of death was due to gunfire

injuries, and the remains were concealed in clandestine graves,

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and had not yet been identified. In each case there were injuries

to the chest or spine, with fractures to all aspects of the rib

cage and the sternum. The three cases with witness corroboration

provided further evidence that the victims had been hit, kicked,

and stomped on before their deaths (2008:207-8). Both of these

descriptions demonstrate the necessary dovetailing of skeletal

evidence, burial context, and, ideally, witness testimony in

determining torture. In another Peruvian case discussed in the

same chapter, one individual thought was determined to have died

from torture and execution, but it was instead determined that he

likely died from a car accident of some kind, based on the

radiating fractures to his cranium and fibula, together with

fractures on one side of the ribs, away from the costochondral

cartilage, and the single fracture to his manubrium (2008: 234).

As mentioned above, radiating fractures occur based on large,

heavy trauma, and the type of thoracic trauma associated with

torture tends to fracture the ribs near the costochondral

cartilage and to fracture the sternal body rather than the

manubrium. This case in particular demonstrates the importance of

wound patterning.

Brogdon et al. briefly describe further forms of torture

which leave osteological evidence, some of which tend to be

regionally localized. Each description represents a pattern of

wounds, which may be found in conjunction with other telling

wounds and evidence as well. Fractures of the foot phalanges,

metatarsals, and tarsals, with a bias toward the calcaneus, are

indicative of falanga, or beating the soles of the feet, a form

of torture found primarily in the Middle and Far East. Together

with an absence of fractures to the lateral malleolus, which are

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usually not found, and perhaps with fractures to other portions

of the ankle if feet were held in place during torture, the

indications grow stronger. At the cellular level, an increase in

bony uptake and abnormal degenerative changes are seen (Brogdon

et al. 109).

Even more localized than falanga, palmatoria is practiced in

Guinea-Bissau, takes advantage of tibial proximity to surface by

beating on shins, often creating a periosteal reaction due to

hematoma beneath the periosteum and invoking laminar periostitis,

as well as damage to the endosteum and medullary cavity.

Kneecapping will be discussed in detail below. Brogdon et al

describe the specific use of a low velocity firearm on a knee,

ankle, or elbow joint, rather than the broader definition applied

by Northern Irish doctors. In these wounds, bullets are

frequently found within the joint or bone, and functioning of the

joint is often permanently destroyed or limited (2003:109). Among

the types of torture often thought of but seldom seen is finger

and toe torture, in which thumb, finger, or toe screws are

applied and cause compression injuries, including unusual

fractures to the ungual tuberosity of the distal phalanges.

Similar but less severe compression injuries can occur from

stomping with rifle butts or other blunt objects; the more severe

injuries resulting from screws often require amputation of the

digit. These are relatively identifiable markers, although less

so if medical treatment was received and the digit amputated

(2003:125).

Brogdon et al. state that prisoner’s sinusitis, which occurs when

facial beating results in opacification of maxillary sinuses due

to bleeding, in Chad, but it is certainly a possibility in other

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locales as well. Injuries to the face are the most common wounds

found in torture beatings (2003:109). Electric torture wouldn’t

seem to leave a mark on the bone, but can; torture using

electricity works by inducing convulsions of the muscle, which

can create fractures and other injuries which may have

osteological sequelae. In particular, vertebral compression

fractures are seen with electric torture, especially high

thoracic vertebral fractures. Electroshock torture and grand mal

seizures are among the very few causes of such fractures, and so

such fractures could provide rather compelling evidence for

torture (2003:119).

Violations of human rights in a context dictated by

colonialism is particularly loaded, because to violate someone’s

human rights is, in essence, to declare them to be not human, and

colonialism often justified itself by referring to those it

colonized as subhuman and in need of guidance from

‘civilization’. English politicians and media characterized the

Irish as a subhuman “missing link” for years during Britain’s

subjugation of Ireland and the Irish16. To declare, then, in

Northern Ireland, that a largely Irish Catholic population of

suspected terrorists were eligible for separate interrogation

centers and courts which admitted confessions obtained under what

most people and international law would call duress if not

torture, is especially complicated17 . Feldman writes that, in

16 As Gail Lewis remarks in Forming nation, framing welfare; 1998:165.17 Colm Campbell describes the methods used in Northern Ireland and the international reaction (2005); Whyte, in Moody & Martin 2001, states that those suspected of IRA affiliation were interned without trial in the 1970s while Protestant paramilitaries, who were also guilty of terrorism and murder, were not.

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refusing to wash, in leaving their mark on the state’s prisons

with their feces, and in refusing to eat, prisoner protests used

their bodies in the same way as weapons, drawing upon this

colonial history to enforce their point. The state, in performing

interrogational torture, also draws power from prisoners’ bodies

(1991:115; 165-73).

There are multiple systems of ‘justice’, ‘law’ enforcement,

and codes of social and anti-social behavior at play in Northern

Ireland. At one level there is that explicitly embraced by the

state, to which law-abiding citizens are supposed to have

recourse, and wherein terrorism is wrong and, furthermore, is a

more serious crime than, for example, joyriding or selling drugs,

two offenses which are largely neglected by police, particularly

in favor of investigating and prosecuting terrorists. Within the

state system, it is further espoused that, if one is a terrorist

and ais caught, it is a good thing to do—an atonement, a

citizen’s duty-- to give the state authorities any information on

other terrorists and terrorists that one has. This behavior will

be positively reinforced in terms of sentencing, protection, and

preferential treatment.

