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The Anthropology of Castration with Dr. Kathryn Reusch - Ruins 84
336 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Kathryn Reusch, who is a Conservation Technician in the Museum Conservation Department at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We talk about her experiences in school in the UK, her graduate research, and then we take a deep dive into the painful topic of castration (and yes we mean human castration). Connor and Carlton pepper Dr. Reusch with questions about castration and learn more than they ever needed to know.
Literature Recommendations
- 1999 Eunuchs and Castrati: A Cultural History by Piotr O. Scholz
- 2005 The Human Bone Manual by Tim D. White and Pieter Arend Folkens
- 2007 The Archaeology of Disease by Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester
- 2008 The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society by Shaun Together
- 2013 "That which was missing": The Archaeology of Castration by Dr. Kathryn Reusch
Guest Contact
- Dr. Reusch's Twitter: @klreusch
- Denver Museum of Nature and Science
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Episode 84 of a Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life in ruins. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-host, Connor Johnen. David is still unable to join us as he's on his worldwide tour to promote cage-free and ethical source dog
Guest Introduction: Dr. Catherine Royche
00:00:30
Speaker
food.
00:00:30
Speaker
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Catherine Royche, who is a conservation technician in the Museum Conservation Department at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and affiliate faculty of sociology and anthropology at the Metro State University of Denver.
Catherine's Early Interest in Anthropology
00:00:47
Speaker
Catherine, thank you so much for joining us tonight. How are you doing this evening? Thank you for having me. I am doing really well. Thank you.
00:00:54
Speaker
Excellent. Glad to hear it. Yeah, we're super excited to have you on. I met Catherine when I was an intern at DM&S and had many lunches and wonderful conversations and vividly remember eating a meatball sub when she was telling me about her dissertation. And we'll get into that later and why that meatball sub is relevant. But for now, Catherine, what what first got you into anthropology growing up? Were you a dinosaur kid, a history kid or a nature nerd?
00:01:19
Speaker
I was kind of more dinosaur in space kid. I actually grew up in Denver and my parents, both scientists, and they took me to the museum a lot, actually, when I was a kid. So, you know, some of my very early fond memories are going around, exploring the world. You know, if we were if we were road tripping to see family, they would we'd stop at like, oh, there's a natural park or national park here. We're going to stop. We're going to go and have a look at things. And also, they'd take us to the museum a lot.
00:01:47
Speaker
But kind of what got me into anthropology is I actually grew up across the street from a library, which is wonderful when it's summer and your mother is like, get out of the house and go to the library and get something to entertain yourself.
00:02:03
Speaker
So at some point when I was about nine or so, I wandered from the fiction section of the kids in the kids section over to the nonfiction section and found all of the bright shiny books on ancient Egypt. And I was like, oh, that looks really cool. That's really new and mysterious. So pick that up. And kind of immediately from that point was like, I would like to be an archaeologist. This is what I want to do with my life.
00:02:27
Speaker
And my parents, both being fairly realistic people, were like, are you absolutely sure? Because there is not a lot of money in that career. And I was like, yes, this is what I want to do. So that's kind of what started it all off was that trip to the library when I was about nine years old and finding those books on ancient Egypt.
Studying Archaeology in the UK
00:02:45
Speaker
Very cool. I also have like very fond memories of going to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science or what was it like the history something has gone through like several iterations of names.
00:02:56
Speaker
Yeah, that seems to be, yeah, we go through name changes, because I think the original name is like the Denver Museum. And then it's Denver Museum of Natural History. And then yeah, I think late 90s, early 2000s, they switched it up to Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Yeah, that's what I always remembered it as. But yeah, those were our elementary school trips, was going there and things like that. It was definitely a gateway drug for me.
00:03:25
Speaker
I don't know if they want that on their website as a quote, but I will certainly volunteer that. Yeah, we'll have to talk to marketing about that one.
00:03:37
Speaker
Of course, I remember like as a kid, having a library card was like the coolest thing. It was like what you got before you got a permit or in my case, like the pool pass was the next one where you can go by yourself at the library card. That was a big deal to get that. But yeah, that's awesome. So you are you're a Colorado native. You grew up in and around Denver. Yeah. Got introduced through an Egypt book, Egyptology book at the library. So when you were deciding programs right for for college after high school,
00:04:06
Speaker
Why did you choose anthropology? And then additionally, spoiler alert, why the UK? But so I didn't actually choose anthropology. I chose archaeology, which in the UK, because it's a different discipline, you can actually get just a degree in archaeology. But so I was kind of looking for archaeology programs. And then, you know, so there were a couple of other ones like there was Boston University,
00:04:31
Speaker
I applied to Pacific State University up in Oregon, a couple programs here in the US, but I chose the UK because my mom's actually English. And my maternal grandparents and mom and uncle settled here in Denver or in Boulder actually.
00:04:48
Speaker
Basically, my mom was finishing high school. So she went to university here, but my grandfather was very much like hearing that I wanted to get a degree, that I wanted to do an archaeology, that kind of thing. My maternal grandfather was like, oh, well, you could go to school in the UK. And he mentioned that actually from the time I was going into high school.
00:05:06
Speaker
From the time I was about 8th, 9th grade, 12, 13, thereabouts. It was a goal the entire time I was going through high school, actually, to get myself over to the UK and get the qualifications I needed to go to the UK. That was how and why I wound up in the UK, mostly due to my maternal grandfather pushing the UK as a place to be.
