Position: Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Roehampton Bio: Born in Italy, Lia completed her undergraduate degree and MSc at the University of Milan. She moved to the UK in 2006 to complete a Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the University of Kent in Read More…
Category: human osteology
Geographic variation in the human birth canal and its implications for the ‘obstetrical dilemma’ theory
The human birth canal is just large enough for the newborn, making childbirth a difficult and often dangerous process. In a recent study published in the Royal Society, Lia Betti (University of Roehampton) and Andrea Manica (University of Cambridge) show that there is substantial variation in the shape of the female pelvis across human populations, and that most Read More…
7,000 year-old stressed toddlers: a tale of two cemeteries
A new publication by CRESIDA member Colette Berbesque, and collaborator Kara Hoover (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) compared stress in remains from two populations of hunter-gatherers living about seven thousand years ago in different regions of the US (Texas and Florida). Lots of different types of illness and disease leave indicators on the human skeleton. These Read More…
Back to the Brook: attending a workshop on a new fossil primate
By Todd C. Rae Twenty five years ago, as a PhD student at SUNY Stony Brook, I had the good fortune to be part of team collecting primate fossils at Songhor, a 20 million year old site in western Kenya. The leader of the group was Isaiah Nengo, a Kenyan who was, at the time, Read More…
CRESIDA’s new medieval skeleton collection
Last week we saw a buzz of activity around our human osteological collection, comprising about 300 Medieval burials from rural Surrey. Alex Parr, an ex MRes student of ours, has started working with us to help cleaning and studying the human remains. We have had a visiting researcher, Samantha Leggett, who has taken some samples Read More…
Digging into health and disease in post-medieval London with Paola Ponce
In 2011, Archaeology South-East (UCL) excavated 609 post-medieval skeletons from the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy in the City of Westminster, London. Today, the Chapel is all that remains of the Hospital of ‘Henry late King of England of the Savoy’, a charitable foundation completed in 1515. Who were the people buried in the chapel and what do their remains tell us about their health?
