My British Osteological Database – An Update

Finding research material is major component for any PhD. This can often mean extensive online searchers, emails to curators and searching through journal articles for relevant or useful material.

From my own experiences (where I needed large samples of human molars from a range of archaeological periods) this is not always an easy thing to do. A while back I decided to produce a crude database about some of the human remains collections I came across during my search. Recently, I decided to update this to make it more user friendly and to add a couple more sites.

You can find a downloadable excel file here with site names, dates and basic collection information.

Enjoy!

PS. If there are any more collections that you know of (and their information can be shared publicly) please get in touch!

Catching a Break

Graffiti from the Streets of Barcelona

Check this out – a second blog post in one month, that hasn’t happened for a while!

Since my last post I’ve been away to Barcelona, had a quick trip to Bournemouth University, been on hockey tour, attended a workshop on object handling and did my first bit of teaching to children! And in between doing the usual PhD work – so I’ve been busy!

First off Barcelona. It was beautiful. A lovely city with amazing architecture, history and somewhere I intend to visit again. My boyfriend and I went to celebrate his birthday and used it as a chance to get a break away from our work and spend some time with each other. It was absolutely lovely and perfect. We walked a lot but it was worth it to see so much of the city (plus it gave us the excuse to sit in many bars to have a rest and a drink!). We visited the typical tourist spots including La Rambla, Sagrada Familia and the Cathedral. Plus we wondered through the winding streets of the Gothic Quarter. It was incredible, especially Sagrada Familia. I honestly haven’t been in a building that was quite so spectacular! The design and architecture were stunning and the colours created by the stained glass windows were magnificent. I’m not a religious or particularly spiritual person but this was an awe-inspiring place! A must see if you are ever in Barcelona! It was a lovely few days, getting away and getting some head space – and of course the food was incredible! But it definitely reminded me that it’s important to take time for yourself and switch off from daily work life.

So what else? Oh yeah a brief to Bournemouth University to look at some Bronze Age juveniles. There were only a few individuals in their collection, but enough to complete my sample for this time period! This makes me very happy as it’s something tangible that I can tick off as ‘done’. It definitely helps towards the feeling of moving forward and making progress. Now to start looking at the data!

A good week of PhD work the occurred ending with a weekend away on hockey tour! Those who are not familiar with this is a weekend of playing social hockey (i.e. not that serious!) and meeting different players and clubs. It’s a great way to meet other people and to get to know the players on your team better. It was the first tour I’ve been on with Guildford hockey club and was a good laugh! I even saw a friend from Uni which was a lovely surprise. I bump into him randomly now and then so it was great having a catch up – the world of hockey can be a small place!

Moving to this week I’ve tried some new things! The first was attending a CDP (Collaborative Doctoral Partnership – my PhD funding scheme) workshop on object handling. This included going to the V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum) in London to discuss how people (including other CDP students and V&A staff) learn from objects within a collection. Part of the day included short presentations by CDP students about objects or collections involved in their research. Originally, I had not intended to go to the workshop but at the training days the other week I met the student organisers who asked me to present. I agreed and instead of discussing some of the skeletal collections or a particular object I took a different route – to discuss how attitudes towards excavation and reconstruction of human skulls has changed over time. In summary, during my PhD data collection, I came across particular collections (excavated during the late 1800s/early 1900s) that only consisted of skulls – almost all of which had been reconstructed. These reconstructions were made using troublesome materials, such as clay, metal and heavy glues, causing damage to the bones and preventing future research. This of course does not happen today. Guidelines produced by the British Museum and Department of Culture, Media and Sport now recommend excavation and conservation practices and state that conservation/reconstruction should only take place when necessary and by a trained professionals. It is interesting to consider how objects (including human remains) can be used to inform us just of past individuals or populations but also about the collectors and attitudes of the time. This was reflected and considered in talks by other students, as well as other common themes spanning different types of collections and objects. It was a very interesting session and a great chance to meet new people outside the world or bio-archaeaology! It was also great to gain more insight into attitudes of museums and how they look at objects. hopefully there will be more of these sessions in the future!