00:05:30
Speaker
for university. Very cool. And you ultimately ended up at Durham University. How would you describe that program to a person who has no idea?
00:05:41
Speaker
UK archaeology programs. It's really good. So it's really focused. So the department at Durham has a really good kind of spread of staff. They've got, they do have an Egyptologist, but they've also got staff who are focused kind of across the broad range of archaeology. So, I mean, obviously they're focused in certain areas like medieval history, that kind of thing, as you would expect for a UK university, a university in Europe, kind of focusing on
00:06:11
Speaker
medieval European history and archaeology, but also a lot of prehistorians spread across the globe. A lot of people who are focused on things like plant archaeology, bioarchaeology, all those kinds of different topics. They actually also have a conservation section within there as well. The thing I really appreciate about the Durham program
00:06:34
Speaker
is that they really focus on, even though Durham is a slightly more posh university, they focus on the realistic sides of being in archaeology. Most of you are probably not going to have an academic career,
00:06:50
Speaker
Most of you are going to have a career doing CRM, cultural resource management, or in the UK, it's called professional archaeology. And so archaeology, where you're going to be digging insights before contractors come in to build buildings. And they're very realistic about that, kind of from the end of your first introductory lecture.
00:07:09
Speaker
They're like, okay, let's be realistic. Most of you are going to be doing this kind of thing, and let's train you towards that. So they have a very heavy practical component to the course. So the way universities set up in the UK is it's a three year undergraduate, and you don't do any of the kind of liberal arts kind of education like we get here in the US, where it's, you know, you're taking the math, English, languages, history, and sciences. It's literally you go in for your degree program, and that's what you're doing.
00:07:38
Speaker
So if you're doing an archaeology degree, you take only archaeology courses. And the other big difference, at least at Durham, is that you don't have semesters in the same way that we have here. So you know, you take half a year, like, you know, August through December, and you're studying one thing, and then you got another thing from December through June. In the UK, it's, you study the same thing throughout an entire course year. So you start in October, and you have your exams and all of that in June.
00:08:07
Speaker
So it's very focused, which is really helpful if you know that's exactly what you want. Obviously, if you're a little uncertain what you want to do in terms of your career, it's a little bit less helpful. But it's really good in that you're really focused on
00:08:25
Speaker
specifically to the degree course you're going to be doing. And then that helps you focus on kind of a an area of interest if you're interested in pursuing graduate studies. So you can kind of you've got the it's essentially like the last two years of university here in the US really focused and kind of helping to kind of step into graduate studies if that's what you want to do.
00:08:45
Speaker
which is really nice actually. I really appreciated that and a lot of practical professional training. So when you walk out of an undergraduate degree at Durham, you would be able to go and apply to cultural resources management company or that kind of thing and actually be a viable candidate for a job.
00:09:01
Speaker
That would have been great for my GPA because those general classes kicked my butt. And I think it's really interesting to hear that they're so focused and exciting to hear that it's practical because I think we spend a lot of time
00:09:16
Speaker
at least in undergrads of talking about the theoretical or, you know, culture history kind of stuff, but we really miss out on a cultural resources management class. You know, I didn't get that until I was in graduate school. Although my professor, my field school professor did kind of mention and give us the idea about that stuff, but that's really cool. It's very cool.
00:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's definitely a good way of training students. Every year you have a practical component where it's three hours on a Monday morning and the initial thing is where they introduce you to all of the aspects that you need to understand generally for archaeology, so things like taphonomy and how do you write a contact sheet, that kind of thing. If you've got to actually do all the paperwork for a site,
00:10:03
Speaker
what is all that paperwork and how do you run through and do it? And then as you kind of get up into your second and third years, they focus you down a little more until your third year, you're actually focused on some professional aspect of archaeology, whether that's archaeological illustration, zoo archaeological, you know, being able to identify zoo archaeological fauna.
00:10:22
Speaker
doing conservation, that's actually what I did for my third year practical was conservation. And so that was basically a year kind of looking at understanding really the theory behind conservation. And then there was a practical aspect where we were actually conserving items that had been excavated by the department's archaeological unit, the professional archaeological unit. So yeah, it's a really good, really hands-on way of getting that good training so that, yeah, basically a student can walk out and get a job in CRM.
00:10:50
Speaker
That's awesome to hear that they train you in undergrad to become a professional because I think here in the United States, like my experience was here's a bunch of coursework. Technically, the only thing you need to work CRM in our country is you have to do a field school, not necessarily an anthropology degree, but hearing in the UK, you were trained like right from the get-go, like
00:11:11
Speaker
they were very real and blunt with you about this is the reality, we should train you for the reality, which I think is an ongoing issue here in the States of what are we actually training anthropology and specifically archaeology subfield students for an undergraduate if the only thing they need to become CRM archaeologist is a field school. So that's awesome. So why did you end up deciding to stay at Durham for a master's?
00:11:38
Speaker
Um, it was kind of a few different factors. I applied to actually do two different masters at Durham. I applied for just kind of the general archeology masters, and then I applied for the paleopathology masters. And I stayed, I wound up getting the paleopathology masters and I stayed, I decided to stay for that because Durham has Charlotte Roberts.
00:11:59
Speaker
who is like one of the top paleopathologists out there, but also has Rebecca Galland, who's another top paleopathologist. And the program is really well established. It's really well done. And they had just kind of like gotten a new lab set up. So it was really nicely like,
00:12:15
Speaker
everything was kind of primed for like, this is a really good program to be part of. Because some of the other paleopathology, like there's one at Sheffield, there was one at University College London, that kind of thing. But it was kind of really, I was comfortable with the faculty, I was comfortable with the university. And the faculty involved in the program was really, really good. So I was like, you know what, you can't go wrong.
