The New ‘Coimbra Method’: A Biologically Appropriate Method for Recording Specific Features of Fibrocartilaginous Entheseal Changes

What is it about?

This paper presents a new method for recording different types of entheseal changes including formative changes, erosive changes and various types of porosities. The aim of the method is to enable the study of the cause of these individual changes and determine their variability among diverse populations.

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Why is it important?

Entheseal changes have been widely used to infer muscle usage to study activity patterns in past populations. Until the cause of these changes is fully understood it is not possible to use them for this purpose. Studying their variability and their association with age-at-death, skeletal development, biomechanics, diseases etc. will help better understand these changes improving their inferences made in bioarchaeology.