LL3's skeleton shows evidence of at least two conditions associated with significant pain. A serious dental abscess had eaten through the surrounding bone, producing the kind of deep infection that causes severe, throbbing discomfort and visible facial swelling. He also had the elongated styloid process characteristic of Eagle Syndrome, a condition clinically associated with sharp or persistent pain in the jaw, throat, and ear. Whether these conditions overlapped or struck at different points in his life, we cannot say. What the bones cannot tell us is how he experienced any of this - pain is subjective, variable, and leaves no direct skeletal trace. Two people with identical anatomy can report vastly different levels of discomfort. Assessing the burden of pain in past individuals is one of the most challenging problems in bioarchaeology, and LL3 is a reminder of how much remains beyond our reach.

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Pain leaves few traces. In skeletal remains, we can sometimes identify conditions that would have caused discomfort or significant suffering - joint disease, healed fractures, evidence of chronic infection - but we cannot know precisely how any individual experienced pain. The gap between pathology and pain is real and often wide. This is not only a problem for historians and bioarchaeologists. In the present, pain remains one of the most difficult things to assess in another person. It is subjective, variable, and invisible. Clinical tools for measuring it rely on self-report, and self-report depends on being believed. The evidence is clear that pain is frequently underestimated by healthcare providers, and that this underestimation is not evenly distributed.