00:12:38
Speaker
And you kind of already, as having been there as an undergraduate, you kind of already have an in with the faculty, which makes you, again, more memorable when they're looking at applications. So it was kind of one of those things where it's like all the factors kind of make it better to stay here. So I think at least in some programs in the U.S., they kind of encourage you to go somewhere else for your master's or doctorate. Is that the same kind of outlook they have in the U.K. in general?
00:13:05
Speaker
It depends. It kind of depends on who you're talking to. Yeah, some faculty I talked to were definitely like, yeah, you should go somewhere else for graduate school. Some of them were like, you know, staying here for the master's is okay. That's logical. Go somewhere else for the PhD. Some staff members were like, it's fine for you to stay at the same location for all three degrees.
00:13:26
Speaker
For me, it was kind of more a practical aspect in that given the topic I was studying, I was emailing people and a lot of people don't recognize Durham University outside of the UK, which is kind of a shame because it's a really good university, but people don't necessarily recognize the name. They're like, oh, are you talking about University of North Carolina?
00:13:46
Speaker
in
Pursuing a PhD at Oxford
00:13:47
Speaker
Durham, North Carolina, that kind of thing. And it's like, no, no, no, no, this is Durham University in the UK. So given the difficult topic I had, trying to get people to email me back was a little difficult. And so I was kind of part of what I did when I made the switch down to Oxford was getting that kind of name.
00:14:05
Speaker
because you email somebody with a University of Oxford email address and they're like, yes, I would really like to get back to you and talk to you. So there was a little bit of a mercenary sort of ideation basically behind switching down to Oxford, at least partly.
00:14:20
Speaker
Excellent. And as you've already alluded to, so you end up pursuing a PhD at Oxford, you know, I'm pretty sure many of our fans have heard of it. It's kind of, you know, one of those universities has kind of a reputation, kind of a small reputation and kind of a, kind of a big deal to go to Oxford as a PhD student. So other than getting that name recognition, what else drove you to apply to Oxford for your PhD?
00:14:45
Speaker
So partly, I wanted to, as part of the PhD, do some stable isotope work. And the School of Archaeology at Oxford has got, it's kind of split into, there's the Institute, which does kind of more cultural and theoretical work. And then there's the research laboratory for
00:15:03
Speaker
going to both share the name, but it's research laboratory for archaeology and the history of art. And they do all kinds of different basically archaeological science work. So they're do radiocarbon dating, they do stable isotope work, they do thermal luminescence dating and all those kinds of things. And so it was going to be actually really helpful to have which are which are things that Durham didn't do.
00:15:27
Speaker
To be able to have a lab that did that, get that training, that was also really valuable to me. So that ability to actually go and get some of those techniques that I just couldn't get at Durham was another thing that kind of really drew me to Oxford. And I mean, you know, again, at the end of the day, as you say, it's Oxford. Who's going to say no to Oxford?
00:15:48
Speaker
Absolutely. On that note, I think we'll end this segment. I think the next segment might be a little touchy and painful for folks. So just a heads up. This is episode 84. You're about to be sued by Chris Webster's beautiful voice.
00:16:05
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 84 of a Life in Ruins podcast. We are chatting here with Dr. Catherine Roysh, and I just want to give a heads up to our audience that the topic of this segment is going to be a little sensitive, and I don't think it'll be explicitly graphic, but there'll be some things that we talk about that might raise some eyebrows, make you wince, things like that. So just
00:16:30
Speaker
As a heads up, I'm just going to, you know, maybe not, this is not the episode, listen to with your kids or, you know, folks that might be queasy.
PhD Research on Castration
00:16:39
Speaker
So on that note, Dr. Roy, what did you write your PhD on at the University of Oxford? So my thesis topic was castration. And so I was looking at the archaeology of castration and I kind of
00:16:55
Speaker
stumbled onto, stumbled is not the right word, but I kind of worked my way to this topic while I was working on my master's. And it was kind of, you know, that sort of thing that you do when you're working on a graduate degree, you're like, Oh, what am I gonna write my thesis on? What can I do it on? And I had about six or seven different topics.
00:17:14
Speaker
that I'd kind of gone to my supervisor and been like, what do you think about this? And she was like, ah, I don't know if, you know, there's enough there for master's thesis, that kind of thing. And so I finally was kind of thinking over Christmas break that year. And I remembered I had read an Anne Rice novel probably when I was far too young. This is the problem of having unrestricted access to a library because my parents didn't didn't check any of the books. They were just like, OK, you brought books home from the library. Cool. So I read an Anne Rice novel called Cry to Heaven.