In fact, many citizens of Northern Ireland, particularly

Catholics, do not feel that they have equal recourse to the state

system, or perhaps do not feel that the state system is

legitimate18, and so instead apply to a shadow system created by

paramilitary and terrorist organizations. Within this shadow

system, behavior that immediately damages the intimate community,

behavior that occurs within a local Protestant or Catholic group

rather than between Protestants and Catholics, is of great 18 English, in Moody & Martin 2001, pp. 308-9.

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import, and paramilitary groups will take it upon themselves to

investigate and punish such behavior as joyriding, drug dealing,

and theft. Unlike the police and the state justice system,

however, paramilitaries do not have prisons, so their punishments

take on another form, such as kneecapping or punishment beating.

These punishments and worse are also applied to those who are

thought to have betrayed the group by divulging information to

the authorities, the ultimate sin in the eyes of paramilitary

groups. These punishments leave a particular osteological

signature, addressed further below.

The state’s use of interrogation centers and the so-called

Five Techniques (Campbell 2005; Feldman 1991), while debatably

constituting torture and certainly often constituting detainment

without trial or cause, is such that little osteological evidence

would likely be left. Furthermore, few if any people died as a

result of the Five Techniques. The national and international

legitimacy of the state was such that victims of the Five

Techniques could be imprisoned or released without the state

fearing consequences from their testimony, particularly if they

were subsequently further detained as terrorists. Hence, evidence

for such torture is almost entirely dependent upon witness

accounts.

By contrast, the ‘justice’ exacted by the alternative state

formed by the IRA and other groups leaves plenty of osteological

evidence. [One article] and the Royal Victoria Hospital in

Belfast’s reports demonstrate that “kneecapping” in fact more

often involved a gunshot wound to the distal femur or tibia than

an actual insult to the kneecap, although gunshots to the kneecap

as well as the elbow joints and sometimes the ankle joints also

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are known to have occurred. Interestingly, though the parallel

state implied by IRA actions completely lacked international

legitimacy, its legitimacy within the communities where it

operated was such that it, too, could exact such punishment and

release the victim with all but impunity. Consequently, there is

a good deal of data on the healing and sequelae of these wounds,

and corroborating survivor testimony as well.

Nicholas et al define a gunshot wound to the knee as

occurring “between the levels of the adductor tubercle and the

tibial tuberosity” (1993:92), noting that very few victims

present with injuries to the patella19. In Calderwood’s analysis

of trauma fractures from Royal Victoria Hospital in 1972, he

asserts that gunshot wound fractures to the tibia, metacarpals,

and shaft of femur are the most common (no date:298).

Because these types of violence in Northern Ireland both

tend to leave victims alive, and because 95% of victims are

hospitalized within 30 minutes20 of injury, with, on at least one

occasion, an ambulance being called by the perpetrators arriving

five minutes ahead of “schedule,” and told to return after the

punishment had been completed (1993:93), there is a uniquely

large data set on injuries from paramilitary punishments and

bombings, and on complications, particularly from resultant

fractures, from hospital records and statistics. For example,

Calderwood reported a surprisingly low rate of osteomyelitis

following fracture due to gunshot wounds in the 1972 hospital

records, at 2% (no date: 304). Most kneecappings or other 19 According to Richard M. Nicholas, R. John Barr, and Raymond A.B. Mollan in “Paramilitary Punishment in Northern Ireland: A Macabre Irony.” 1993, Journal of Trauma 34(1): 90-95.20 As above, page 90.

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punishment shootings are done with low-velocity weapons such as

handguns. Many of these shootings, according to Nolan & McCoy,

injured neither joints nor bone and resulted in “only minor soft

tissue damage which did not necessitate [hospital] admission and

was treated by wound excision and debridement under local

anaesthetic” (1996:405). Nicholas et al. included figures for

joint involvement and descriptions of common complications21.

Several articles note a shift in the type of punishment

applied by paramilitary groups occurring around the time of the

ceasefire in 199422. Nolan and McCoy note that, in 1994 and

afterwards, “‘knee-cappings’ virtually ceased…The use of firearms

is regarded as a breach of the ceasefire and current punishment

involves beating the victim’s limbs with clubs, baseball bats,

and hockey and hurley sticks” (1996:405)23. They note that these

beatings typically result in more joint involvement than most

kneecappings and tend to involve comminuated fractures, though

beatings cause fewer injuries to the vascular system. Peyton

gives the percentages of injuries from 1992-2001 as 60%

21 In 1986, the knee joint was the only one involved, and only in under 10 cases. In 1987 knee joint involvement increased to approximately 40 cases, and both ankle joint involvement (approximately 10 cases) and elbow joint involvement (under 5 cases). In 1988, there were under 30 cases of with knee joint involvement, approximately 10 cases with ankle involvement, and from 6-10 cases with elbow joint involvement. In 1989, the number of cases with knee joint involvement skyrocketed to over 70, with over 20 cases involving the ankle joint but a decrease in elbow involvement (approximately 5 cases). Complications occurred in 41% of knee injuries, 68% of ankle injuries, and 30% of elbow injuries in the period under consideration. Of the complicated knee injuries, the popliteal artery was implicated in 33% of cases, with associated fractures in half of that group.22 Nolan & McCoy, 1996 pg. 405; Gardiner 1997; O’Neill et al. 2001. 23 Nolan and McCoy note an increase from 28 beatings in 1993-4 to 140 from August 1994 to July 1995 (1996:405).

