ABSTRACT
Review of Trepanations in British Antiquity Focusing on Funerary Context to Explain their Occurrence CHARLOTTE ROBERTS1 AND JACQUELINE MCKINLEY2 1Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, Durham, UK; 2Wessex Trust, Portway House, Salisbury, UK
Trepanation, or the surgical removal of a piece of skull “to create a communication between the cranial cavity and the environment” (Aufderheide and Rodríguez Martin, 1998, p. 31) has been described as an operation performed in many parts of the world from prehistory to the present (e.g. Furnas et al., 1985; Lisowski, 1967). The evidence suggests that both healed and unhealed examples exist. However, it is often unclear whether the unhealed trepanations were performed before death and were unsuccessful, or whether the operation was undertaken after death for some reason. Clearly, the existence of an unhealed trepanation does not necessarily mean that the operation caused the death of the individual; having only the skeleton available for study means that the potentially many causes of death will not be visible, thus making the attribution of a specific cause of death impossible in virtually all cases.
