 The first thing I want to do is say thank you very much to my co-authors for today. I've been very fortunate to work on a large project that worked on the sites of the 여id indices, several different teams have done work on them, and with the help of Stephanie and Ivana we've tried to bring some of the results together, and this paper is loosely based on some of the analysis they did when they did the dental microwave of those two sites, i chi'n gwneud am gyfwyrdd ac yn gwneud o adlwyddoedd a i'w meddwl i chi'n gwneud o amser i ddweud ym mhwysig yma. Felly, y ddweud i'r sefynt ac rwy'n gofio ar gwrthod ar gael ymlaen ymlaen, yn ymlaen i'r cyffredinol i gwybodaethau i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, i'r gweithio i'n gwneud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud, A'r cyfnodd wedi'i gweithio'r amsgwrs dros y cyfnodd gyda'i bywydau yma yn cynhyrch ar gyfer bywydau biochologicol a'r bywydau funerol. Rydyn ni'n fawr i'w wneud i'r bywydau yma o'r archiologiad yw'r bywydau, ac rydyn ni'n ffoistio yma ymgylchedd o'i gael o'r cyfrannu mynd i'w ddiogelio ar bywydau biochologicolig. A rhywbeth nid i'w wneud eu gweithio a wneud i'r cyfrannu. A fyddwniddon i gael i'r byfyddo i'r bai sydd wedi bod yn ymgyrchau cysylltu bai yn piolion ymgyrchol a'r byddo i'n ddod yn ymgyrchaf, a'r ysgafoddau a'r unrhyw fyddwn i'n gweithio, fel hynny'r ysgafoddau ymgyrch. Mae'r byddo i'r ffunorau yn ymgyrchafol a'r byddo i'r byddo i'r byddaeth eich byddaeth, Llywodraeth o bobl yn ymwneud wrth gael y cyfrifiadau ac yw'r ffaith i fynd eich bod ni'n ddim yn fan hynny o'r cynnig o'r canhau ymddangos. Felly, ydw i'n rhodaeth, rwy'n dod i'n mynd i'n dweud y baraiol, i'n gwneud y bydd y byddol, yn dweud, ond ydy mynd i'n gwybod i'n dweud y byddol o ffordd o'r bobl yn cyfrifiadau ac rwy'n mynd i'n dweud y byddol yn y neolid, ac rydw i'n dweud eu bwysig i'n ond wedi bod wedi'i gydag am y bod ni wedi'n bwysig o'r gwahoddau a'r gwahoddau i gydag i'r ffwrdd ffordd. That is the context in which I work. There are different specific questions that we tend to ask. The first one tends to be about the kind of variation in social practice that we see. Is this around the social structure that's egalitarian? Or are we seeing various forms of inequality or hierarchy? a chael ei wneud i'r ideae wedi'i gynhyrchu i wneud cwyllwr, a'r cyflwygannol a'r cyflwygannol, ac y cyflwygannol yw'r dweudio'r cyflwygannol. Wrth gwrs, mae'n gweithio ar y cyflwygannol a'r gweithio'n gweithio ar y mezzolithu mewn hefyd, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio ar y gydweithio ar y gweithio ar gyfer y gweithio ar ddegwydd a'u gwneud â'i gweld agrocyllys. Rydw i'n ffôr i chi wedi rhoi cyfnodd arddangos, yna hon i'r cwestiynau o rhag o ddalfodol ac mae'r ddalfodol ffordd yn rhan o gwaith eisiau gweithio'r patent. Yma rwy'n gallu meddwl arall, ac rwy'n cael byddech chi'n mynd i chi'n rhoi heb ychydig ffordd ymlaen o'r cyfreith iail. Yn cael bydda i rwy'n cael ei wneud am y gallwn chyfrwygoedd, ac efallai gael lle, ac mae'n rhaid i'n falch i chi ddalfodol. Mae'r ddweud o'n mynd i'n ffordd o'r ddweud i'w ddweud yr yswmfyniadau ar hyn oedd y cyfle, boedd yng nghyrch yn rhan o'r modau lleol yng Nghymru yn ymwysig o fynd i ddataeth. Mae'n ddweud o'n ddweud o'n ddweud y byw argymell argymell ar gyfer ddataeth, mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddataeth yn ymdrach o'r ddataeth o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'n gweithio i'r ddweud y'r ideaeth sydd yn y 70s, ac yn ymwneud yn bwysig o'i ddweud yw'r ddweud, ond mae'n ddweud ymwneud ymwneud yn ymwneud. Ond ydych chi'n ddweud o'r ffosona ffosona, ond mae'n gweithio'r gwaith yn ymddych chi'n gweithio'r gwaith, ac mae'n gweithio'r gwaith yn ymddych chi'n gweithio'r gwaith. Mae'n ddweud i'r gwaith i'r gwaith. Felly, we kind of use the bioarchaeology data to add information to that, to add information on to the grade goods, to add information on to the person in the grade. It's not necessarily wrong to do that, but I think we need to unpick some of the assumptions which come with that. Personally that it's, the variable can sort of be seen as a package that comes together to tell you about the identity of that person. That we can make cross-cultural analogies based on economics, perhaps that we can draw on anthropology in particular ways. And underpinning everything we do is that the variation that we see in the grades is meaningful for the questions that we're trying to ask. And I just, I've kind of become aware of that very much as I've been doing my research. I wanted to kind of lay it out as an observation that these are