Atkinson 20

punishment beatings and 40% gunshot wounds, with a total of 2322

injuries or deaths related to paramilitary violence (2002:53). He

also states that the number of these injuries related to

punishment for antisocial behavior has been decreasing, but

neither provides an alternative rationale for the injuries nor

evidence to support this decrease, other than stating that they

are used to “stifle dissent” (2002:53). Prior to the 1994 and

subsequent ceasefires, beatings were described as a warning that

might be delivered for a first offense (Nicholas et al. 1993:91).

Osteologically, these punishment beatings would appear to be

different than those described in Baraybar & Kimmerle 2008.

Rather than focusing on the thorax and resulting in primarily rib

fractures, Peyton describes punishment beatings as primarily

directed at the limbs, particularly the forearms, hands, and

shins, with amputation of a finger an not uncommon consequence of

beatings to the hands (2002:54). This difference might be due to

intent—punitive torture rather than either sadistic or

interrogative torture, without an intent to permanently

dehumanize, but instead to mark as deviant from the community and

hopefully to deter future deviance. The intent was both punitive

and deterrent; most low velocity gunshot wounds did heal, and the

idea was to deter further antisocial behavior from the victim

himself and from those who saw him and his injuries in the

community24. In cases where an offense was repeated, the offender

24 I use male pronouns here because, as Reilly et al. describe, violencebetween young offenders and between the paramilitaries and young offenders is almost entirely restricted to men. Nicholas et al. differentiate between the punishment shootings and beatings applied to young men who transgress community boundaries, and the tarring and feathering more frequently inflicted on young women who associated with British soldiers.

Atkinson 21

might receive more severe beatings or shootings to multiple

joints, and might even be banished from the area upon leaving the

hospital, under threat of death (Peyton 2002:54).

The difference, then, between state and paramilitary torture

is not so wide as it might seem, particular because

paramilitaries seek to set up parallel states within their

separate communities. Both have the punishment of deviance as at

least one component, although state torture is allegedly

interrogational rather than punitive, in Wisnewski & Emerick’s

scheme. However, the reality of the situation seems to indicate

that this was at least in part deterrent, or terroristic

(terroristic torture to deter terrorists), given the number of

innocent young men swept up in raids (English 2001).

The IRA and other nationalist paramilitaries’ reasoning for

undermining the state is evident and has deep roots in Irish

history; parallel institutions and defiance of the British state

go back to the first British attempts to colonize Ireland. The

famous English poet Edmund Spenser, whose long poem The Faerie

Queene is considered to be a national epic and origin myth of

England intended to legitimize the Tudor order and England’s

power over Ireland, was also a government official in colonial

Ireland. His A Veue on the Present State of Ireland reveals deep-seated

racism and loathing of the Irish people, whom he describes as

cannibals, heathens, atheists, and Papists (though it’s difficult

to see how they managed to be all simultaneously), and whose long

poetic tradition, expressed orally though hereditary lines of

bards, was, in essence, nothing. Spenser needed to denigrate the

Irish bardic tradition in order to establish English dominance

and natural superiority; a subhuman people cannot have a national

Atkinson 22

poetry or even a coherent culture other than that heathen,

primitive cannibalism colonial powers are so fond of invoking (or

inventing).

Irish hedge schools, operating directly against the British-

imposed laws known as the Penal Codes, enculturated children in

longstanding Irish tradition and Catholicism. During the first

war of independence, from 1919 to 1921, nationalist groups

established an alternative legal system to settle land disputes,

and employed the men of the IRA to enforce their edicts, creating

a curious situation in which “those who shot policemen at night…

[became] policemen during the day” (Munck 1984:82). On both

sides, the coherency of separate sectarian communities without

acknowledgement of the state seems to have been the intention of

these extrajudicial—or perhaps parajudicial—punishments and the

relatively structured way in which they were instituted. Various

proto-paramilitary and insurgent groups, including the IRA and

its precursors, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenians,

were instrumental from at least the 19th century in undermining

colonial rule and Anglo-Irish control of land and resources. Once

Northern Ireland was incorporated into the UK, Catholic Irish who

culturally identified with the Republic of Ireland and who were

often treated as second class citizens either reinstated or saw

as legitimate the continuation of such parallel or shadow

institutions25. Although both paramilitaries and the state

applied torture to curtail what they perceive as deviance in some

form or other, the state considered the paramilitary groups’

actions, including their punishment shootings and beatings, to be

deviant, and informing on other members of paramilitary groups to25 The Course of Irish History ed. Moody and Martin.