00:17:44
Speaker
And it's all about Castrati, who are the castrated singers for the Catholic Church during the late medieval into the early modern period. And I remember basically reading there, the main character had had a thing where as they hit puberty, their limbs started growing unusually long and just all these different sorts of changes. And I was like, well, those
00:18:04
Speaker
have to be skeletal changes. So I got back after Christmas, went to my undergraduate supervisor and was like, how about castration? And she's like, well, look into it, see what's there. And it kind of billowed from a master's thesis into a PhD. And again, it's something that
00:18:22
Speaker
I could probably, if I had access to skeletons, it could be a full on lifetime career sort of thing, because there's just so much information about it that we just really don't have enough info on that we could really dig into using both anthropology and archaeology. Yeah, so Catherine told me this, Dr. Roysh. I was eating a meatball sub for lunch one day, and I was just like, what was your dissertation on? And she's like, this is what I did. And I was like,
00:18:47
Speaker
fascinating. Please tell me more. But yeah, I mean, your, your publications, and we talked about this in the green room. I'm absolutely, I love these. You have voices for that. Just, just, just to be clear, we aren't talking about the castration of animals, right? We're a little, a little bit of both. Okay. Okay. I just wanted to put that before we go in. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Animals and humans. Yeah.
00:19:16
Speaker
So, we got raised voices, the archaeology of castration, reading between the lines, the disparate data in castration studies, defining the other, castration, social difference in archaeology, and dependent deviance, castration and deviant burial, like just absolutely phenomenal names for articles.
00:19:38
Speaker
Concerning your PhD dissertation, what was your thesis statement? What were you trying to prove? What was your research question? What were your results? The research question was basically, we have these historical accounts written by non-castrated males.
00:19:55
Speaker
about here's what all these changes are. And most of them are about the soft tissue. But we do know that castration before puberty in males, mammals of all kinds, not just humans, but in male mammals causes certain skeletal changes, including things like the long bones get longer, that kind of thing. So we had this kind of vague idea. But there's no set information about like, here are the things you should be looking for if you're digging in an area where you think there might be castrates.
00:20:24
Speaker
And so my first thesis question was, what actually are the changes to the skeleton in mammals, especially humans, when you castrate before puberty? And then the next question was, can we actually establish some way of detecting this? Because when I was looking into it,
00:20:44
Speaker
We've got records from China, various different dynasties in China, the Ming Dynasty in China from 1300 to 1600 in China. They're saying there are 100,000 eunuchs.
00:21:00
Speaker
serving the emperor and kind of the upper, his sons, the princes, and the nobility in China. Voltaire, I mean, it's Candide, so it's satire, but he's saying 4,000 boys a year being castrated in Naples during the height of the Castrati in the early modern period, you know, the 1700s, 1800s. And so I'm like, you know, if we're taking these numbers, even if we take them with a grain of salt, that is thousands upon thousands, if not millions of people
00:21:30
Speaker
that we just don't have any record of archaeologically. And that just strikes me as, okay, it's not that there, I mean, even if we have even smaller numbers than are listed in some of these tomes, some of these texts, there should still be enough, like there are enough records and legitimate records from the palaces and that kind of thing where we should be finding these people archaeologically.
00:21:54
Speaker
And we're just not. So my kind of basic premise was we don't understand what we're looking for. We don't understand what, when we see a castrate skeleton, we don't, unless it's specifically kind of like on a headstone saying this was a castrate, we don't understand that that's what we're seeing. And so kind of my thesis was what are actually are the changes and
00:22:15
Speaker
how can we set ourselves up so that if we are digging in an area where we know we might encounter castrate skeletons, we can actually recognize them and kind of maybe do a little bit more study there and see what stories their remains have to tell. So two questions for you. How ubiquitous was this practice across the globe and in different cultures, like time and place? And second, what's the purpose of this practice?
00:22:42
Speaker
Okay, so it kind of depends when and where you are. As far as we can tell, the earliest kind of records we have of human castrates are in some hymns to the goddess Inanna from, or in Uruk in Mesopotamia. And that's about 4,000 BC. Those are, that's the written forms of them. Those hymns are probably a good 2,000 years older than that. So 6,000 BC, potentially.
00:23:09
Speaker
There is some suggestion that human castration is linked to animal castration and animal castration as a practice for herding and kind of maintaining your domestic animals the way the kind of the breeding programs you set up. There's some suggestions that that comes in with the secondary products revolution 10 to 12,000 years ago. So potentially human castration and castration as a practice in general has been around for 10 to 12,000 years.
00:23:37
Speaker
As far as I can tell, at its widest extent, it spread from China in the east. There are some suggestions that there were castrates in Japan at certain points, all the way from the easternmost coast of Afro-Eurasia, all the way through into Africa and around the Mediterranean coast in Europe. It's a pan-Afro-Eurasian thing over time.
00:24:04
Speaker
Again, kind of more popular in some areas than others. It seems to be more closely related with very hierarchical kind of structures, either religion, so castrated priests for especially goddesses, or very hierarchical kind of political structures, so empires, that kind of thing. Where the emperor, the head of state is kind of seen as a semi-divine figure, castrates seem to be
00:24:29
Speaker
kind of go hand in hand with that kind of practice. And it's this idea that castorates kind of act, they kind of get put into this place where they're seen as not physically male and not physically female. They kind of inhabit a third gender or in some cases a third sex.
00:24:46
Speaker
And that's kind of seen as being a very powerful sort of state to be in. And so they're kind of given these specialized roles where they can be around a semi-divine figure who might harm normal people around them and who might be harmed by normal people around them. And so therefore, castorates kind of quite frequently, especially in imperial contexts,
00:25:08
Speaker
act as a kind of mediator between the imperial ruler and everyone else around him. And so they'll kind of act as, you know, full on servants. Sometimes they'll act in kind of more clerical roles, those kinds of things. It really kind of depends where you are and when you are. But the kind of overall, it seems to be they're acting as kind of a sort of living barrier between either a divine or a semi-divine figure and the rest of the population.
