Research student projects

Current research projects

Elliot Elliott - Defining the prevalence of leprosy in peri-domestic animals using osteoarchaeology

This Future100 funded project is a study of M. leprae, also known as Hansen’s Disease or leprosy, as a zoonotic disease present in modern wild populations of British red squirrels and in zooarchaeological skeletal collections of these animals. The project will analyse skeletal material held by reference and museum collections to build a baseline osteological profile of the red squirrel. Skeletal remains of modern cases of squirrels infected with the bacillus, as well as archaeological specimens of red squirrels, will be examined to determine if there are bony lesions known to be present in human cases of the disease. Both modern and archaeological samples will be subject to biomolecular analyses (aDNA, lipids) to confirm the presence of the infection in conjunction with the analysis of the skeletal material. Identifying bony lesions would aid in identifying archaeological cases of infected animals, which could then contribute to analysing patterns of human-animal transmission in the past.

Rebecca Kibble - Towards the creation of a digital dataset amalgamating the entirety of zooarchaeological assemblage data within a GIS platform

The research aims at creating a digital dataset using GIS applications that can encode the full complexities of zooarchaeological assemblage data across multi-scalar boundaries. The study will encapsulate empirical research on faunal assemblage data, in terms of methodological procedures from data acquisition to final digital output. Fundamentally I will be using statistics to characterise and amalgamate multi-variate assemblage data into a singular comparative dataset by using the principles of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and correspondence analysis; to facilitate more flexible and fluid temporal and spatial examination.

Once such a dataset is created the second main aim is to establish how GIS can visualise and analyse the multi-variate, multi-scalar datasets produced within spatial and temporal domains. This has huge significance for the progression of GIS within archaeology, particularly within zooarchaeology in terms of creating a more robust way of recording, analysing and disseminating faunal assemblages.

GIS needs to be able to handle and analyse archaeological data in terms of complex spatial and temporal domains to fully exploit the research potential of GIS applications specific to the archaeological discipline. My research will investigate the analytical potential of multi-variate and multi-scalar data to determine its use within archaeology.

Renate Larsse - Living with humans: how animals experienced life in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia

Future 100-funded PhD student Renate Larssen is researching animal-human relationships in the Scandinavian Iron and Viking Ages from a multidisciplinary and post-anthropocentric perspective. Renate uses her background in animal behaviour to re-interpret the archaeological evidence of past animal lives, such as animal remains and material culture, by combining zooarchaeological methods such as osteobiographies and isotope analyses with a theoretical framework centred on ethology. Through this approach, she aims to explore the lived experiences of horses, dogs, and sheep in Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia, and the range and complexity of the relationships they had to the humans around them. Renate’s research is part of the European Research Council-funded Body-Politics project, which aims to provide a new and creative analysis of personhood, death, and sexuality in first millennium Northern Europe.

Shannon Loftus - The animal bones from Owl Cave

Owl Cave is a collapsed basalt lava-tube cave situated in south-eastern Idaho. A terminal Pleistocene deposit (>12,000 YBP) with the remains of ancient fauna (e.g., mammoth, camel, dire wolf), Paleoindian period Folsom projectile points, and other tools, was identified below several tons of massive roof fall at depths in excess of five meters. Although excavated in the 1980s, the faunal and artifact assemblages were never analyzed. Of particular interest is the presence of bison bone as Owl Cave is already known to be the location of a Holocene (~6,000 YBP) bison “jump” and processing site. This project seeks to determine if such hunting and processing of bison occurred at Owl Cave during the terminal Pleistocene. To answer this question requires a variety of investigative approaches, to include comparative study with likened sites, microscopic examination of the bison bone for evidence of butchering, DNA analysis, and chronological assays. If such Paleoindian activity is proven to have occurred, Owl Cave represents the oldest such site west of the Rocky Mountains. This has the potential to contribute to a more refined understanding of Great Basin prehistory, and challenges decades of accepted chronology.

Jonathan Walsh - Changing human-animal relationships in medieval and post-medieval Leicester: a zooarchaeological analysis of faunal remains from Waterside

This MPhil study contributes to a growing understanding of changing animal/human relationships in medieval and post medieval England. It focuses on a zooarchaeological analysis of an assemblage of animal bones recovered from the 2015-2019 excavations at Waterside Leicester conducted by the University of Leicester Archaeological Services. The results of this analysis will be contexualised with medieval and post-medieval zooarchaeological studies from Leicester and elsewhere in England. It will explore how animal/human relationships changed over time, and how these compared with other urban and rural sites within the region and beyond.

Completed doctoral research projects

• Rachel Small - Food, identity and humoral theory in early modern England: a case study from Leicestershire (2023)
• Nora Battermann - Revealing Reynard: a 10,000-year cultural biography of human-fox interactions (2022)
• Lauren Bellis - A dog’s life: an interdisciplinary study of changing human-animal relationships in Roman Britain (2020)
• Emily Banfield - Animals and ontologies in Neolithic long barrows (2018)
• Alison Foster - The identification of chicken breeds in the archaeological record (2018)
• Eric Tourigny - Upper Canada foodways: An analysis of faunal remains recovered from urban household and rural farmstead sites in the area of York (Toronto), AD 1794-1900 (2016)
• Meghann Mahoney - Diet and provisioning in Roman small towns: a case study from Ashton, Northamptonshire (2015)