Osteoarchaeology

Above View of the River Avon and Broad Quay from the East, taken by George Love Dafnis in 1892 (colourised by Rob Goller).

Pandemics and public health: cleansing Bath’s ‘Great Unwashed’

Excavations in Bath have revealed the remains of one of the earliest Victorian wash houses. Constructed during a time of revolutionary social reform and seismic shifts in attitudes towards poverty and public health, what can it tell us about how local authorities and community campaigners strove to improve the well-being of the poor following the arrival of a devastating pandemic? Current Archaeology explores recent research by Cai Mason.

RIGHT The remains of 13 individuals were found around the site of La Hoya, lying where they were killed, many with evidence of traumatic injuries.

Iron Age massacre in Iberia

Post-excavation analysis is now shedding more light on the final days of La Hoya and the devastating attack on the settlement.

LEFT This Iron Age man’s spine showed signs of advanced tuberculosis.

Migration and disease in the Iron Age

Scientific analysis of a human skeleton discovered at Tarrant Hinton in Dorset has shed new light on life – and the transmission of infectious disease – in Iron Age Britain. The remains were originally found during excavations at a small…

ABOVE Close up images of the cranium, showing evidence of facial trauma (as indicated by the arrows).

Judicial facial mutilation in Anglo-Saxon England?

Anglo-Saxon law codes speak of facial mutilation as a punishment for certain crimes, but until recently no archaeological evidence had been found for it in England. Now the skull of a young woman discovered in Oakridge, Basingstoke, has been identified…

LEFT The Ridgeway Hill mass grave in Dorset (see CA 299) which featured in the DNA study.

Delving into Viking DNA

A large study, led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, has mapped the DNA of the Viking world. The results (recently published in Nature: https:// doi.org) paint a complex picture of population movement across Europe during this period. Over…

LEFT The Stoke Quay site under excavation, looking towards the south.

Ipswich’s medieval population investigated

In 2012, an extensive excavation was carried out in the Stoke Quay area of Ipswich by Oxford Archaeology and Pre-Construct Archaeology. Covering an area of 1.2ha, the project was a major undertaking and made finds spanning the early medieval period…

LEFT The best way to examine this image of the burial in Building 52 from all 360 degrees is online: p3d.in/O1Vd2/shadeless

Cyber Archaeology: how 3D modelling is unpeeling the Neolithic at Çatalhöyük

Archaeology destroys: once a site has been dug, it cannot be un-dug. Now, however, archaeologists Maurizio Forte, Nicolò Dell’Unto, and Scott Haddow, at the huge Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, have developed a process that can do just that – virtually, at least.

Above Side by side in a pit, these skeletons were originally assumed to be Black Death victims, but radiocarbon dates have provided an unexpected explanation for the high fatality rate. Could they have died as a result of the last millennium’s largest volcanic eruption? This mass burial clips the edge of an earlier pit that may date to a 1252 famine, while the bodies in the later pit are believed to be victims of the climatic fluctuation brought on by the 1258 eruption.

London’s volcanic winter: Spitalfields cemetery and the famine of 1258

Mass graves were needed all too often in the Medieval world, but establishing the specific tragedy behind any given set is difficult. Now Don Walker believes that a group in Spitalfields cemetery can be linked to a massive volcanic eruption, as he told Matthew Symonds.

Where are the children?

There really have been so few instances when Time Team sites have yielded any evidence pertaining to children - despite having dug more than 150 sites over the 13 years the series has been running.