Beyond curse or blessing: the opportunities and challenges of aDNA analysis

Early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries

“…At the time of writing, the methodologies and questions employed in the investigation of ancient DNA are only just catching up with the problems of social archaeology (Sykes, et al 2019). However, we have an enormous amount of data to investigate by looking at the bodies of past people and, most importantly, by situating the data within each contextual setting.…”

“…This early Anglo-Saxon cemetery was rst identi ed in 1926 when three burials were found (Meaney, 1964). Subsequently, in 1994, a further twenty-six burials were excavated (Taylor et al, 1997) and in 2007 a further seventeen burials were excavated before construction of the parish recreational building (Mortimer et al, 2017). A further seventy-eight burials were excavated between 2010 and 2014 as part of a university research programme, taking the known cemetery total to 124 individuals.…”

Why were New World rabbits not domesticated?

“…Archeological evidence from the Roman and pre-Roman sites of Ambrussum, Lattara, and Pech Mahoin southern France indicates the presence of rabbit bones, and multivariate analyses of skeletal measurements demonstrate they exhibited a larger size than wild populations, suggesting intentional breeding by humans ( Watson, 2019a ,b; Watson and Gardeisen, 2019 ). Additionally, a rabbit bone was recovered from the first to second century AD Fishbourne Roman Palace in Britain ( Sykes et al, 2019 ), suggesting management or at least long-distance trade of rabbits at this time.…”

A veritable confusion: use and abuse of isotope analysis in archaeology

“…Important critical and discursive reviews have been published, especially in relation to genetics (e.g. Booth 2019a; Crellin and Harris 2020;Hofmann 2015;Palsdottir et al 2019;Sykes, Spriggs, and Evin 2019;Vander Linden 2016), including warnings against nationalist narratives that try to draw on archaeological science (Frieman and Hofmann 2019;Hakenbeck 2019;Richardson and Booth 2017).…”