the kinds of assumptions that I'm trying to make. These are the kind of assumptions that I have to rely on in order to go forward with my analyses. So the biosocial approach then, if we're going to try and think about it in creative and being creative ways, I think the knowledge is now commonplace. A lot of people are now trying to do this. We're trying to blend these two things together, but people are doing it in different ways. And I think it's most useful and most powerful when we begin to test that assumption between practices of death and life. So whether we begin to see patterns that we see in the bioarcheological data repeated in the funerary data and whether we see any correlations between the two. And also where we try and use it to identify social groupings that perhaps wouldn't show up in the funerary data. Perhaps to begin to unpick that package a little bit and see where there are perhaps multiple or conflicting identities co-existing within the burial record. Okay, so turning to my case studies. They both come from the linear bank ceramic called the LBK. This is the distribution of the LBK. It starts from the Great Hungarian Plain about 5,500 BC and spreads out in two phases. I think they look a little bit like dinosaurs. So the little dinosaur is the first phase to about 5,300 BC and then a second phase reaching all the way from Ukraine all the way through to the Paris Basin. And we see a lot of homogeneity across that distribution. It's largely thought to have spread due to migration and the recent ADNA evidence seems to be confirming that. And then in terms of our existing social models, there's been quite some debate over the last 20, 30 years or even 40 years of the kind of social structures that we see in the LBK, whether it's roughly egalitarian and that's been argued quite nicely from recent research coming out of the Paris Basin or whether it's much more based around kin-based lineages and hierarchies, particularly coming from the funerary evidence itself that perhaps we have more inequality in structures as we go across the course of the LBK. So looking at the LBK burials in a little bit more detail, the sort of classic LBK burial rights as it's defined is an incubation in a cemetery, though we find lots of variation. The majority of burials are crouched, though we also find different body positions and on their left-hand side. And typically when we talk about the way in which grave goods are selected to go into individual graves, we see them as determined by age and sex. And I'd argue that's true for some grave goods but not for all of them. For example often you'll find pottery is supposed to be thought to be in female graves, but when I looked at all of the data from across the whole of the LBK that didn't stand up as statistically significant. It's a slight tendency for more pottery in female graves but it doesn't actually work when you look at the whole picture overall. But that kind of normal picture covers a lot of variation. When we look at the kinds of practices and deviations that people have they spread out across a whole range of different activities. So we find burials on settlements as well as cemeteries. We find disarticulated remains, we find them in enclosures, we find them in rubbish pits, sometimes considered to be disturbed earlier graves, but perhaps not. Because we also find evidence of people re-entering graves so this is where the anthropologist who's excavated it thinks that they've been moved and disturbed and the bones have been moved around more than biotubation would allow. So we have possibly re-entering graves as well. Also skull caps are found so people modifying skeletons to perhaps take objects for drinking with love of your ancestors perhaps not. But definitely modifying bones in particular ways. We also find cenotaph graves sometimes in conditions where there are quite good bone preservation so rather than it not being the bone that hasn't preserved perhaps it was never intended to be a body in the first place. And then we also have mass burials and perhaps graves without noticeable ceremony evidence of violence or violent activities where normal funerary rights haven't taken place after those deaths. So turning to the case studies themselves in more detail. This is the two these are the two sites, Bedro Vita and Mitra. They're often grouped together because they're the largest cemeteries that we find in those areas so Bedro Vita if you include the second one burials has about 110 burials whereas Mitra has something around 72 to 75 depending on preservation and preservation and how you look at double graves. Radiocarbon