Research profile: Jessica Thompson

By Steven Scarpa

As a researcher, it can be easy to detach from your subject matter. But, in the case of Jess Thompson’s latest research – the discovery of the oldest known instance of human cremation, which happened 9,500 years ago in Africa – she didn’t want to let the person slip away. 

She found that by examining the details provided by burned bone fragments, even after thousands of years, you can hear whispers of who this individual might have been. 

Thompson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Assistant Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody, recently published findings in Science Advances. Using all the methods at her disposal - archaeological, geospatial, forensic, and bioarcheological — Thompson and her colleagues reconstructed the cremation. Yale Today provides a detailed outline.

“As a Peabody curator, it’s really important to me that any research I do is translated broadly to all the people out there who are interested in this kind of discovery,” Thompson said. 

She has been working in northern Malawi since 2009 and in 2016 started a new project in the area to learn more about what life was like in the Stone Age. “Our goal was to uncover evidence of past lifestyles, what people were eating, how people were making stone tools, and if they were ornamenting themselves with beads. What was going on in the day-to-day life of these people?” Thompson said.

During a dig in their second field season, Thompson’s team found a huge mass of ash. As they continued to dig, they realized the mass was deep and thick. “Finally, one of the excavators said, ‘Come look at this.’ I went over, and he had found at the bottom of the excavation the very end of a human elbow,” Thompson recalled.

Thompson realized they’d encountered a cremation site. The pyre, about the size of a queen bed, was found near rock shelters at the base of Mount Hora. “This was a thriving landscape full of people with social memories and stories connected to landscape features, which are almost totally erased today,” Thompson said.

By examining 170 fragments of bone, Thompson and her team were able to make some determinations about the person at the center of the pyre. 

The person who had been cremated was likely to have been a small woman between the ages of 18 and 60. By comparing the bones in the upper arms to those in the lower limbs, she was likely had a greater ratio of strength in her upper body than her lower body. That could indicate she might not have spent as much time on long treks compared to other foragers. 

“There were a few other clues about her life. Seems like she was probably suffering from a bit of arthritis. She also had an infection in one of her arms that had healed at some point,” Thompson said. 

There were cut marks on the bones, which Thompson said means that people were involved in removing flesh and fragmenting the bones, which could be associated with remembrance, social memory, and ancestral veneration. The absence of teeth or skull bones indicated that the head had been removed prior to cremation. 

The discovery opened up a new world of questions for Thompson. Cremations are associated with farmers or those who have livestock, Thompson said. It’s not a mortuary custom typically associated with foragers  – and especially not in the African record. The challenge inherent in burning a human body implies a great deal of communal effort, and ancient foragers in Africa have been traditionally viewed as small-scale and less invested in labor intensive public events. 

“It does seem to suggest that there was something different about this person and the way that they were treated because it was not in line with the other mortuary rituals that we had seen at that and at other sites in the region,” Thompson said. 

Thompson and her colleagues continue to work on reconstructing the ordinary day-to-day lives of these people. Thanks to those efforts, there’s a possibility they might find something new or different than what was previously believed. “We are finding a lot more diversity in the way that people are treating their dead than we ever expected,” Thompson said. “This suggests that there was also a lot more diversity in the roles people had in life.”

Thompson’s work shows something that isn’t always immediately obvious to a Peabody Museum visitor – its scientists regularly conduct active field research. “We are an international scientific organization, and I feel really proud to be able to bring this kind of discovery to my work as a curator here,” Thompson said.