What next..?

Do you want more?

We hope that you have found this course interesting and useful. We have filled the weeks with information and examples from our research and experience in the field and the laboratory.

Below we provide some possible ways of continuing your learning in this area.

Further reading

We have based a lot of the content of this six-week course on our own research. We have spent many years developing new methods, studying the skeleton to better understand how people lived their lives, and applying all of this to interesting contexts.

Our book Human Identity and Identification explores how the body is important for making our identity and also for identifying us. Rebecca Gowland’s now-classic book The Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains was vital in showing how we can study social processes from skeletal remains. Her recent book Care in the Past explores the ways in which we can study care and treatment in the past from the body. Tim Thompson’s book Human Remains: Another Dimension is full of examples of how imaging can be used to study the body, and what we can learn from that. His book The Archaeology of Cremation explores what information we can get from burned bodies, and what that can tell us about how people lived their lives.

If you’re interested in further study please also look at our MSc programme in Human Bioarchaeology and Palaeopathology at Durham University.