Atkinson 23

be atoning and fulfilling a duty to the state. They also

considered their own interrogational torture, prison sentences,

and even shootings of civilians to be justifiable and legitimate,

something with which the international community, the

paramilitaries, and almost everyone, respectively, saw as

inaccurate. The paramilitaries, extreme deviants according the

state, considered themselves to be legitimate authorities in

their own communities, more legitimate than the state, and to

better serve the needs of those communities, something with which

members of the communities might agree—to a point:

The nationalist communities largely accepted this alternative legality as practiced by the IRA, although therewere always contradictions. Mrs. McBride, who called in ‘thelads’ (the IRA) to deal with a break-in at her home…might object if Mrs. McCann’s son was beaten up…with hurley sticksthe next night. (Munck 1984:86)

As Munck notes, this balance involved a more complicated social

contract between the IRA and the community around it, upon which

it depended for safehouses and the movement of munitions. As the

conflict continued, the social control of paramilitary

organizations has weakened in some contexts, but the control of

the state has not always increased in its place, as is the case

with young men in Belfast:

Few participants [in this study], regardless of religious denomination and community background regarded either [the state or the paramilitaries] as legitimate, and the authority’s attempts to exert control was (sic) enthusiastically rebutted…Given their level of alienation from any means of social control, the young men saw violenceas one means of redress when they, themselves, felt wronged.(Reilly et al. 2004: 476-7)

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The violence of youth is seen as antisocial because it is enacted

against members of their own community, in contrast to the

violence of the paramilitaries, which is seen by the groups and

their supporters as war—except for the punishment beatings and

shootings, which, as one youth in Reilly et al’s study pointed

out, consist of “’battering their own people!’” (2004:477).

Northern Ireland provides a useful contrast to many of the

other situations discussed in this paper because of the impunity

with which both state and paramilitary torture operated within

the context of a “developed” Western liberal democracy for over

thirty years. This impunity allowed torture victims of both state

and non-state actors to be released following their victimization

without fear of punishment on the perpetrators’ parts. Notable as

well is the decreasing legitimacy of both state and paramilitary

authority (Reilly et al. 2004) despite their continued use of

these punishments. Because of the data on injuries incurred in

living victims, cases from Northern Ireland also allow for the

consideration of the damage done by certain forms of injury and

torture in living tissue.

It is notable that state actors tended to use methods of

torture designed to be invisible, while paramilitaries intended

the torture they inflicted to be seen in order to fulfill its

purpose of marking out deviants and deterring others from

committing similarly deviant actions. The state sees both the

actions taken by those punished and by the punishers as deviant,

but sees the punishers as more deviant, particularly because

paramilitaries are also called terrorists, which serves to mark

them out as among the most deviant in society. Within their

shadow society, however, their behaviors are not only acceptable

Atkinson 25

but admirable and indeed required to protect the community. When

the state itself acts in ways seen as deviant from the principles

and requirements of a liberal democracy, it too uses such

justifications, and those who act on its behalf, even out of

order, were rarely punished, in contrast to the members of

paramilitaries. Like the state, paramilitaries saw themselves as

justified maintainers of order and as warriors, who were

nonetheless punished for their actions. With violence of variant

forms pervading every level of a society politically located in a

leading Western liberal democracy whose government is still seen

as legitimate, Northern Ireland presents in interesting contrast

to most, if not all, of the other examples given here, in which

the states that practiced torture have usually fallen prior to

any open discussion of their acts coming into the public arena.

Northern Ireland also presents a particularly clear example of

cultural violence in two directions. Throughout colonial Irish

history, Britain made the structural and direct violence of its

colonialism—including, in perhaps the most egregious incident,

continuing to ship food produced on Irish soil by Irish labor to

England while millions of people were starving to death or

fleeing their homeland in the 1840s’ Potato Famine—legitimate by

inventing and perpetuating a narrative of Irish wildness and

inferiority. In Edmund Spenser’s day, this took the form of

characterizing them as the ultimate savages, not only ignorant of

but actively opposed to all that was civilizing and right about

England: “‘[The Irish] are all Papists by theire profession but

in the same so blindelye and brutishly enformed that for the most

parte as that ye woulde rather thinke them Atheists or infidles”

(quoted in Murphy 1999:66). Spenser also recounts a story he got

Atkinson 26

secondhand in which a mother licks up the blood of her son after

his execution by the English, proclaiming that it was to precious

to allow the earth to swallow up, from which he extrapolated to

form the familiar strains of cannibalism libel, used throughout

history and across the world to justify colonizing and oppressing

the wild and dangerous heathens. Britain used this narrative over

the years to legitimate their colonization of Ireland, refining

it as the spirit of the times demanded (from cannibal heathens to

the missing link to uncontrollable rebels to wicked terrorists).

Similarly, the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland created

their own cultural justifications for direct violence within and

between their communities, a process mimicked by the youth who

reject the authority of both entities:

Participants [in the Reilly et al. study] described violenceas a norm, such as after a night out, heavy alcohol consumption, or when others ‘were asking for it.’ The latterincluded instances where insults were perceived to require aviolent response, and being in the ‘wrong place at the wrongtime,’ such as straying into an area dominated by the other [sectarian] community. (Reilly et al 2004: 475)

The paramilitaries justify punishment beatings and shootings as

maintaining order and the coherency of their communities by

seeking to eliminate ‘antisocial’ behavior; the antisocial,

sometimes violent behavior is in turn justified by those who

perform it as required by the social context created by the

paramilitaries or their own subculture26.

Sierra Leone also has a history of colonial domination by

the British, in particular the appropriation of diamond resources

26 Johan Galtung’s “Cultural Violence,” written in 1990, is the source of these understandings of cultural, structural, and direct violence andtheir interrelatedness.

