Paleopathology

The purpose of the contemporary discipline of paleopathology is to diagnose and place diseases into
an evolutionary, environmental and healthiness context to understand biological variables and
create new questions and fields of research. This recently born and ever-evolving discipline has in
its past a history of controversies and re-interpretations. Its current approaches towards new
directions and interpretations strictly dialogue with archaeology on one hand and clinical medicine
on the other. As the field of research is closely related mostly to these disciplines, one of the most
important key point of paleopathology is cooperation and interdisciplinarity.


Some of the general problems the discipline deals with are how the human body and the bone tissue
react to pathological stresses, how the different diseases occur at the skeletal level and the way to

recognize the global onset of a pathology on the skeleton to reach a more probable diagnosis. Based
on that, paleopathology has imposed limits to its research, as it cannot totally answer to the
questions related to the ancient living populations without cooperating with other disciplines and
field of research that can open new perspectives on several aspects of the human past conditions.


In our Centre, the differential diagnosis of a pathology occurring on skeletal tissue takes hold of a
detailed macroscopic observation, up to parallel analyses such as histology on tissue and
radiodiagnostics.