Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 78

Hildur Gestsdóttir, Helgi Jónsson, Juliet Rogers and Jón Thorsteinsson
Figure 1. Left os coxa showing osteoarthritis of the hip.
in which an individual’s immune system
starts reacting against their own tissues,
although several other factors have been
speculated as the cause of the disease; an
infectious agent, climate, diet or changes
in vascular, endocrine, metabolic or other
systems. The articular manifestations of
the disease are a narrowing of the joint
space and bone erosion which can lead
to the joint involved fusing, but there is
little evidence of any repair (new bone
formation) in response to the inflamma-
tion (Aufderheide & Rodríguez-Martín,
1998).
There is considerable interest in
the prevalence of rheumatoid arthritis in
the past. The first description of the dis-
ease is accredited to Landré-Bouvais in
Paris as late as 1800 (Landré-Bouvais,
1800). Only a handful of palaeopatho-
logical cases of rheumatoid arthritis
have been reported and only a few cases
of likely rheumatoid arthritis have been
described in Old World skeletons whereas
the disease appears to have been relative-
ly more common in early Native Ameri-
cans (Rothchild, 1990). There is evidence
that rheumatoid arthritis was common in
Iceland in the 18th century (Jónsson and
Helgason, 1996), but so far there is little
evidence for the disease before that time.
It is evident from Jón Steffen-
sen’s report that in many cases he was
describing osteoarthritis. As opposed to
rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis is a
noninflammatory progressive degenera-
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