Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2006, Page 79

OSTEOARTHRITIS IN THE SKELETAL POPULATION FROM SKELJASTAÐIR ICELAND; A REASSESSMENT
Figure 2. 2"d-4,h right and left metacarpals showing osteoarthritis of the hand.
tive joint disease which is characterised
by the loss of joint cartilage which leads
to lesions caused by bone-to-bone con-
tact within the joint. This means that new
bone formation is the main feature of
the disease, which is the most common
form of joint pathology (Aufderheide &
Rodríguez-Martín, 1998).
With the advent of a compre-
hensive genealogy database of the Ice-
landic population, it has been shown that
osteoarthritis of the hand and hip has a
strong hereditary component stretching
back through several generations (Jónsson
et al., 2003, Ingvarsson et al., 2000. The
very high prevalence of hip osteoarthritis
in Iceland is of particular interest (Ingvars-
son et al., 1999), whereas current evidence
suggests that the prevalence of hand and
knee osteoarthritis is comparable to that
found in neighbouring countries.
Thus, the aim of the current
study was twofold, to look for evidence
of rheumatoid arthritis, and to estimate
the prevalence of osteoarthritis in the
high medieval population from Skeljas-
taðir using modern palaeopathological
methods.
Material and methods
The site
The Skeljastaðir site is in the Þjórsárdalur
valley in southern Iceland. There are
about twenty known abandoned medieval
farm sites in the valley. A team of Nordic
archaeologists excavated eight of these,
including Skeljastaðir, in the summer of
1939. A total of sixty-three graves were
found at the site (Stenberger, 1943). Like
most archaeological sites in Iceland, the
dating of the occupation period of Skelja-
staðir, and therefore the use of the cem-
etery, has mainly been based on tephra-
chronology. Sigurður Þórarinsson, an Ice-
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