"My first thought was that it might be foot-binding, and I started to look into it and found that at that point there hadn't been many publications on what the bones of foot-bound feet actually look like, although there was a lot of research on the history of it."

Liz Berger's work on an archaeological excavation in China uncovered skeletons with bound feet — an ancient custom practiced by China’s elite for a thousand years until the early 1900s.

LiveScience