00:25:37
Speaker
That's absolutely fascinating. So I think in general, when we think, or at least when I think of castration, I think of it as like a emasculating or like a lessening of punishment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think of something that like is negative and negative effect on a human body, but it seems like these folks actually occupy like a very kind of important role in these societies.
00:26:04
Speaker
That's one of these interesting things. For example, in China, when the Qing Dynasty came in, the Ming Dynasty, which was the last Han Chinese dynasty of China and ended in 1644, when the Qing, who were Manchurian, basically invaded and took over the country.
00:26:25
Speaker
There is a lot of, basically the way it's taught in Chinese history is that essentially the emperors grew too weak, the eunuchs took too much power, so the castorates had too much power, and that basically caused the downfall of the dynasty. So when the Qing came in and established their dynasty, there was a very solid rule, the first ruler of that dynasty was like, we're not going to have eunuchs.
00:26:46
Speaker
And it kind of came down to they had to have Unix because they couldn't do any of the domestic chores. Because there's also this thing where, you know, in the Forbidden City, the royal palace, they weren't supposed to have intact males other than the emperor inside the gates of the Forbidden City after dark, while female maids can't handle all the domestic tasks.
00:27:05
Speaker
that need to happen. And so it was kind of, they found themselves as they settled down into kind of more traditional Han Chinese sort of way of living, instead of the more kind of nomadic lifestyle they'd had before, they found they just couldn't do without eunuchs. And so they kind of, they were like, okay, no eunuchs. And they're like, okay, no more than 3000 eunuchs. And then it was like, no more than 5000 eunuchs. And then it was just kind of like, all right, no more than X, but you know, that number was always kind of being exceeded. So yeah, it's kind of one of those things where
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's as soon as you kind of get into using, you have that role and that needs to be filled. Yeah, you can't really get away from having eunuchs within the imperial structure. It's the same thing with the Ottoman Empire and a lot of the Persian empires as well. It's just kind of one of those, basically, as soon as you have that kind of group of people filling that role, you still need someone to fill that role. And this is kind of the most
00:27:59
Speaker
obvious sort of group of people because it's like they've always been there, they've always done this role. This is a role for them.
00:28:06
Speaker
That's awesome. Also, this is going to be random, very random. We made a joke earlier in one of our episodes and we'd say the term Weijiang Xian, which is just a joke from History Eye. It's this way deep-lying thing. But he was actually this guy Weijiang Xian who was a eunuch in the part of that late Ming dynasty who had all this power and was kind of
00:28:31
Speaker
known for that kind of stuff. I think someone messaged us the other day and asked us what term we were saying. We were actually referring to this guy who was kind of wild and did this kind of crazy stuff in the late Ming Dynasty. Just as a heads up to our listeners.
00:28:46
Speaker
As a full circle to explaining something, we pulled off another podcast. They did not necessarily explain themselves. This topic is so fascinating for a number of reasons. One, as Connor has said, castration, I think in the American sense, is really seen as a punishment. This is predominantly done in our history towards undesirables.
00:29:09
Speaker
you know, maybe enslaved people that got a little too excited about freedom or other, particularly minority groups. But to hear you talk about how in some of these societies, it was a special class of population where they had this and that you can see this skeletonly, right? So as you talked,
00:29:32
Speaker
about how in mammals in general, if they're castrated early enough, like, you know, prepubescent, that they have different growths in their long bones. And you said that just as my castrated, well, he's not castrated. He had his little tubes cut, I guess. My partner's male cat was strutting in here and I was like kind of staring at him pretty intently for a little bit. I'm like, do you have, do you have some long, is that why you have some long limbs? So are you able to see this archaeologically?
00:29:58
Speaker
Um, yes. Yeah. So unfortunately, even, and this is, you know, as, as I said, I kind of, I went to Oxford because I wasn't getting a lot of people kind of writing, especially when you write about castration because which, I mean, yeah, as you say, it's, there's this special role for castrates, but we have historically always not wanted to be associated with it. Cause yeah, it is seen as kind of this, especially for intact males who are most of the people who've been writing history.
00:30:23
Speaker
it's a thing that you know it's again that castration anxiety is real and especially when you live in a society where this is practiced and it is practiced as a punishment because so yeah that's one of the things is a lot of these societies where castrate they use castrates castrate was also the castration was also a punishment
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, it is one of those things where there's a lot of anxiety behind it. You've got mostly intact males writing the histories, and so you get this push-pull as to, we need them, but we don't like having them, and we don't want to be associated with us being the ones to make them. In the Roman Empire, it has to come from outside the borders of the empire. You can't be castrating people inside the empire unless it's for punishment, that kind of thing.
00:31:03
Speaker
But yeah, you can actually see it in long bones. And it's, unfortunately, I didn't get a lot of skeletons for my thesis, which is kind of why I branched out more into animals and kind of just broadly in mammals for my thesis is, yes, yeah, if you castrate paper betterly, and it's basically it's dependent on the hormones,
00:31:25
Speaker
we know about estrogen, we know about testosterone. Both males and females, if we think of sex as a spectrum, and we've got females at one end, males at the other end, females tend to have more estrogen, males tend to have more testosterone. But what actually happens is the androgens, the male sex hormones, everybody has a little bit of both at least, at least a little bit of both.
