 and she's going to talk about food and sleep. Thanks Emma. Okay, so just before the coffee break and when everybody wants to go and have a snack, I'm going to talk about food. So I'm in the second year of my PhD, just about to start my third, so I'm in the middle of all of my lab work. So this is highly speculative, so bear with me. Okay, so basically I'm going to take you through my project rationale, talk about basically what this session is about, multi-disciplinary, multi-proxy approaches. Give a whiz bang to it through paleo diet and stable isotope analysis. Apologies, I know some of you are well versed in this, but just for anybody who needs to kind of know what on earth I'm on about. Talk about identity reconstruction and life history, how isotopes can tie into this. A little bit about the fish event horizon and then basically my PhD data. So why am I looking at this? Why are we mostly sort of all gathered in this room and interested in this? The seventh century, as we've all sort of been talking about and in fact, you know, sort of really the fifth through to the eighth, the ninth is a big period of transition across Europe, which is in England. When I started my PhD, I was initially interested in Christianization and whether or not we could maybe trace this not through just burials, but also the stable isotopes. Looking at diet, mobility, does this match up? Spoiler alert, not necessarily. So, I have a bit of a bizarre background. In terms of how I'm coming at this, I've got both medieval archeology background as well as biochemistry background, so I decided to use a multi-proxy and interdisciplinary approach. And this is some definite pros and cons and some huge challenges that I'm trying to work through my PhD. So I'm trying to bring together the historical elements that we heard a bit about from Cady earlier, material culture, bring in the osteology and biochemistry, as well as funerary archeology, the burials, the grave goods, cemetery layout, and then tie in things like theology and anthropology of religion to really look at how and why these things are occurring and what impact that might have on everyday life. This is multi-scaler. I'm doing everything from individual approach up to a whole sort of Anglo-Saxon framework, it's quite multivariate, and this has some pros in terms of overlapping and complementary evidence, but it's also causing me a bit of a nightmare in terms of my stats and how to kind of bring this all together so any suggestions would be great. So what am I doing? Paleo diet and stabilisotope analysis. There's lots of different parts of the skeleton you can sample, and each of these different tissues will give you different signatures and you're able to do different analyses on each of these. So what I'm specifically looking at is I'm trying to take one rib and one tooth per individual. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes the preservation on the site doesn't allow for this, and essentially the reason why I'm doing this is because the ribs we think from Tamsin O'Connell's work gives you roughly about the last 10 years of life, and this is because your ribs, you're breathing all the time so it's probably got the highest turnover rate of bones so you're getting the freshest, most newest bone I guess in terms of diet remodeling. So get carbon and nitrogen for diet and I'm getting teeth because I can use both the tooth root, the dentine to also look at diet, carbon and nitrogen and using mostly premolars, second premolars and second molars because they're formed roughly about the same time to look at post-weaning childhood signatures. So I want to look at individuals at the beginning of life as well as close to their end of life so I'm mostly looking at adults as well but also I can have the tooth enamel which allows me to do carbonate analysis on that enamel which gives me another carbon proxy which I'm hoping will help me sort out fresh water fish and anybody who does stabilized tips will know that is a bit of a nightmare but that is my aim as well as oxygen to look at mobility and if anybody would like to give me extra money to do strontium please feel free to chuck me a grant. I have approximately 1,200 individuals already from pre-published data that are in my data set and I'm incorporating into a meta-analysis and personally I'm doing about 350 individuals across 14 sites that's roughly about 700 samples in terms of CNN and about 300 for carbonate. And in terms of the faunal baselines I've only got fauna that is well contextualized and not just from Grave Phil from two out of my 14 sites so this isn't great but this is where I'm going back to the pre-published data to try to use those faunal baselines to give us a background. Apologies, I have to end this beautiful GIS for my really hastily throwing together Google Maps but this is to roughly show you the spread of my sites across Britain so this is where I'm going to be looking at the individuals across their life course looking at the sites looking at that population bringing up to regional analyses because environment plays a big role in what you're going to eat as well as doing a big comparison with all of those other sites in my meta-analysis. So this is my meta-analysis to date it is messy it isn't the best graph ever but this is just for anybody who's unfamiliar with where certain animals and certain types of food might map and I don't think James Barrett is in here because he gave me hell for putting orcas up there because yes, no Anglosaxons don't eat orcas but to give you an idea this is where a carnivorous marine mammal would map actually much further off the Richter scale there you've got your carbon baseline here and nitrogen on your vertical axis carbon roughly relates to all types of plants that you're eating the type of environment Anglosaxons in England I do not expect and I have not found any C4 plants so this is really kind of for us everyone's eating the same sorts of plants nitrogen is to do with your length of your food chains and the type of protein and how much protein you're eating so freshwater fish are a bit annoying because yes they map here but also they map all the way across here as well this is why freshwater fish in your diet and trying to work out if eating them in Christianization can become quite difficult you've got your salmonids over here and your marine fish some other cod and marine fish also go off my scale here we've got birds and dogs pigs and humans here so your omnivores and the lovely little cute sheep and cows so your herbivores here and if humans just for anybody to have the reference if you are a vegan you will match somewhere around here so basically no animal protein input but if you're a vegetarian guess what if you're eating any cheese or any eggs you map that everybody else is eating meat but to give you a bit of a context there as well so what questions can we actually ask and possibly answer with this