Remains on display at the Our Buried Bones exhibition in Glasgow include those of two women 1,000 years and miles apart, from different social classes, both with evidence of poor diets

The skeletons of two women who died more than 1,000 years and miles apart, but who shared conditions which would have filled their short lives with pain, go on display in an exhibition opening in Glasgow this week.

One was a tiny teenager who died in the early 19th century, and was given a pauper’s funeral in a densely packed south London cemetery reserved for what the exhibition curator, Jelena Bekvalac, called “the abject poor” – including many workers in the Southwark brothels.

She was well under five feet tall, and by the end of her short life would have been in agony, her pitted skull revealing the scars of the open sores of tertiary syphilis, the then incurable disease with which she was probably born. Her bent leg bones may be another symptom of the disease, or caused by rickets, another condition usually related to poverty and poor diet.

The other woman was Pictish, possibly with royal connections, given a high-status burial around the year 700 AD. She was laid under an imposing cairn on the beautiful Scottish island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides – yet like the London girl, she suffered from shockingly worn and decayed teeth, and bone conditions related to dietary deficiencies.

“It is impossible to look at these bones without feeling an emotional connection to these people who died so long ago,” Bekvalac said.

The decayed teeth of both women reveal how they lived and what they ate: the Pictish woman, who lived beside a sea teeming with life, ate almost no fish or seafood. The marks in the teeth of the London girl showed that in her short life she went through several periods of near starvation, until she died before her 20th birthday, and was buried in the Cross Bones cemetery in Borough, south London. In the 16th century John Stow’s Survey of London recorded it as a burial ground for “single women”, a euphemism for prostitutes, and it was grossly overcrowded by the time it was closed in the mid 19th century as a danger to public health.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jelena Bekvalac, curator of human osteology at the Museum of London and Emily Sargent, curator at Wellcome Collection, check the skeleton of a female aged between 17-25 years old from Crossbones in Southwark who suffered the ravages of syphilis. Photograph: Callum Bennetts/MAVERICK PHOTO AGENCY

The exhibition, which includes striking contemporary views of the sites by Thomas Adank, has been jointly created by the Museum of London, where Bekvalac is curator of human osteology in one of the largest collections of human remains taken from one location anywhere in the world, the Wellcome Collection, and the Hunterian medical museum in Glasgow, which has contributed remains from its own collection and from other Scottish museum collections.

Emily Sargent, curator at Wellcome Collection, said: “Spanning thousands of years and from opposite ends of the country and social scales, the bones of these individuals offer us a rare and special glimpse into history. Yet we identify with their rotten teeth or broken bones, and are reminded that skeletons can tell us more about what people lived with, rather than what they died from.”

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One of the London skeletons is of a man who was shot with an arrow which lodged within his spine, but survived – only to die in the Black Death plague of the late 1340s, buried with hundreds of others in a pit in East Smithfield. “He is certainly one who who might have come back to haunt us, bitter at his fate,” Bekvalac said.

The southerners have been joined by skeletons from Scotland, including one found at Tiree in 1912, with such startlingly well-preserved bones that local people objected bitterly when it was removed to a museum, believing the archaeologists were desecrating the grave of a recent ancestor. Recent research has revealed that the bones are not around 2,000 years old, like a nearby Iron Age settlement, but Neolithic, more than 5,000 years old. They revealed the earliest known case of rickets in the UK, leaving the woman with misshapen leg and chest bones.

There are also the remains of an adolescent male from the Horse Cross cemetery in Perth, with a gaping skull fracture suggesting he may be a murder victim.

• The exhibition is open, with free entry, at the Hunterian Museum until 8 January, and will then travel on to Bristol and Leeds next year.