00:31:49
Speaker
Androgens actually turn into estrogens. And you need estrogens to both tell your bones to start growing when you're a kid. You also need it to tell your bones to stop growing. So it's kind of one of these things where castrates, when the testicles are removed or otherwise destroyed,
00:32:07
Speaker
Or the destroyed sounds so much worse. When you say destroyed, that really makes me cringe. Well, yeah, this is there were a couple times doing the reading for my thesis where it was not great because the main main way of getting rid of testicles is to just cut them off. But there were also methods where you could crush them. Or, you know, they're like like they do sometimes with modern animals, they kind of put a band around the base of them and just kind of they essentially atrophy and fall off.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, there are lots of different kind of terrible ways of castrating male mammals. Yeah, it's not very pleasant reading sometimes. But basically, if the testicles are no longer there, they can't create that estrogen to send that signal to the bones to stop growing.
00:32:54
Speaker
So, I looked at a castrate. He was from, I believe, somewhere along the Nile. And he'd basically been caught, enslaved, brought up the Nile, castrated, and he wound up in a household in Egypt.
00:33:10
Speaker
He then, I think, caught something, a cold, an infection, something, and passed away at about somewhere between 22 and 26. His age is a little unclear. But basically, his remains were then taken to the morgue in Cairo, where this French doctor was visiting. He was friends with the head of the morgue in Cairo and watched the autopsy. And then, I don't know how, probably through some extremely dodgy and unethical practices, brought the remains of this individual back to France with him.
00:33:40
Speaker
These remains are actually in the Anatomy Museum in Lyon. I went to study these remains for my thesis. This individual died when he was 26, and he still got completely open epiphysis. As your bones are growing, you've got the end bits, which are the epiphysis, and then you've got the diaphysis. Of an arm bone, you'd have an epiphysis up here, an epiphysis down here, and then you've got the shaft.
00:34:04
Speaker
And normally by the time you're in your mid-20s, you'd expect these epiphyses to be fully fused to the rest of the bone. His were completely open. So that's unusual. It potentially could happen if someone was malnourished, a couple of other things, but kind of even more than that, a paper that was published in the kind of early 2010s by Bel Castro and colleagues
00:34:26
Speaker
They had exhumed a very famous Castrado named Farinelli, and he was basically kind of like the Jonas Brothers of the operatic age, the 1700s. He was like the Michael Jackson, the big superstar kind of singer of the time. And so he was wealthy. He had all these fans.
00:34:46
Speaker
And he basically was wealthy enough that he could set aside a tomb for himself. So he was buried and he'd been exhumed a couple times, moved around. He'd been buried with a great niece, that kind of thing. And in 2009 or so, he was exhumed because the cemetery was, I believe, being built over.
00:35:07
Speaker
So he was exhumed from the cemetery and so the team was studying his remains and they were looking at him. He died when he was 76 and he still had open epiphysis.
00:35:18
Speaker
which is completely unheard of. Basically, there's something completely different going on with this skeleton. His long bone epiphysis are completely open. Because the epiphysis never get that signal to fuse to the bones, your bones just keep getting longer and longer and longer because they're growing out towards these epiphysis.
00:35:38
Speaker
and they're never told to stop. So yeah, you get this kind of very long, in some cases, very kind of narrow sort of body shape, not quite Slenderman, but... Oh my God, I was just about to say Slenderman. Just kind of straight, straight Slenderman. Oh my God. Yeah.
00:35:54
Speaker
You look at some photos of castorates from the early 1900s, and you're like, okay, yeah, no. Seeing that person coming at you in a dark alleyway or a dark forest somewhere, if you knew about Slender Man, you would kind of be like, oh. All of the long bones get very long. Then the other thing I found was that
00:36:12
Speaker
Basically, again, you need testosterone and at least a little bit of estrogen to kind of make the mid-face, the kind of area here between your eyes and your mouth, get taller. If you don't have that, that kind of stays small, so your face, the castorates in general are always described as having very childlike faces.
00:36:29
Speaker
And that's part of it. Partly also you don't get the same level of wrinkling to your skin, but also like just because your face doesn't get as tall, it looks more childlike. And then you also get the pelvis. It doesn't look quite correct. So you've got kind of like the bits where you put your hands on are the iliac crest and that kind of angles out in castrates. So like the kind of the lower bit where your pubic bone and your
00:36:57
Speaker
sit-upon bones, your ischia, that looks kind of the same as anybody else, but the more upper flared part of a pelvis, they kind of lay out a little bit, which kind of contributes to... Casteries get described as having a very feminine-looking hips.
00:37:14
Speaker
And that's partly due to fat deposition and partly due to the, I think the fact that their pelvis kind of splay out a little bit in this kind of weird way. So yeah, you can look at a skeleton and you can be like, okay, yes, that looks weird. Cause like, yeah, this is, I went into the anatomy museum.
00:37:31
Speaker
And they just have this skeleton kind of hanging in the anatomy museum and walking up. You look at it and you're like, there's something not right with that skeleton. But the weird thing is when he was laid down for me to be able to examine him, that kind of disappeared. And so you kind of other other than the fact that the fingers and the toes were a little long, a little spidery looking, most of that kind of disproportion disappeared.
00:37:53
Speaker
And I think that's part of why we're not finding castrates archaeologically, is because, of course, when you exhume a skeleton, they're laying down. When you examine them, they're laying down. You don't get this kind of idea of that kind of long, strange proportion.