Finally, this week I had my first experience of teaching children. Yesterday I helped a friend who does some outreach within Southampton University. This included teaching classes 10 year-olds a little about archaeology and burials. Basically, the idea to get the kids to put together a small model of a skeleton then bury it with objects that may tell us about that person. It was quite fun and certainly a new experience for me! I’m glad that I get the chance to do some teaching, there’s a few more coming up next month so we’ll see how I get on then!

So over the last 3 weeks I’ve been quite busy. It’s all good though and I like the variety – it stops me getting stuck or bored!

Oops I Did it Again…

I’ve left it a while since writing a blog post! Sorry the PhD took over my life for a while there (a bit more than usual!).

So what have I been doing? Well there has been some more data collecting, more writing, more hockey and the upgrade. For those of you who don’t know about the PhD process some universities conduct upgrades during the PhD. This is an examination type meeting where a couple of lecturers (most likely within the same department as you) question the PhD student on a piece of written work and assess whether they a) have a project that can stand and process onto a PhD and 2) that the student knows what they are doing?!

To be honest mine feels like a bit of a blur and it is quite an odd experience! However, I came through it and received some great advice that I will be using to refine, restructure and focus my project. I’m hoping that I’ll continue my PhD with a slightly new perspective and with the knowledge that it is going well (although I will have to remind my self that constantly. It’s the nature of the beast!).

Please note that for each university this process is different and has different requirements. When I talk about my upgrade it only relates to my experience. I highly recommend attending any training events relating to the upgrade and/or talk to your supervisors and fellow students who have gone through it. I was told that this is to help prepare you for the final viva so it is going to be tough – but worth it in the end! 

So what else have I been doing? Well more data collection for a start. I’ve visited a couple more museums including Cheltenham Museum and a small collection held by the University of Bristol Spelaeologial Society (which also hosts the brilliant cave Gazetteers website that I mention on my British Osteologial Collections page). But I guess the one I would like to brag about is the Natural History Museum! Yup I was lucky enough to carry out a weeks data collection at the NHM London.

The NHM is one of my favourite museums, I went there a number of times and now that I live near London I can go as often as I like. But it was such a great opportunity to go and use some of their collection in my research. The lovely Curatorial Assistant was on hand to help with any questions and queries and it was great getting to chat to her. I hope to see her again at BABAO 2017 where we both hope to present a poster. It was a privilege to work there and can even say that I met the curator of the human remains collections (who was also our first key note speaker at our SSSB conference – see previous post). In addition, as part of the agreement to collect data I carried out some basic osteological curation work on the specimens I examined by completing an inventory sheet of the remains. It may sound like a small thing but it will allow for easier and more efficient inventorying and assessment for future researches and curators – and hey every little helps!

What else is there…Oh yeah I’ve just come off from two excellent training days organised by the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP), who fund my PhD. These two days talked about life after the PhD, getting and applying for funding grants and things to consider when applying for jobs. Even though I am only in my 2nd year to was a great thing to attend. It means I can start thinking about what I want to do now, and start preparing my CV, skills and research so I can look for work/funding efficiently and productively when the time comes. It was also great to meet some of the other CDP students, it’s always nice to hear about their experiences and learn about their research. Through this I was asked if I would like to do a small presentation about object handling at another CDP event coming up in a few weeks (check out those networking skills lol!). They haven’t got anyone talking about human remains so I think I will take them up on their offer. Plus it will give me another chance to practice my presentation skills! I’ll report back in a few weeks to let you know how it went!

Anyway, I hope this gives you a little idea of what I’ve been up to. Next week I’m away in Barcelona (it’s the boyfriend’s birthday treat) and will come back refreshed and relaxed ready to hit the ground running with the PhD. Until then…adios!

 

A busy few weeks …

Well hasn’t March flown by?! It feels like ages ago when I last updated my blog, but it isn’t really but in the last 2 weeks so much has happen. I have been to two more institutions to see their collections and the conference I was helping to organize took place. It’s been a great – but very very busy – couple of weeks!