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by British companies alone for many years, leaving the country’s

inhabitants poor despite the natural resources of their home. The

structural violence inherent in this arrangement and the similar

monopolies that succeeded it were instrumental in the ensuing

violence of the civil war (Keen 2005). Keen calls one of the

chapters in his book Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone “Frankenstein’s

monster,” and the metaphor is particularly apt as regards the

relationship between structural violence and direct violence.

Just as Victor Frankenstein’s neglect and abuse of a Creature he

put in unequal circumstances from birth, based upon just the

circumstances he created, leads to its rebellion and the total

destruction of them both and all those around them, so structural

violence can breed rebellion and directly violent death. While

structural violence pervaded the lives of many Sierra Leoneans,

and nearly all of the youth, not all rebel soldiers became such

voluntarily—although a good number of them did. Some were

kidnapped and forced to join the ranks of the rebels27.

Amputation is rarely practiced as a form of torture,

although it is sometimes found as a legal punishment in countries

under Sharia law, and may occur in medical treatment as the

result of complications from torture28. In Sierra Leone, again as

in Northern Ireland, many torture victims were intended to live.

Amputation was enacted as a visible symbol, a message. During

what Carey characterizes as the first wave of amputations, from

1995-1996, it was “the obvious intent of the rebels to

communicate their presence and their horrific capacity to destroy

by sending human reports to the district governmental

27 Carey 2006:108. 28 Brogdon et al. 2003.

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headquarters” (2006:112). Carey and Keen both note that many

rebels were youths who had been sent away from their villages,

and came back to wreak havoc as part of a rebel force. In

returning to places from which they had been themselves severed,

and as a reaction to a society where they were given no value,

they dehumanized and tortured others in order to humanize and

value themselves. Carey describes the rebels’ motivations during

the third wave of amputations, in early 1998, when

Having successfully toppled two governments…the rebels made an identity for themselves as a tenacious contradictory possibility to the traditional and contemporary power structures…disorder would continue if they were not includedin the shaping of power and identity (2006: 118). Cutting off a person’s means of livelihood was a

particularly salient way of making their point—of ensuring their

own continued centrality. In 1998, many of the amputations

occurred very publicly (Carey 2006:119), a more effective and

efficient distribution of a message similar to that which had

been sent in 1995. A similar form of torture occurred in Zaire,

where the hands and wrists of reporters, authors, and artists

were often fractured. As Brogdon et al write, “The aim is not

only to hamper the victims’ work, but also to cause physiological

injury by mutilating the appendages that is their main instrument

of livelihood and personality” (2003:110).

Keen writes that “A fundamental feature of the violence in

Sierra Leon was the imposition of extreme humiliation and shame

on the victims. In many instances, this seems to have been an

attempt to turn previous roles on their heads, by imposing the

power of the gun on local big men who had previously ‘lorded it ‘

over the youths in question” (59). Together with the knowledge

Atkinson 29

that many rebels returned to areas from which they had been

banished previously in order to reverse the previous state of

affairs and take control, there is a clear indication that

violence and amputation became methods of inscribing deviance and

the inability to work onto the victims, and taking a dominant

position and the place of those who had work and therefore a

place in society on the part of the torturers. The youth involved

were unemployed and marginalized, which gave them little to lose

and a great deal to gain from wielding violent power when no

other kind was available29.

Something which occurred in neither Northern Ireland nor,

often, in Sierra Leone, was the murder and secret disposal of

torture victims. Hiding or destroying the bodies of torture

victims is a further act of violence, one at odds with yet with

ties to the use of visible marks of torture on the living as a

message to the community about the strength of the torturers or

the necessity of “appropriate” behavior. Hidden bodies are bodies

erased, bodies made silent and insignificant. This is a warning

in part not to make oneself visible in the world of the living,

for fear of disappearing and occupying a social space neither

dead nor alive, not one thing or another, not present or mourned.

Victoria Sanford describes a mass grave beneath a church floor in

Guatemala, where twenty-six victims of extrajudicial execution

were found concealed beneath a trench filled with garbage and

pornography (2003: 125). Mass graves are a denial of

individuality, of identity, and of social worth and space in many

contexts. Hidden graves are a denial of a person’s experience,

29 Keen 2005.

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life, death, and identity, even as they are a tacit admission

that what was done to the victim was wrong and must be concealed.

To torture is to take power from the victim, to make oneself

more than human in one’s own eyes even as the person being

tortured is made less. Allan Feldman writes that

Interrogation is a ceremony of verification, not only of crimebut of agency…The performance of torture does not apply power; rather it manufactures it from the ‘raw’ ingredient of the captive’s body…Two metaphysical intangibles collide, intersect, and synthesize inthe body of the captive—the force of disorder and the force ofthe state. (Feldman 115)

In the Northern Irish case, on which Feldman is writing, this is

particularly relevant, as the paramilitaries enact their own

“statehood” in their communities by marring the bodies of those

who trespass against their authority, while the state itself does

the same to the paramilitaries, an attempt often turned on its

head by imprisoned members of the IRA in particular, who exert

control and assert the illegitimacy of the state’s power over

them by manufacturing power from their own bodies in hunger

strikes and the like, creating an osteological signature similar

to the structural violence that they felt was being enacted on

the Catholic population, and which certainly had been in the

past. The use of a hunger strike certainly resonated with the

famines of the past, which Britain had at any time the power to

stop (because it wasn’t as though there wasn’t food being

produced in Ireland; it simply wasn’t staying). Thus, rather than

allowing the state control of their bodies through imprisonment

and controlled activity, these prisoners constructed a

counternarrative through the use of their own bodies as canvas,

something most states want to avoid and which is, in cases of

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state violence, often prevented by the secretive nature of

imprisonment, torture, execution, and burial. While Britain made

an attempt to obfuscate its use of the Five Techniques, prisons

and legal proceedings remained relatively permeable to the

public. Yet even in those cases where executions and bodies are

concealed, the unearthing of bodies provides a powerful impetus

for exhumations and revelations of all kinds, as though exposing

the physical ramifications of torture were the key to opening the

door to releasing the words survivors had internalized and allows

the return of the disappeared, the liminal, to the public space

of the living until their fate is fully determined and brought

out:

What the Mother’s (sic) of the Disappeared do is to collectively harness this magical power of the lost souls ofPurgatory and relocate memory in the contested public sphere, away from the fear-numbing and crazy-making fastnessof the individual mind where paramilitary death squads and the State machinery of concealment would fix it. In so courageously naming the names and holding the photographic image of the dead and disappeared, the mothers crate the specific image necessary to reverse public and State memory.(Taussig 28).

Naming and identifying those whom the state has attempted to

erase is an especially important act. Naming, memorializing, and,

conversely, effacing, the markers of the dead on earth has been

vital in mortuary ritual not only in contemporary situations, but

in ancient ones as well.

In ancient Rome, funerary monuments were vital to keeping

the memory of the dead alive, considered a central piece of any

afterlife. Maureen Carroll writes that “[The inscribed words on

funerary monuments were] memoria, a notion that encompassed fame

and reputation in life and in death, that gave people the hope of

Atkinson 32

some form of afterlife…The survival of one’s name was of great

importance in Roman society” (2011:67-8). This was of such

importance, in fact, that the named dead retained the ability to

be punished socially, through reputation. What was known as

damnatio memoriae were the effacements of names on a monument after

death, “the eradication of the memory of that individual”

(Carroll, 2011:72). In fact, there was thought to be a kind of

sympathetic magic connecting the image on a funerary monument and

the person it represented, so that anything done to one reflected

upon the other, and thus destroying an image on a monument was

akin to desecrating the body of the dead person (2011:73). The

connection between the memory of the deceased and the physical

body is an even tighter one, and hence a culturally

inappropriate, irreverent, or anomalous disposal of a body can

reveal deep issues surrounding the death of such an individual,

in the past as today. For instance, in the United States, a body

found unembalmed, without clothes, in a shallow grave would be

cause for calling the police and instigating a forensic

investigation, as would finding a body buried on private

property, or concealed under the floor of a house30. In many

countries, there are even laws regarding the appropriate disposal

of a body, and in a 2005 court case in Boca Raton, even the

appropriate way to memorialize dead relatives became a bone of

30 Karen Ramey Burns in Forensic Osteology describes normal U.S. vs. Islamic burial customs. Norman J. Sauer, also in Forensic Osteology (ed. Kathleen J.Reichs), describes a murder victim’s antemortem and perimortem injuries and her disposal underneath a remodeled garage floor in the home of the suspected perpetrator. One differentiation of ‘ordinary’ crime from state crime is the concealment of a body from all, including police and state forces, on private property.

Atkinson 33

legal contention31, with the state’s concept of aesthetics at war

with variant religious and cultural interpretations of what

constitutes appropriate and necessary memorialization at the

gravesite. Because such memorials and treatment of the dead are

so important, whether in presence of absence, as in exposure

burials, disposal of remains at odds with normative funerary

practices within a culture require examination, as they likely

reveal something about the life or death of the deceased person.

In The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial, Pettitt provides an

useful overview of various methods of disposal of remains, and of

human mortuary activity. He writes that “Symbolic constructions

underpin all mortuary activities in the present day, no matter

what communities indulge in them” (2011:269), and describes the

current, fully symbolic behavior of Homo sapiens as a point in

which “the agency of the dead is now recognised in mortuary

treatment…mortuary activity is organised in time and space

according to social rules” (2011:267). Parker Pearson notes that

in many European churchyards, social hierarchy is observable

through location: “The poor were buried on the darker, north side

of the churchyard, an area associated with in folklore with evil

and the devil,” something he refers to as a “geography of

holiness and inclusion” (2000: 14). This is a distinction between

high and low status individuals as, largely, determined by

wealth; those who were considered outright deviant often received

different burial treatment. Parker Pearson describes the

treatment of suicides during and after the 15th century in Europe;

they were often buried staked down at crossroads or outside the

31 Sullivan, Winnifred. 2005. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Atkinson 34

edges of the churchyard, in unconsecrated ground, along with

mothers who died in childbirth, demonstrating spatially the

status of those who died in such ways in the community—external,

mysterious, liminal.

At Sutton Hoo, aside from the celebrated royal burial

mounds, are a group of burials thought to be those of execution

victims, to the east. These burials contain no grave goods, in

stark contrast to the wealth at the royal burials, and many of

the remains show evidence of decapitation and broken limbs32. If

these are the remains of execution victims, presumably they had

done or were believed to have done something so counter to the

norms of their society that it warranted their deaths and

permanent separation from the rest of the community. Another

clear spatial segregation of individuals who were deviants at

least in death is found in the cemetery at Vedbaek, in Denmark,

dated to the late Mesolithic. Other members of the Vedbaek

community, apparently the majority, were buried elsewhere. This

cemetery presents an unusual demographic profile, with few

elderly adults or children, who had the highest mortality rates.