Modern Castration Practices
00:38:06
Speaker
Unless you're doing statistical analyses, you wouldn't get that kind of disproportion that comes out. So we did do some statistics and
00:38:18
Speaker
You can actually statistically detect castrates within a population if you're kind of living it, keeping it at three extremes, male, female, and castrate. Very, very, very cool. Yeah. I think I've never been. I've never never been this uncomfortable. It's just like, this is a, this is a hard topic for, for gentlemen in particular. And just listening to you talk about this, like I, yeah, I could see the Connor on this. Like this was cool.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah, and this is episode 84. We will catch you after you hear Chris Webster's beautiful, beautiful voice.
00:38:54
Speaker
and is not castrated. Welcome back to episode 84 of the Life in Ruins podcast. We are here with Dr. Katherine Roysh, and I think I've introduced and or walked out every segment of this, so I apologize to Carlton. But recently, I was listening to a Radiolab piece, and we will drop that in the show notes, where they're talking about modern castration.
00:39:20
Speaker
who it affects and things like that. So could you give us kind of a short description of what modern castration looks like today?
00:39:32
Speaker
Definitely. And yeah, it's kind of the first thing is that we do still have castration today. It's not a dead practice. It's something that we're still doing actively. In some cases, it's more chemical castration for sex offenders. And that's basically blockers to block hormones. The idea is that it's supposed to prevent aggression, sexual feelings, and in some cases, erections.
00:39:56
Speaker
how well that works is kind of debated still within the medical and medical legal fields. But the idea is that it's a more humane form of castration because it's reversible. So if you stop taking the drugs, you can go back to fairly normal sexual function. So that happens for sexual predators, those kinds of things. If they're looking for a shorter sentence, they might trade off and say, yes, I'm willing to undergo chemical castration.
00:40:20
Speaker
The other thing it gets used for quite frequently these days is prostate cancer, because prostate cancer is fed by testosterone. Sometimes if you have a very aggressive form or a form that's not responding well to other kinds of treatments, you will be given chemical castration, essentially, again, those same blockers to kind of prevent the androgens, especially the testosterone, from kind of really aggravating and feeding the cancer. So that's kind of two major forms.
00:40:47
Speaker
And then there are also, yeah, there's still physical sterilizations happening of people today. And this kind of stems from, I'm blanking on exactly the date, but it's basically Bell versus Buck. And it was an early 1900s rule, basically.
00:41:02
Speaker
It's talked all about in the book Imbeciles, which I'm blanking on the author at the moment. It goes into this case where it's this idea that undesirable to who is, again, who's in power at the time, but people who are undesirable to the people in power can be legally sterilized.
00:41:23
Speaker
And that's still US law. If you are within the US and you are deemed essentially an imbecile, that's the actual legal term used, you can be sterilized against your will. And this is a law that's used for a lot of different things. It's used, yes, for people with, in some cases, developmental disabilities. It's part of what's being used to justify sterilizations of women coming north.
00:41:45
Speaker
from Central America, Central and South America on the southern border, those sterilizations we heard about a month or two ago. It's the same law that's being used to justify those. And so yeah, it's sterilization, castration is still being practiced today in a number of different ways, a number of different places. There's also the fact that a lot of trans individuals
00:42:08
Speaker
if you wish to be recognized legally on your identification as the sex that matches your gender identity, frequently, especially here in the US, you have to be sterilized. And so it's still being practiced in a lot of same ways that it has been practiced in the past, and in some cases, some very discriminatory ways.
00:42:27
Speaker
Absolutely. And I will go ahead and Chris, you don't have to believe this. That's pretty fucked up. Lay that down. I know part of that deviancy that you touched upon, like within the modern era, that includes homosexuals and that's happened to individuals that many
00:42:44
Speaker
had a very prominent roles in history. Like in the green room, we talked about, you know, the guy in the UK that cracked the enigma code, the German enigma code, and we were able to read all of the German message, Nazi German messages throughout World War II was a homosexual. And then once that got found out, they made him go through that chemical castration. And especially when it kind of talked about sterilization, right? Like American Indian communities,
00:43:13
Speaker
attested this right in the 1970s. Maybe our listeners aren't aware, but the US and some doctors sterilized indigenous women without their knowledge. And to hear that that's going on today in 2021, migrants fleeing into the United States from their countries who are in economic and political turmoil, primarily because of American and CIA involvement,
00:43:38
Speaker
is highly disturbing and castration for many of our audience is something that we think of as explicitly a past practice and something that we've learned throughout this entire show and an entire theme that we've had with all of our guests is how is archaeology and anthropology relevant to today and your research on castration, which
00:44:01
Speaker
kind of shows how that affects you biologically, and we've talked about the anthropology of how they've interacted societally. That matters today, that modern people, that there are people that are going through this process either willing or unwillingly, or it's being forced upon them.
00:44:16
Speaker
You know, like, as you mentioned, people are being with people that are trying to become the identity that they associate with, that that's being forced upon them.
Relevance and Recommendations
00:44:28
Speaker
Right. Like we talked about the Ming Dynasty. I mean, do you volunteer to be a castrate? Who knows? But like that, the dualities where you can see a lot of this interplay is just with this conversation night, it's just
00:44:41
Speaker
So eye opening is like all I can say. And that doesn't necessarily mean a good thing. It's like, holy, holy crap. This is still going on today. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those.
00:44:54
Speaker
challenging things of studying this field. People are like, oh, how can that be relevant? And it's actually deeply relevant today in ways that I really wish it wasn't. As you say, in the year 2021, I really wish that it was not relevant in the ways that it is. But yeah, it is this kind of deep duality and it's
00:45:15
Speaker
it's kind of interwoven into castration. And I think it probably comes from that original seed of if castration is related to, human castration is related to animal management practices.
