In 1810, the inspector general of quarries, the nobleman Louis-Étienne Héricard de Thury, decided to show some respect for the dead and arranged skulls and long bones – femurs, tibias, humeri – into decorative walls and thus, in a sense, transformed this place into a “tourist attraction” which is currently visited by approximately half a million people a year. But this is only a facade, because behind these walls there are other bones, left in complete disarray.
Scientists finally decided to take a better look at them, and the opportunity came by accident. When one of the decorative walls collapsed in 2022, Charlier’s team from the University of Versailles and Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines were given the opportunity to investigate the site. This is the first opportunity to see what procedures (such as amputation, trepanation, autopsy and embalming) were performed by the inhabitants of Paris whose bodies were thrown into quarries.
What’s more, theirs the study also tries to determine what diseases and parasitic infections they suffered from, as well as heavy metal poisoningincluding lead, mercury, arsenic and antimony. Some of them leave traces on human bones (rickets, syphilis or leprosy), and others – those that kill too quickly to leave traces – can be detected from DNA samples (plague). Why do this? As researchers explain, for example, to check how the disease we are still struggling with has changed, but to better understand it.
We are supposed to know the preliminary results of the analyzes before the end of the year, and maybe that’s it then we will find out how many bodies were actually thrown into the Paris catacombs – the authors of the research project expect the number to exceed 6 million! However, they have no illusions that the work is here for so many years that it will be taken care of by future generations: “It’s a huge task. It’s endless work. I think that the children of my students will continue this work.”
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Source: geekweek.interia.pl
