Original headline: Healers a head of their time
A peasant on the wrong end of a violent assault 1000 years ago had his brain surgeon to thank for his survival, archaeologists have found.
The skull, unearthed from a medieval cemetery in the abandoned Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy, shows unexpected sophistication in cranial surgery in Anglo-Saxon times.
Simon Mays, skeletal biologist at English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology, said: "This skull is the best evidence we have that such surgery to treat skull fractures was being performed in England at the time.
"It predates medieval written accounts of the procedure by at least 100 years and is a world away from notions that Anglo-Saxon healers were all about spells and potions."
The evidence comes from analysis of the skull of a 40-year-old man, who lived in Wharram Percy between AD960 and AD1100.
A cemetery excavated between 1950 and 1990, yielding almost 700 skeletons, revealed high levels of disease, malnutrition and stunted growth in children, and showed that life could be nasty, brutish and short.
The man's skull had been struck a near fatal blow with a blunt instrument, sustaining a severe depressed fracture on its left-hand side.
However, closer examination revealed that he also had life-saving surgery, involving lifting a rectangular area of the scalp 9cmx10cm and scraping away at the skull to remove depressed bone fragments and relieve pressure on the brain.
The technique, called trepanning, was known in Ancient Greece and Rome, and elsewhere in the ancient world, but gets no mention in Anglo-Saxon literature.
Some historians have suggested that this knowledge did not penetrate to Western Europe for centuries after the fall of Alexandria in the seventh century. But Wharram's peasant not only survived, he apparently lived for many more years, eventually dying of other causes.
Although the skull is the earliest discovered in England showing conclusive signs of this kind of treatment, skulls dating back to Neolithic times reveal that trepanning was also performed on people who had no head wounds, perhaps in an attempt to treat mental illness.
But a mystery still remains: how did a man who was apparently a humble peasant manage to afford such complicated medical treatment?
"Medical skills were largely reserved for the elite, and physicians attracted widespread cynicism," Dr Mays said. "So the treatment handed out to Wharram's peasant doesn't square at all with our knowledge of the period. It seems most probable that the operation was performed by an itinerant healer of unusual skill, whose medical acumen was handed down through oral tradition."