Instead, most of the people buried in the cemetery at Vedbaek

rather than with their fellows died in mid-life, or apparently in

childbirth33. Like the suicides Parker Pearson describes, some bog

bodies were also staked down (described in Brothwell and Asingh)

to keep the sacrificial offerings from rising up and escaping the

bog. In this case, there appears to be a similar fear of the

restless dead returning. It is not for nothing that Taussig 32 The description of Sutton Hoo also comes from Parker Pearson. He doesnot detail whether or not the breaking of limbs was ante- or peri- mortem. 33 Parker Pearson 2000.

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refers to the Mothers of the Disappeared as harnessing “this

magical power of the lost souls of purgatory and [relocating]

memory in the contested public sphere” (1992:28); the disappeared

are liminal, too, and the murdered are restless. They are not

buried in consecrated ground; they are so far outside the

churchyard that no one is quite sure where they belong, among the

living or the dead.

Among the most notorious and apparent deviant disposals of

bodies are those of the bog bodies throughout Northern Europe.

These do appear to express a degree of deviance in life from

their victims, most of whose hands were notably free of calluses

from working34. Lindow Man in particular demonstrates a great deal

of perimortem trauma, sufficient to have killed him several times

over, including multiple cranial traumas, garroting leading to

broken cervical vertebrae, and a slit throat. In the case of

Grauballe Man, whose remains were reanalyzed in 2001, evidence

suggests that he was killed by having his throat slit as his head

was pulled backwards (Gregersen et al. 2007:234). While there

were no marks found on Grauballe Man’s vertebrae, the soft tissue

demonstrages that the slitting of his throat reached them,

severing ligaments around the second, third, and fourth

vertebrae; the cut would also have severed both carotid arteries

and the jugular vein (2007:252). Gregersen et al. write that

“The injury’s location, direction, and depth suggest that

Grauballe Man’s head was probably bent over backwards at the time

the cut was made, and that the injury was produced by a person

standing behind him” (2007:254). The body also showed an open,

oblique fracture to the left tibia, which may have been peri or 34 Brothwell 1986; Parker Pearson 2000:68-9.

Atkinson 36

postmortem (2007:254-5). Pauline Asingh notes that the bog bodies

do represent a significant departure from other Northwest

European Iron Age burials, which she describes as having been

placed on a funeral pyre before being buried, in line with Parker

Pearson’s description of other burials in the period, wherein

cremated bones were deposited in a pot and then buried in a

mound, usually somewhere high and at least half a kilometer from

water35. Parker Pearson reads this as representing a division of

the universe into “the worthy dead above, fully transformed by

fire into dry burnt bones and associated with things made through

fire; the middle world of the living; and the wet underworld of

the sacrificial and executed dead who were entirely untransformed

and returned to an animal-like state” (2000:70). Asingh also

reads the deposition of bog bodies as a way of preventing

transformation, noting that Iron Age people knew well that the

bog preserved what was put into it, and adding, in reference to

the bog bodies found staked down or otherwise weighted, “People

were submerged in bogs like other ritual deposits and secured

there—with both body and soul intact” (2007:288-9). However, as

Asingh also notes, it is impossible to determine whether those

people killed and put into the bogs were chosen because they were

criminals, witches, or elites, or based on any kind of deviance

in life. All the same, the disposals of their bodies signify

something very different from those of the other members of

society, a stasis and separation from the normal goings-on of the

cosmos required for the perpetuation of those affairs. In a way,

this is how torture can itself be seen by those performing it—as

necessary either to perpetuate society securely, or to reform it 35 Asingh 2007:287; Parker Pearson 2000: 70

Atkinson 37

in a ‘better’ mold. Even in Northern Ireland, where those

tortured either by the state or by paramilitaries were

temporarily removed from their ordinary societal context and

subsequently restored to it, with physical, psychological, or

legal markers of their prior deviance attached to them, the

separation and suspension of social functioning during torture

and hospitalization or imprisonment, with an attempt to

permanently cut off activities seen as undesirable, were

operative. In situations where victims of torture were

disappeared, their whereabouts and ultimate fates unknown, this

separation from and suspension of social actions in the external

world became all-encompassing for them, and in many cases for

their loved ones as well.

In Linza, near Tirana, Albania, the victims of communist

secret police were buried in alleged secrecy—alleged because many

local inhabitants knew of the remains’ presence, and, eventually,

relatives of disappeared people attempted to find and exhume the

bodies there, finally beginning to do so in early 2010. When

remains were found by relatives, professional organizations took

over the exhumation, which eventually yielded the remains of

thirteen individuals in multiple pits. The area where they were

found was accessible only by foot and had been closed to

civilians in 1990 in an attempt by the military to keep the area

secret36. The doctors at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in

Tirana who examined the remains used an analysis of wound

patterns to determine the circumstances surrounding the deaths of

the victims and to prove that they suffered torture at the hands

of their killers. They noted that all of the thirteen individuals36 Sinamati et al.

