About that talus cone and the fossilized tooth plaque....

I'm reading "10,000 Tales From a 17th-Century Crypt/In Milan, bones that piled under a hospital over a half-century shed light on the health and habits of some of the Renaissance era’s most impoverished people" (NYT).

The burial vaults formed a sort of subterranean potter’s field. After a heavy granite lid was removed from one of the square holes in the church floor, bodies would be dropped into a vault of the brick-lined tombs. Over time, the corpses accumulated and formed a funnel-shaped pile, called a talus cone. These pyramids of remains grew over time, widening at the base and tapering to a point at the top. When a talus cone reached the ceiling and could not hold more bodies, a new underground vault would be used....

Fossilized plaque on teeth offered clues to the patients’ diets, which included standard grains like wheat, barley, sorghum, rice and millet. It also featured two unexpected additions: potato starch, pointing to the early influence of New World foods, and spores from horsetails, a fern with green, nonflowering stems that can be toxic in large amounts. The finding confirms contemporary accounts of people who, desperate from hunger, ate grass and died with mouths tinted green....