FOR MANY people the men, women and children who lived fourteen or fifteen centuries ago are mere abstractions, and it is sometimes hard to comprehend that the people we early medieval historians study were actually people rather than concepts or faceless automatons pushed across time and space by anonymous, impersonal, historical forces. But the evidence of human bones helps to re-animate the historical dead. When confronted with the skeletons of a mother and baby who died during pregnancy, or the body of a tenth-century peasant with polio, or a woman whose arthritic toes and bunions must have caused her feet to ache, it is only then that we truly begin to comprehend that people in early medieval Britain did live and did breathe. Bones, as a matter of fact, enable us to say all sorts of things about the overall health and well-being of people living a millennium before we have any other useful demographic data. Skulls and tibias, for example, can betray dubious water and teetering health; tiny bodies infant mortality; broken-necked corpses the terrible, bodily consequences of thievery. While bones permit us to track broad demographic trends that none of the period's texts disclose, the specificity of bones allows for more than this. Skeletons, first and foremost, are the remains of individuals, who, while living, had hopes and sorrows all their own. These were people with individually aching knees and their very own sore shoulders.