Transcript
SPEAKER: Dr Miriam Cole, environmental archaeologist, University of York. First, when people hear the word archaeology, they often imagine objects lifted from the ground and displayed behind glass. What I find fascinating is that some of the most informative evidence never becomes an object at all. It survives inside bones and teeth, where it records habits that the people themselves could not have written down. In addition, those traces are not random: they reflect what someone ate, where they moved, and sometimes how much pressure their body was under. The method I want to focus on today begins with chemistry, not excavation. The first step is the analysis of carbon isotopes in the bone samples, because different plants leave different signatures in the tissues of the people who consumed them. That does not tell us everything, of course, but it gives us a stable starting point. However, the signal is only useful if the material is well preserved, which is why we pay so much attention to the condition of the remains before drawing any conclusions. Another aspect of the work is that the evidence is often strongest in dental enamel, the hard outer layer that survives long after other tissues have decayed. Enamel is valuable because it captures information from childhood and then keeps it almost unchanged. Furthermore, that makes it particularly good for reconstructing early diets, especially when a person’s later life took them somewhere very different. The chemistry can therefore tell a story that the burial goods never mention. Moving on, one of the most revealing crops in the sequence is millet, because it produces a chemical pattern that stands out from wheat and barley. In some regions, the appearance of millet in the record marks a major shift in food production, while in others it simply shows contact between groups with different agricultural habits. Either way, it helps us separate local traditions from imported ones. What matters is not the grain itself alone, but the context in which it begins to appear. A change in diet, though, does not always mean a complete change of home. It may reflect seasonal movement, with families spending part of the year in one area and part in another. In that case, the chemical record becomes a map of regular movement rather than a sign of permanent migration. Furthermore, the distinction matters because it changes how we interpret social organisation, access to resources, and the way communities negotiated difficult climates. In coastal settlements, the contrast can be even clearer. People living near the sea often ate coastal shellfish, and those foods leave a distinctive pattern that is easy to recognise once you know what to look for. However, shellfish alone are never the whole explanation. They need to be read alongside other foods, because a community may gather marine resources during short visits without depending on them every day. The same samples can also reveal stress markers linked to illness or hardship. These markers do not appear as dramatic injuries; instead, they show that the body was coping with conditions that restricted growth or disrupted normal development. Another layer of interpretation comes from comparing many individuals, because one skeleton may reflect an unusual event, while a larger sample can reveal a broader trend. By comparing several cemeteries, the team can map migration patterns over several centuries. That comparison is useful because it shows whether movement was steady, interrupted, or tied to particular events. Furthermore, it can reveal that people were not merely drifting randomly across the landscape; they were using routes that remained meaningful across generations. On one site, we kept encountering the same corridor of movement, and the local community simply called it the old route. Finally, the broader picture is cultural as much as scientific. The data suggest that people were not only moving through the region but also developing a strong sense of place, even when their diet or residence changed. In other words, landscape was not just background. It shaped identity, memory, and belonging. What the bones show us, then, is a world in which mobility and attachment were not opposites. They were part of the same lived experience.