So a couple of weeks ago I headed up to the University of Bradford to look at an Iron Age collection they have in their Biological Anthropology Research Centre. I was there for the whole week as it was a large collection but it was very productive. Whilst I was there I was told that there was also a Bronze Age collection and as I was able to get through the Iron Age sample quite quickly I had time to look at the Bronze Age stuff as well. So I got two collections for the price of one!

As well as the great collections at Bradford I have to talk about the amazing facilities they have there. I gather that a few years ago the Archaeology department moved buildings and were provided with brand new lab spaces, and I must say they are wonderful! They are spacious, well organized and very modern. It made collecting my data much easier. I hope that the Bradford students realize how lucky they are!

Some of the facilities at University of Bradford. Image from twicopy.org/en/BradToothFairy

Oh and a bonus thing that happened whilst I was in Bradford. I met Prof. Keith Manchester. For those who don’t know much about bioarchaeology /osteology Keith Manchester is quite big in paleopathology – my key textbook I used during my undergraduate degree to learn about the subject was co-authored by him. He was so lovely and was kind enough to show me around some of the other lab and teaching spaces in the department. It was so nice meeting him and not at all scary!

So my week was in Bradford was over. As I said it was a great week and I got a lot done, but my travels were not over. The following week I was in Sheffield visiting the museum’s collection. Before getting onto that, however, just a quick side note. I’ve probably mentioned before that I play hockey (field not ice!) and this year my team has been going for promotion. Now this weekend (between my two trips) we had seen very important game – of we won or drew then we were guaranteed first play in the league a promotion. So there was quite a bit of pressure and I was very nervous before the game, but we played really well and won! We were so happy (of course!), we had confirmed our place at the top! It was amazing and I so pleased and proud of the team. We’ve had a couple of ups and downs but we got there in the end. And a special thanks must go out to our coach Chris. If you’re interested you can find the match report for the game here.

After a good week in Bradford and an amazing hockey game I was up in Sheffield visiting the museum’s stores. I had another successful week and saw many Bronze Age remains, and a few Neolithic. One thing that was annoying was the condition of some of the remains. Some of the skulls had been reconstructed using glue and plaster making them heavy and a few had their jaws glued together so I couldn’t examine their teeth. Now I must stress that this is due to a result of old collectors back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and not the museum. Collectors in the past did not seem to have that much interest in studying the remains but just collected them. For this reason many of these skeletal collections only possess the skulls, which is annoying for modern day researchers. I’m sure that there’s a project in there examining the history of collecting and the reason behind these practices but that’s for someone else! Regardless of these specimens there were plenty of others that were of use to my project and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Sheffield, and the members of staff were brilliant.

Before moving on I must give a special thanks to Leigh Ann, the collection assistant, who was really helpful and great to talk to. Leigh Ann knew so much about the various collections held by the museum and I learnt a lot. It’s also a bonus that she recommended some great podcasts to listen to! Hopefully we’ll bump into one another again, maybe at the Society of Museum Archaeologists (SMA) later this year.Leigh-Ann and the other staff members were great, I highly recommend visiting Sheffield Museum and that you use their collections if you are a researcher!

After all of the traveling and data collection the weekend of March 24th offered something else that was very exciting –  the SSSB Conference! I have mentioned this in previous posts but SSSB is an inter-disciplinary conference exploring death, anatomy, attitudes to the body, mortuary practices and more, with SSSB standing for Skeletons, Stories and Social Bodies. I am committee member for this and I can’t believe how quickly it came round but here it was!

What can I say? I think that it was a great success! We had a wide range of speakers discussing everything from mortuary practices seen in archaeology to new approaches to viewing the remains of Pompeii to how should be approach medical students about the donated bodies. You can see a full list of abstracts of the papers and posters presented here to understand the complete variety of work. We also two great Keynotes by Dr Heather Bonney and Prof. Caroline Wilkinson discussing the history of collecting and the history and use of facial reconstruction. I even ran a workshop with another PhD student  introducing delegates to bioarchaeology and how to age, sex and identify pathology on human skeletal remains. All in all it was a great conference and I met so many interesting and wonderful people. If you are interested search for #SSSB2017 on twitter or check our twitter page @sssbconf. 

