For the remaining skulls in the sample that did not exhibit clear cranial fractures, the precise cause of death remains less visually obvious on the bone. To explain how those individuals may have died, scholars and researchers have posited several alternative theories. Because soft tissue rarely survives in the archaeological record outside of specific artificial or environmental mummification contexts, deaths resulting from soft-tissue damage or non-skeletal trauma leave no direct trace on the bone. Consequently, researchers have suggested that asphyxiation, strangulation, or poisoning could account for the deaths of the individuals whose skulls bore no visible skeletal trauma.
Methodological advances and historical oversight
The discovery of extensive violent trauma across nearly 40 percent of the examined skulls raises an obvious question: why did Flinders Petrie, widely regarded as one of the most meticulous and methodical excavators of his era, fail to document these fatal injuries when he first processed the collection?
Petrie’s original field notes made no mention of the severe, fatal trauma that Campbell identified. However, Campbell stressed that this omission should not be viewed as carelessness or poor record-keeping on the part of the famous excavator. Instead, it underscores how dramatically the fields of bioarchaeology, osteology, and physical anthropology have advanced over the past hundred years.
Campbell noted that Petrie was a extraordinarily careful observer who documented his finds with great detail given the tools available to him at the time. The issue was not a lack of diligence, but rather a lack of scientific knowledge regarding bone biomechanics and forensic pathology. Petrie simply did not possess the theoretical framework or analytical training required to understand what he was looking at when examining broken bone surfaces.
Over the last few decades, bioarchaeologists have developed a far more sophisticated understanding of how to differentiate between injuries that occurred around the time of death and damage that occurred long after burial. Modern bone analysis relies heavily on understanding how bone tissue reacts to mechanical stress under different biological conditions. Bone responds in fundamentally different ways depending on whether it is fresh, green bone containing living moisture and organic collagen, dry bone that has lost its organic matrix over time, or fossilized bone exposed to environmental pressure.
When fresh bone suffers an impact at or near the time of death—known as perimortem trauma—it exhibits specific structural behaviors, such as smooth, linear fracturing, plastic deformation, and characteristic beveling along the margins of the break. Conversely, dry bone that breaks centuries after death due to soil weight, excavation tools, or handling—known as postmortem damage—fractures in a jagged, irregular, or staircase fashion.
Without a modern understanding of these biomechanical distinctions, early excavators had no reliable method for determining when a fracture occurred. If an early archaeologist saw a crack in a skull, the standard assumption was that the fragile bone had simply broken during excavation or handling. Because accidental damage during unearthing was common, genuine evidence of ancient lethal violence was frequently dismissed as routine excavation damage.
