Abstract
The excavations carried out in tomb II belonging to the hypogeic necropolis of “Sa Figu”, near the village of Ittiri, (Sassari, Italy) supplied human bone remains and pottery unambiguously referred to the Early Bronze Age (characterized by the local culture of “Bonnannaro”). Our work is an anthropological study, it focused on analysis of human remains. The aim of our paper was to obtain the minimum number of individuals (MNI), sex, death age and analysis of paleopathologies. In order to establish sex of single individuals we followed the work lines of Ferembach (Ferembach et al, 1980),and also sex has been determined by using a method based on equation of discriminant functions, since the only bones intact and in large number were talus and calcaneus. The estimation of age at death was essentially based on the diaphysis size (Uberlaker, 1989), on the cranial sutures obliteration (Meindl and Lovejoy, 1985), for adult, and for subadults on the diaphysis size, welding between epiphysis and diaphysis and on teeth formation and eruption according to Ubelaker. The minimum number of individuals is 63 persons, 39 are adults and 24 are subadults. We were able to recognize the sex of 30 individuals by observing the morphological and metric features of talus. Moreover, we have recognized 14 male and 16 female individuals while the remaining bones were too small and fragmented to proceed further. Analyzing bone fragments we recovered differents paleopathologies including arthropathies, hereditary skeletal dysplasia, tumours, dental-alveolar diseases and many henthesopathies.