Over I got the impression that most people enjoyed it and found that it was quite different to other conferences they had been to. Hopefully, the delegates were introduced to new topics, ideas and perspectives that may provide new considerations for their own work. There already been talk of SSSB 2018 so fingers crossed that goes ahead and we can make the conference even better for next year!

Now I have a day of rest, with the in-laws visiting, then tomorrow it’s back to work!

 

Up to Manchester!

Butterfly mobile taken during my visit to Manchester Museum

This last month I’ve been so busy with writing and sorting out my data that I haven’t had a chance to do anything with my blog. In the last week, however, I’ve visited two more museums to look at some Neolithic and Bronze Age teeth.

A few days ago I took my first trip up to Manchester. I’ve never been to this part of the country but needed to go and visit Lancaster Maritime Museum and Manchester Museum. Both museums were lovely but I only really got a chance to have a look around Manchester Museum. It reminded me of a small Natural History Museum as it had quite a lot of animal specimens – including a lot of skulls! I took plenty of pictures of these and I might write some posts about them, like my old ‘skull of the month‘ posts.

It was really nice to go up north for a bit. I traveled up with my boyfriend, and it was lovely having the company! We also stayed with some friends who I haven’t seen for a couple of years. It was so nice seeing them! We even talked about going on holiday to the Lakes one day – something I’m very keen to do. Oh and they also had very cute cat called Arthur. He was such a sweetie and playing with him made me want one of my own. Maybe one day.

In other news the conference is going really well. I haven’t talked about it for a while but remember that I’m on the committee for a conference called Skeletons, Stories and Social Bodies? Well that’s happening at the end of this month. I can’t believe it’s coming up so soon, but everything is coming together and we have lots of people registered. I think it’s going to be really good, especially for a brand new conference! It’s really exciting and I’m really pleased to be a part of it. But before then I have two more collections to visit, and quite a bit of data analysis and write up to finish!

Where has Christmas gone?!

A shot of London from Waterloo Bridge, taken on my way home from the Hunterian Museum.

My last blog post was before Christmas so that’s nearly a month ago now. How time flies when you’ve got work to do! I would say my new years resolution would be to write more blog posts, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time. As well my PhD work, the conference I’m a committee member for is getting ever closer! Maybe after March (and the conference) I’ll have some more time. I really want to expand these blog posts to more than ‘what I’ve been up to’ – maybe I’ll have the time soon!

Ah, Christmas feels so long ago now, but it was lovely. I managed to have a week off to see family, catch up with some old friends and generally chill out for a bit. It was great – even with a horrible cough and cold! But a week goes pretty fast when you’re having fun and I was soon home again and back carrying on with the PhD.

The PhD stuff is going well, I’ve booked to go and visit some new museums (that have Neolithic remains hooray!) and started going down to visit the Dorset County Museum. It’s pretty far to go but they have some really useful collections. Plus their stores are in a church, which is quite interesting if a little cold! I’ve said before that I really enjoy going to these museums as I get to meet new people. This week that included Claire Randall a zoo- and osteo-  archeologist. We had a lovely chat and it was great finding out about her work. This week I’ve also been brushing up on my statistics, which I have a love-hate relationship with! It can be a pain to get through but it’s so satisfying once you’ve done it and got it right!

Enough about the PhD work. The other cool thing I’m involved in at the moment is the Skeletons Stories and Social Bodies conference. I’ve talked about in many times (and you can find out even more by visiting our website) but it’s now getting quite close!  We’ve now had all of the abstracts in and produced a draft schedule. I am really looking forward to it as we have some great presentations covering a wide range of things! I know the speakers will be great but I also can’t wait to meet some of the delegates. There are quite a few people on social media who have been really supportive and enthusiastic about the conference and it would be great to finally put some names to faces! Not to long to wait now 😀

Finally, today I was back helping pack the collections at the Hunterian Museum. I think I asy this every time but I do enjoy working there. The people are great and I love the museum, but it also gives me some head space away from my PhD work. It’s so easy to become obsessed and constantly worried that I should be working that it’s nice to escape once a fortnight! So I’ll be back there in two weeks time, still packing away.

