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Skull Trepanations in Bronze Age Greece: An Archaeologist's View

Publication at First Faculty of Medicine |
2015

Abstract

In the February 2014 issue of WORLD NEUROSURGERY, Papagrigorakis et al. published a paper on one of the oldest cases of skull trepanation in Bronze Age Greece found in Kirrha and dated to the Middle Helladic period (c. 2000MINUS SIGN 1700 BC), i.e., the Middle Bronze Age (21). With regard to its importance and contribution to the history of medicine/surgical practice in the prehistoric Aegean, this paper evoked 2 specialists' commentaries (11, 12).

With a background in Aegean prehistory, I consider to be appropriate to add one more commentary from the (osteo)archaeological perspective, in which some data, inaccurately presented by Papagrigorakis et al., will be corrected and supplemented with the necessary (archaeological) context.