Atkinson 38

exhumed exhibited either bullet wounds or blunt force trauma to

the skull, all of which were determined to be perimortem, a

feature which they compared to other known mass killings,

particularly the mass grave at Tuskulenai, Lithuania, where

Jankauskas noted that 97% of the dead had perimortem lesions,

from blunt force trauma or gunshot wounds. Many of the

postcranial remains at Linza were fragmented, and so the analysis

focuses on bullet wounds (found in all of the crania) and other

traumas to the skulls. The article stated that “different ante

mortem (sic) signs of cruel torture were evident. Signs of trauma

could be found in most of the bones” (2011:200), but does not

elaborate on what those might be, so it is impossible to further

examine their methods of analysis. In a different article,

Jankauskas writes that “sufficient data” to determine genocide is

composed of “…numerous individuals of various sex and age,

inhumed in clandestine unmarked rural sites with clear signs of

violent death…[which] indicate doubtlessly the attempts of

assailants to ‘dehumanize’ victims” (2009:395). For torture,

wound patterning analysis and the presence of multiple ante- or

peri-mortem traumas would probably be necessary in addition to

some of these criteria, particularly the nature of the

“clandestine, unmarked” disposal site; however, a mass grave is

unnecessary to make a determination of torture, as the case study

by Tania Delabarde37 emphasizes. She describes the discovery, in

Kosovo, of a corpse found in the middle of a forest. Inhabitants

of a nearby village found the body in 1999 and buried her in a

grave about one meter deep; six years later, the remains were

37 Case Study 5.2 featured in Baraybar and Kimmerle’s Skeletal Trauma, chapter 5.

Atkinson 39

exhumed by the Office on Missing Persons and Forensics. The body

was found flexed into the confines of the grave with four pairs

of surgical gloves that had been associated with the remains,

remarkable given the distance of the location from any hospital

or habitation (2008:236). The individual in the grave was found

to be an elderly female from seventy to eight-five years old at

death, with osteoporotic thinning of compact bone. Investigators

observed 29 rib fractures, 18 of which were on the right rib

cage; a healed fracture of the right humerus and two unhealed

fractures of the sternal body. The rib fractures, too, were in

variant stages of healing, with three distinct levels of bone

activity observed. Delabarde describes the rib fractures as

concentrated on the anterior and the right lateral portions of

the rib cage, with the three different stages of healing

localized to three different areas of the rib cage. The most

recent, almost completely unhealed fractures were near the

midsternal line; the intermediately healed fractures were between

the scapular and axillary lines; and the most healed fractures

were between the paravertebral and scapular lines.38 The oldest

injuries, localized on the right side between the paravertebral

and scapular lines, and including the right humerus, were

attributed to a road traffic accident well before her death, as

road traffic accident patterns often involve one arm and one side

of the rib cage. The second-most healed injuries, along with the

most recent injuries, are consistent with anteroposterior

compression of the chest, an injury made all the more severe by

38 Delabarde defines the stages of healing as 0-3, with 0 being perimortem fractures, 1 showing slight bone proliferation at the injury and sharp edges, 2 showing an open fracture with bone proliferation and blunt edges, and 3 showing a callus formation or complete remodeling.

Atkinson 40

the victim’s age and osteoporosis (2008:239). In an earlier

chapter of Skeletal Trauma, Baraybar & Kimmerle write that

“tolerance to blunt anterior loading of the chest [is arguably]

more dependent on age than on load distribution” (2008:218). They

also describe the potential soft tissue consequences of beatings

to the ribs and rib fractures, including pneumothorax, which

occurs when air is forced into the thoracic cavity and cannot

escape, often collapsing one or both lungs, and hemothorax, which

occurs when blood fills the space between the lungs and the wall

of the chest after a penetrating chest injury breaks major blood

vessels in the surrounding area.

Not every instance of torture or marginalization in this

paper is fully explored as to the questions asked in the

introduction; to do so would require more space and time than

that to which I have recourse. However, the questions themselves

come out of what is hopefully an understanding of what is

required in order to trace connections between the marks torture

makes on the bones and the cultural background that undergirds

those marks. In Northern Ireland, though the marks were seen not

on remains but on living victims, the history and long trails of

cultural and structural violence that coalesced into the direct

violence detailed above is most fully fleshed; the other case

studies tend to focus on the wound patterns necessary to diagnose

torture in the absence of a living victim and a clear context. A

broader context for determining perceptions of deviance in the

dead can be found in a long history of mortuary ritual in the

archaeological record; torturers mark their perceptions of

deviance on their victims’ bodies in life and in death. In

interrogational torture, ‘breaking’ a subject, making him talk,

Atkinson 41

validates the interrogator as a superior human being, gives him

further power to consume and devour. Inscribing, inflicting, the

terrible perceptions of the torturer literally onto the body of

the victim is among the worst crimes possible, representing the

perverse side of the uniquely human capacity for imagination in

the total destruction of that capacity in another human being; to

make one’s own identity out of the breaking of someone else’s

ability to imagine him or herself is a terrifyingly cruel and

selfish act that leaves marks on the mind and the body of the

victim. When they are legible and available to the eyes of the

world and to forensic anthropology, those marks can be read and

can give those willing to see the images of what happened to the

victim, but such a reading can never and must never undo what was

done. To torture, to murder, to make a person and a body

disappear is to undo them, and such an erasure is a death that

seeks to go beyond death, into the destruction of not only a

person’s whole self, but also the possibility of remembering that

victim. The one thing such a reading of violent inscriptions can

do is to restore the full possibility of memory.