Miklós Kásler - Zoltán Szentirmay (szerk.): Identifying the Árpád Dynasty Skeletons Interred in the Matthias Church. Applying data from historical, archaeological, anthropological, radiological, morphological, radiocarbon dating and genetic research (Budapest, 2021)
CHAPTER THREE – Archaeological, anthropological and radiological data
Figure 16. A: The reconstructed 3D skull of Béla III based on hundreds of layers is a good illustration of the fact that both the cranium cerebrale, cranial base and the facial bones are intact. There are no signs of bone disease in either the sinus or ear region. B: The lateral image also shows that the ear’s opening is fully intact. Éry’s working group of anthropologists performed extremely detailed anthropological investigations on the royal couple and the skeletons of persons 1/3 G5, and 1/4 H6 (Éry 2008). In the course of this, they calculated the anthropological age at the time of death (displayed in Figure 3) and the body heights as follows: Béla III: 186.61 cm (or 185.83 cm), Anne of Antioch: 161.69 cm (or 161.46 cm), skeleton 1/3 G: 162.07 cm, skeleton 1/4 H: 178.18 cm. It was considered, merely theoretically, that the skeleton labelled G may have been one of the Árpád Dynasty Kings buried at Székesfehérvár. The names of Kálmán the Learned (fl 116), Béla II the Blind (t1141 ), Géza II (fl 162), László II (fl 163) and István IV (fl 165) were considered, but all of them were ruled out due to a small difference between the known age of these kings and the anthropologically determined age. In Kálmáns case, the ear infection lacks osteological evidence, while Béla II was ruled out from the theoretical possibilities 80