00:45:29
Speaker
It starts 10, 12,000 years ago. If you view people as animals, if you view people, you know, you have slaves, you view people as less than you, it's a very, very easy step to go from, okay, we're doing our animal herd management practices. Now we're going to do that same herd management practice.
00:45:50
Speaker
on the people we've got. And it's probably that original seed of human castration is related to that viewing of other human beings as not human, as inhuman. And it's that same problem we see here in 2021 is you don't view them as human and therefore you're justified in doing whatever you want to them.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Like you mentioned, it's a population control mechanism. You can really control and put down folks that you don't want that are not desirable as part of your population. That's a very eugenics thing, and that's the history of anthropology. All this stuff is really related to our discipline.
00:46:35
Speaker
are the trajectory of humans in this world, a lot of that is related. So it's crazy. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. It's been eye-opening and really fantastic to have you on. Thank you very much for having me. I love talking about it. So yeah, it's been a great opportunity. Thank you.
00:46:57
Speaker
Excellent. And I know our listeners might be confused, but yeah, we ran a little long for the second segment, which we're totally happy about. So we do have to cut this one a little bit short, Katherine, like Echoing Connor. It's been fascinating having you on. I've been thinking about it since we had that lunch and you're like, this is what my research is about. And I was like,
00:47:15
Speaker
Oh, okay. So, but before we end the show, what are a couple sources? These could be books, articles, videos, blogs, whatever that you would recommend for anyone interested in bio anthropology, paleo pathology, or castration.
00:47:30
Speaker
Definitely. If anyone's interested in learning more about the human skeleton, anything like that, beginning human osteology, the Human Bone Manual by Tim White and Peter Fulkins is great for that. It's a great introductory manual. It's got a lot of the really basic information for beginning bioarchaeology. Inside it, it's got
00:47:51
Speaker
life-size images of human bones. So you can kind of, from all the kind of different angles, you can view a bone. So it's actually a really great field resource as well. And it's, you'll find full professional bioarchaeologists taking it into the field as a reference guide. So it's a wonderful book. For paleopathology specifically, which is the study of disease in past populations, I really like The Archaeology of Disease by Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester.
00:48:19
Speaker
It's a really great intro to paleopathology as kind of a discipline, looking at, okay, we understand what the skeleton is, we understand what it should look like. Now we've got this skeleton that looks very different. How do we kind of determine what's going on? And so it's actually used as a textbook pretty frequently. In fact, it was one of the textbooks for my master's program.
00:48:39
Speaker
And then for castration, if you're interested in it, I really do want to say my thesis. It's not published, but you can actually find it on Oxford's repository webpage. You have to deposit a digital copy of your thesis. So I do have a copy of that. But if you have a kind of a more general interest, I'm just kind of learning about the history of castration. Piotr Schulz has got a book called Unix and Castrati, a cultural history, which is a really great kind of general history
00:49:07
Speaker
It was published in 2001, so it's a little bit out of date. If you'd like something a little bit more up to date, Sean Tuffer has the Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society, which has got a really great section. There are a couple chapters that are really good history of castration kind of across the globe.
00:49:23
Speaker
And as far as I know, that's available. Both of those are available from most libraries, certainly here in the Front Range region, you can get them from the library. I only say that because Sean Tuffer's book is a little bit expensive for if you've just kind of got a passing interest.
Episode Conclusion
00:49:38
Speaker
And then yeah, if you're interested in more about Buck versus Bell, imbeciles, which again, I'm blanking on the author is a really great kind of segue there.
00:49:46
Speaker
That's Paul Lombardo. I looked it up now. I Googled it, so that was the reason. That will be in the show notes and a link to that. Also a link to the Radiolab piece, which I think is based on that. Where can our listeners find you on social media?
00:50:04
Speaker
I have a Twitter, which is at klreusch, and that's R-E-U-S-C-H. And then you can also find me on the DM&S staff webpage under basically our anthropology staff. I'm on there. And that's probably the best place to kind of catch up with what we're doing in the conservation lab at the museum.
00:50:26
Speaker
Awesome. And because this is a life in ruins, we have to ask you a very cheesy question. So if you were given the opportunity, would you choose to study a very sensitive subject about the folks who lived in ruins? Would you do it all again? Yes, definitely.
00:50:47
Speaker
Absolutely. That's what I like to hear. So everyone, we just interviewed Dr. Katherine Royce, conservation technician in the museum, conservation department at Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and affiliate faculty of sociology and anthropology at the Metro State University of Denver. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Dr. Royce, it's been an absolute pleasure talking about what got you inspired to be an archaeologist as well as your research.
00:51:16
Speaker
For everyone listening, please, please, please be sure to rate the podcast and provide us with any feedback on whichever podcasting platform you are using to listen to our show. It's very important that you let us know how we're doing. You can email us if you have topics you'd like us to cover or guests that you'd like us to interview. And if you're listening on the All Shows feed on the Archeology Podcast Network, please, please, please
00:51:40
Speaker
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00:52:13
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So what's the difference between a man with a vasectomy and a eunuch?
00:52:35
Speaker
A vast difference. Damn! I have heard it! Made it! Oh my god, that makes me so happy. And with that everyone, we are out.
00:53:02
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster, Rachel Rodin, Laura Johnson, Max Lander, and
00:53:21
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.