 

It’s Christmas! My last post for 2016

Sorry I’ve been a bit rubbish about posting recently, I’ve had quite a bit to do. But now it’s time to stop and relax for a little while as it’s Christmas!

Tomorrow I’m going to Southampton for one last day to volunteer at a conference that is currently being hosted by the archaeology department at Southampton university. This is for the TAG conference (Theoretical Archaeology Group) and its the first time I’ve been. There’s quite a bit on including a Christmas market selling books, jewellery, cards and lots of other nice things. There’s also a lot of talks, with multiple sessions running all at once. One of the sessions is for the conference I’m helping to organize, Skeletons, Stories & Social Bodies  and I’m really looking forward to hearing the presentations.

Speaking of SSSB it’s going well. The abstract deadline has now closed and we’ve had plenty of submissions, which means a great amount of talks to select from! We’ve also chosen the workshops, which are varied and sound very interesting. The key note speakers have also been confirmed and announced – and I’m very excited about that! We’ve got Heather Bonney from the Natural History Museum, London and Caroline Wilkinson from Face Lab, based at Liverpool John Moores University. It’s all coming together now and I can’t wait. The only deadline that is left is for art submissions for the exhibition, so if you have any art (or could recommend anyone!) that would fit within the conference give me a shout. I also would like to say thank you to David Mennear for advertising the conference on his blog ‘These Bones of Mine‘. It’s a great blog covering a range of topics in bioarchaeology, and I strongly recommend visiting!

So why haven’t I been around for a while? Well I’ve been collecting data, so traveling to Winchester for that, volunteering at the Royal College of Surgeons, playing hockey and finishing a draft for my upgrade, which will take place next year. Oh yeah and I also had to prepare a presentation for the TAG conference – my first proper conference! So I’ve been fairly busy but I feel like it’s all going well. But I’m not going to lie I’m very happy it’s Christmas and I can take a break!

I’m off to my mum’s in a few days, then up to the in-laws for Christmas Day. I’m very much looking forward to lots of nice food and drink, some well deserved rest and most importantly lots of family time. So Merry Christmas all, enjoy the holidays and see you in the New Year!

Return to Cardiff Museum

Sorry I didn’t post anything late week I was rather busy so it slipped my mind, so this post will talk about my last 2 weeks of work. This includes another trip to the stores of the Corinium Museum, volunteering at the Royal College of Surgeons, a trip to the Cotswold Archaeology office and another up to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

My visit to the Corinium Museum stores was successful again. I got through another load of Anglo-Saxon skeletons for my data collection. It’s such a good collection and its going to be very useful for my PhD project as it includes lots of juvenile individuals. This makes me very happy! However, I’ve got quite a few more trips to make to their stores as it’s such a large collection.

The day after my trip to Cirencester I was back at the Royal College  of Surgeons volunteering in the museums department. It’s been a few weeks since  I’ve been there as the museum has been quite busy and haven’t been able to have me in. However, it was great to be back packing more skeletons into boxes ready for the move. Of course, it was also great to see the staff members again. I do enjoy working there!

So that was last week. I started this week by coming up to Kemble, which is near Cirencester. The purpose of this trip was to visit one of the office of Cotswold Archaeology, as they had a couple of Bronze Age and Iron Age skeletons. Whilst there I got to meet a couple of lovely people, including Sharon Clough who gave me some great information regarding some of the other collections I’m intending to use in my research. I also got to chat to Sharon about commercial archaeology units and learn a bit more about them. I’ve only really visited museums and universities so far, so it was a really good opportunity to learn about the commercial sector – a completely new area for me!

This week has ended with a trip but to the National Museum of Wales, in Cardiff. In my last visit I went through the prehistoric human remains in their collection. This time I was going back to the relevant specimens and taking measurements. I’ve now managed to get collection of Neolithic individuals recorded, plus a few Bronze Age remains, which is always good!

