Biological Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Research Group
Director: Dr Barra Ó Donnabháin
Affiliated staff: Dr Ron Pinhasi, Mr Michael Monk
PhD researchers: Linda Lynch, Ian Magee, Clare Mullins, Ciarán Brewster
Archaeology is about charting human change across time and through space and the primary focus of this group is on the biological dimensions of this process. The guiding principles for the Biological Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Research Group are the recognition of the inter-relationship between biological and cultural aspects of the human career and that the human body is a site of articulation between the biological, the material and the social. Past interactions between biological and cultural spheres are examined chiefly through the analysis of human remains and their archaeological contexts across a number of different temporal and geographic settings. The Group is currently concentrating on the following themes:
• The origin and spread of tuberculosis
• Hunter-farmer transformations: a cross-disciplinary investigation of the biocultural, functional and archaeogenetic aspects of the Neolithic process in human societies from the Levant and Danube Gorges regions
• Industrialisation, heath and growth: a diachronic study of late medieval post-medieval cemetery populations from London
• Immigrants and Indigenes: genetic diversity in the early historic population of Ireland
• Imagining Medieval Bodies: constructions of health, illhealth and the body in historic Ireland
• History of Bioarchaeology
• Culture, biological heritage and identity
• Feeding the Irish: diachronic changes in diet and nutrition in Ireland
•The People of Prehistoric Ireland (click on link to access external website)
The MA in Human Osteoarchaeology programme is housed within this research group.
