J Archaeol Sci 33 (11)

The authors examined in detail two archaeological cases of leprosy from medieval England. The first was a child skeleton with rhino-maxillary changes typical of lepromatous leprosy (LL). The second case was the skeleton of a male adult who showed both typical rhino-maxillary changes and osteitis/periostitis on the leg and foot bones. Bone powder was sampled from both cases and DNA extracts were prepared. These were subjected to a series of polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) specific for regions on the Mycobacterium leprae genome. The repetitive element RLEP was used for confirmation of M. leprae DNA and then three polymorphic regions were successfully amplified and sequenced to determine the number of variable nucleotide tandem repeats (vntr) at these loci. These were the microsatellite regions ML2344 and ML2172 and the minisatellite region ML0058. Genotyping data from the strains preserved within the skeletal remains were compared with those obtained for a reference strain of M. leprae. Variation at these three loci was found between both burials and the reference strain, indicating that vntr typing of LL cases from the archaeological record is a useful way of confirming disease and an additional means of authenticating aDNA data. This demonstrates the feasibility of targeting multiple loci for phylogenetic studies of leprosy strains from archival sources.

Simultaneous analysis of relationships between multiple artefact classes is required for characterisation of many types of activity areas. The paper illustrates improved forms of multivariate visualisation, spatial analysis and integration of experimental results that are possible with GIS based photomapping. Techniques are demonstrated through analysis of a hearth associated artefact scatter exposed during excavations of a Late Archaic pithouse at Peru. A multivariate density raster is created and additive colour visualisation is used for simultaneous display of three artefact distributions. Performing unconstrained clustering in a GIS, space is classified by simultaneous relative density relationships between multiple object types.