Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
Researchers identify the first skeleton showing China's judicial nose amputation
A woman buried face down in a Henan cemetery had her nasal bones cut back to half the bridge and lived, and the team that found her among 300 burials argues the grave itself points to punishment.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- A study in the November issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports describes a 700-year-old woman's skull from China as the world's first archaeological example of punitive nose amputation.
- She was buried face down in a wooden coffin on the southern edge of the Sanzhiyuan cemetery in Henan province, with a copper hairpin as her only grave good.
- Radiocarbon dating places her life between 1298 and 1404, a span that covers the end of the Yuan dynasty and the beginning of the Ming.
- The 2019 dig was a rapid salvage excavation ahead of construction, and the skull was not recognized as a possible amputation until a Zhengzhou University archaeologist worked through the skeletons in 2024.
- Wang said theft of livestock such as cattle and donkeys was not uncommon in the agriculture-based economy, though adultery was another possible reason for the sentence.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- capability With the bone signature described in print, curators can screen existing skeletal collections for the same nasal margins, so the record of this punishment need no longer rest only on inscriptions and legal texts.
- constraint A single skull supports no rate: the work cannot say how often the sentence was imposed, on whom, or whether women were disproportionately subject to it.
- precedent Salvage excavations hand on collections nobody has examined closely, so the next case of this kind is likelier to be found in a storeroom than in a trench.
The identification rests on two lines of evidence, and each one supports the other. On the bone, the team recorded an enlarged piriform aperture, two nasal bones cut back to roughly half the bridge of the nose, and broken bones inside the nose with signs of healing at their edges [8][9][10]. The researchers wrote that the injuries would have given the middle of her face a "hollow appearance" [11]. They could not completely rule out a disease or a birth defect, and said the face-down burial was what made punishment the most likely reading [12].
So the burial position is the reason the authors prefer a penal cut to a pathology, and the penal cut is their explanation for the burial.
Qian Wang, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University and a co-author, told Live Science in an email: "We believe this woman was a kind of cast-off after death. She was buried face-down, suggesting a discriminatory attitude" [24][13]. He added that "Her burial, alone, in a place without her family or community, could be a decision of disapproval" [14]. Elizabeth Berger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the work, told Live Science that the study makes a convincing case for punitive nasal amputation as the cause [21].
One skull out of about 300 excavated at the site works out to roughly 0.3 percent of the assemblage [1], and there is nothing to compare it against. Wang said he was surprised by the find "because so far no scientific report or description of any cases of penal nasal amputation" in archaeological skeletons has been published [18].
Healing at the cut margins establishes that she survived the injury [3][10], though it cannot show who inflicted it. The judicial part of the reading comes from the written and inscribed record: the punishment appears in Shang-dynasty oracle bone inscriptions, written as a knife on the left or right side of the nose [17], and it sits among the Five Punishments of early dynastic China alongside tattooing, foot amputation, castration and death [19]. Wang said that "At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, such a felony was punished by nasal amputation" [16]. The radiocarbon result spans 106 years [3] and falls in either the Yuan or the early Ming [6], so the date on its own puts her as easily in the early Ming as under that code.
The skull sat in a collection for five years before anyone read the nasal margins this way [2]. It was assessed under the Asia Module of the Global History of Health Project, which Wang leads [23]. Berger said that with the case described, "researchers can look for other cases, and hopefully more evidence can be found of who was subjected to this punishment, how it was carried out, and how it was medically managed afterwards, including the use of prosthetics" [22].
What to watch
- Whether screening under the Global History of Health Project's Asia Module turns up a second skull with the same nasal margins.
- Whether any future case shows after-care or a prosthesis, which Berger listed as an open question.
- Whether a cut nose ever appears in an ordinary family-associated burial, which would separate the bone diagnosis from the grave position.