approach and how will this relate into nursing transitions so as archaeologists we get people like this with their grave goods we've got the skeleton and we can ask biological questions about their biological identity and their life history so the isotopes talking about diet and mobility the osteology trying to answer questions about age, sex, pathology DNA to talk about relatedness but also if you're looking at pathogen DNA to look at health and diet as well and possibly mobility and then eventually an apology so I do know that this is a Viking reconstructive grave but it was just so nice I had to put it up we want to then get to how this individual went into the ground the things that we've possibly lost talk about the funerary sphere and the things that make up that burial and we can then talk about social identity so the grave goods this is where that will play into the next level of my analysis the funerary archaeology and the depositional process but then gender versus the osteological sex age and what that might mean socially who were these people and eventually I want to get from that to what they were eating and drinking during their life course what that might have been for practice ritual, economy and anybody who works in this time period we know that things like the Bay of Tapestry are pretty much as good as it's going to get in terms of trying to get to what people are actually eating and most of the Anglo-Saxon records about food are either very, very vague or they're medicinal in purpose so we can't necessarily take what they're using medicinally for what they're eating day to day but Debbie Vanham's work does give us quite a lot about what they might have been growing and had access to so this fish event horizon which also impacts the area of carbon dates that Haley was talking about what we're finding from you zoo archeological work which I'm hoping to integrate is the fact that we've actually got two fish event horizons so what the green is showing here is actually freshwater fish remains in London and then we've got blue which is marine fish remains so these are skeletal elements that we're able to find in excavations this first line here is 600 and you see this huge spike in green there compared to basically nothing in the Roman period this isn't to say that Romans weren't even fish we know they were but we're seeing this huge spike which then carries on and we get this even bigger one which is the expected one that James Barrett and David Orton have talked about and this is isotopically what we see the marine versus freshwater fish big jump here so what I'm interested in is we know about this this is quite well characterised isotopically this is harder to characterise isotopically and as many of you all know trying to get evidence for freshwater or fish remains or most anguished sacks and settlement sites has been quite difficult so it wasn't always done on some of these very well known earlier excavated sites so this is something that will hopefully I might be able to un-tease with the tooth enamel so maybe match up with some of this nice new data that's coming out of the zoo archaeology so what am I getting so there's some really nice regional patterns that are coming out and I think regionality has a lot to do with what we're seeing during the early medieval transition so with Wessex it's generally pretty low this is also backed up with the same patterns in the animal isotopes the faunal baselines and the regional differences so generally the people who are eating fish are mostly coastal unsurprisingly and that's also mostly got to do with the time period as well which we can see here so you see general shift through time but this is also very much tied to the regionality so a lot of the individuals who are here are the Wessex individuals who don't have access to the coast so this is unsurprising so one of my two case studies for you here is King's Garden Hostel so I got this data about a month ago 12 individuals 7th century and I picked these two women from these two different sites because they're roughly the same age they're contemporaneous to just show you basically what two women in two different parts of England are eating got some reused grave goods as well so a reused coin from the 4th century female 45 years old general skeletal degradation and has an isotope signature that basically tells me not eating much or any fish at all very terrestrial diet lovely beautiful what I would expect for Cambridge we then go to Fingalsham in Kent and some of you might have noticed I've tried to keep the axes the same here there is generally a much lower shift in the nitrogen here okay we've got some outliers and I'm working on trying to work out what exactly is going on there so please don't ask me I've got this mass specter the last week so I haven't had a chance to understand all that 40 individuals we're going to look at this woman here grave 180 she's got some very nice grave goods relatively well furnished although not as high status as some other graves as we've seen today roughly about 30 years old possibly older some dental pathologies but generally she's in pretty good legal health carbon within 1% per mill of the other individual which indicates about the same type of plant resources that she's eating but about 2% per mill which generally in isotope terms means you're eating a different type of protein resource in this case a lot lower okay so in Kent and this is generally what I'm finding across the whole of Kent they're eating a lot less protein why? I'm not sure most of my sites are relatively coastal they're quite close to the surface what's going on here Kent is weird isotopically so while this approach worked to try to entee some of these transitions from the early to the later medieval periods I'm now pushing the boundaries of when some of my sites are going up to I've got one symmetry that goes from the 7th through to the 11th century so I'm hoping once I get that data back that will really help us tease across in one population what's going on which will give us some indications of what people are eating what that means economically and how that might also reflect these changes that Emma and other speakers have been talking about in the burials through time so we do see some change through time but geographical differences are really at the core here I think there's definitely regional differences and that's got to be I think to do with your economic basis and what you've actually got available but with things usually but also regionally in terms of both grave goods and some times to do with diet but this can lead us to hopefully reconstructing my identities and I think there's major potential for these techniques going forward and hopefully when I get the carbonate results back in the dentine to look at earlier life this might tell me if things are actually changing on a individual's lifetime basis or if it's a much longer