So another day, another lot of data collection completed. I think it’s all going well – I feel like I’ve got a lot done, but then I still have a load more to do! As a little fish called Dory once said ‘just keep swimming!’

Data Collection Continues – Into the Hampshire Cultural Trust Stores

I’m a little bit late posting this week as I’ve been really busy collecting data. I’ve had a couple of very productive days data collecting, which should continue next week.

 

Since Wednesday of this week I’ve been in the stores of Hampshire Cultural Trust. Here they hold a lot of the finds from archaeology excavations undertake in the county of Hampshire, including a lot of human remains. I contacted the Trust a month or two ago who sent me a list of their human remains holding. I was so pleased as they have a lot, particularly of Iron Age remains. So this week I started working at the stores, based near Winchester and will be returning for at least one more day next week to finish going through their material.

 

So far I’ve managed to go through the material of some of the small Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, but their are a few more to finish next week. The biggest collection I used was material from the Iron Age Danebury hill fort. I haven’t carried out much research just yet about the site itself but the human remains were in pretty good shape and will be a great addition to any my work. It’s certainly boosted my numbers of Iron Age material, I just need to find some more Bronze Age skeletons now!

 

Hopefully next week I’ll finish at the Hampshire Cultural Trust and there’s a chance that I’ll be heading back to the Corinium Museum stores in Cirencester. I’m also heading into London this week for a talk based at the Old Operating Theatre for a talk about Body Snatchers! I can’t wait!

Into the New Year…A PhD Update

My last blog was at Christmas and I’ve been meaning to do another one for the last few weeks but never seemed to get around to it – so here it is finally!

Since the Christmas break (which was lovely and lazy!) and settling back into work I’ve really started to get going with my project. The first step of my project was to propose an adjusted method for recording dental wear in human molars, which was completed before Christmas. This also included identifying the aging method, using human dentition, that would most be the most accurate and easy to apply and came to the conclusion of using the AlQahtani et al (2010) London Dental Atlas. About 2 years ago I wrote another blog piece discussing the accuracy of three different dental age estimate charts, including the London Atlas. The article describes the AlQahtani et al (2010) method in brief but the atlas itself can be viewed here.

The next step was to test out the method that I had created to assess how it worked when practically applied to human skulls. In order to do this I needed a good skeletal collection of the correct time period for my project (neolithic to medieval) that included juvenile and adults skulls. Luckily for me there is such a collection at Southampton and so it was very easy for me to get started! You can find out a bit more about the teaching collection and courses that Southampton University at the following blog: BOS, curated by the wonderful Ellie!

So it’s now the beginning of February and I’ve managed to apply my method to the juvenile skulls twice and the adults once. My plan is to do this a few more times for each set of skulls and there are a few reasons for this. The first is that this will enable to tweek my method where necessary so that it is as easy and accurate to use as possible. The second reason is so that I can become comfortable with handling and identifying teeth, but also so that I get used to the process of recording the data. This will be particularly useful when I move on to different skeletal collections, where I will only have a short period of time with them.

Finally, and probably most importantly, recording the data from the same set of skulls, multiple times will allow me to test the repeatability of my method. In order for this method to be robust and accurate it must produce statistically similar results when applied to the same collection, this will ensure that any results obtained using this method can be comparable. When recording the data from the same collection of skulls I am making sure that there is a period of time in between each data collection. This ensures that I cannot remember any particular individual and all of the collected data is ‘new’ again.

So far, the data collection is going well and I am getting through the skulls in the time that I wanted. Another key aspect of my project is to produce a method that is quick and easy to apply, and at the moment that’s going to plan so fingers crossed it stays that way!

I probably won’t do another blog post on the progress of my PhD for a little while as I won’t have much new to say until I’ve finished my data collection. However, I do plan to do a new blog post on molar identification (seeing as I’m getting pretty good at it now!). Hopefully, I’ll sort that out soon and get it posted!