20 PREHISTORIC TREPniNING. 



"^J'he aperture was on the right side of the frontal bone, was nearly circular 

 in shape, and about 3 centimeters in diameter. The inner table of the skull 

 exhibited no trace whatever of inflammatory process, such as would inevi- 

 tably have accompanied caries or exostosis of the bone. At great length 

 Professor Wankel examines every possible disease or injury of the bone 

 which might be supposed to account for the opening, and rejects them all. 

 From this argument by exclusion he arrives at a very firm belief that the 

 case was one of surgical trephining, preciselj^ analogous to those observed 

 in the crania of La Lozfere.^"* 



About the same time Dr. B. Dudik sent a communication to the Berlin 

 Ethnological Society, announcing his discovery of man}^ trephined skulls 

 in the ossuarium, or Beinhaus, at Sedlec in Bohemia."' In this famous bone- 

 heap there are pyramids of skulls and thousands of human bones. Tradi- 

 tion states tl;at they came from the old churchyard of Sedlec, the soil of 

 Avhich, having been made sacred by admixture with earth brought from Geth- 

 semane, had the property of rapidly decaying the flesh and of preserving the 

 bones with a whiteness as of alabaster. The structure which now incloses 

 the relics was erected in 1700, l)ut allusions to the Sedlec bones are to be 

 found in very early chronicles. A local legend relates that the perforated 

 skulls (of which there are a great many) once belonged to the Cistei'cian and 

 Carthusian monks who were killed when the Hussites, under Ziska, captured 

 the convent of Sedlec in 1421. Dr. Dudik thinks that the punctures are 

 too even and too free from fracture to have been made by the spiked clubs 

 with which Ziska's followers were armed. This objection is probably not 

 well-founded. The writer remembers examining- a heap of skulls of horses 

 in a knacker's yard, the animals having been destroyed with a pole-axe, a 

 weapon very similar to a spiked club, and the punctures were, in almost all 

 instances, round with sharp edges and not accompanied by fracture. It 

 seems probable that these bones have accumulated through a very long 

 period of time, but that they date principally from the year 1318, when 

 a pestilence ravaged Bohemia and thirty thousand persons were buried in 

 Sedlec alone. 



^i" Wankel (H. ). Ein piilbistoriseher Scbiidel mit eiiicr halbgeheiltcii Wiinde aiif dcr Stirne hochst- 

 wahrscbeinlich diircli Trepanation entstandeu. Mitth. d. antlirop. Gcsollsch. in Wien, 1878, vii, 86-95. 



-'Dndik (B.). Uebcv trcpanirto Cranien im Beinbanse zn Sedlec. Ztscbr. f. Etlm., Berl., 1878, x, 

 227-2a'-.. 