dating has been carried out on both of the cemeteries. Bedro Vita was fairly successful and they managed to get a much better more refined model out from the cemeteries and it seems to be slightly before Mitra so it starts 5,340 to 5,230 and then ends about 510 to 590 so quite big spectrums but um and a long lived cemetery in Mitra unfortunately the bones have been consolidated with PVC blue and when we went and analyzed the collagen it had impregnated quite a lot of the collagen so we were unable to radiocarbon dates very many burials but I think we managed to get eight reliable radiocarbon dates out they were then of course not the burials with pottery in all the ones that had any stratigraphy as it's of law but starting slightly later than Bedro Vita and ending probably around the same time. In terms of the pottery Mitra seems to be later than the earliest phase at Bedro Vita and about 5200 in this region there's some big shift in the pottery in allegiances so the Bedro Vita probably falls either side of that whereas Mitra is classic you need to start at that particular point. So three projects have worked on these two sites the first one was the bioarchaeology project led by Max Bellerbill the next one was the LBK lifeways project led by Alistair Whittle and I was the post doc on that project and then finally there's a work from my colleagues Zyrgynydd Cymrufana who've done the dental microwave. So the data that we had comes from the kind of data that gives us information about life and the kind of information about death the kind of isotopes that you'd expect and also dental matter which is quite interesting to compare to the carbon and nitrogen because they have different chronologies and the questions that we were asking we decided to try and see whether we could see any correlations so straightforward correlations between the two sets of data or whether we could see any groups or clusters within the data. So to summarise some very complex very detailed evidence at Bedro Vita the funerary data females and children tend to be agferwish more so than males we have this male association with polished stone and chip stone Bondylus is slightly more with women but it's sort of of different quality men have less bondylus shells but they tend to have more and bigger pieces great good to thought to increase with age but when I looked at it in detail they increased up to a certain point and then it began to drop off after the age of about 40 and then there's really very little correlations between body positions orientations and particular grade goods there are no sort of packages of grade goods that might pick people out in particular ways at nature it's a very similar picture as well so we have some very strong trends around males and polished stone everything else there's kind of hints here and there but nothing as a strong or statistically significant the spatial analysis similarly was quite complex previous work and identified separate groups that perhaps had different grade goods but I find it quite hard to believe some of the groupings for example why is this grade in this group and not in that group and if you move the groups around the pattern breaks down um so to summarise that the key variations really that we have are male and polished stone tools variation with age and very little distinct clustering in the grade goods we're not getting group sort of totems appearing as grade goods we're getting things that are much more subtle than that okay so to look at the isotope data very quickly because I'm running out of time um basically for the um isotope data the main picture from the carbon and nitrogen is how clustered it is so in comparison to other periods the neolithic lbk nitrogen carbon and nitrogen data is incredibly flustered people are eating very very similar diets and it's the same furniture as well very very well flustered these are the inputs for the strong team evidence um we find a lot more mobility at the early site of bedragita than we do at nitra so it seemingly this slightly earlier slide there's a lot more variation in where people are coming from than we find at nitra on the whole women seem to have more outside of the local rough local rough local rage than men do um and there's always one of all that turns up with low a low value that's harder to sort so turning to uh the work of sphagniff in the valley they looked at the dental wear which tells you about diet in the last few months of life they look at the striations and the different uh coarseness of the diets causes different patterns to be left generally they they concerns what we see in the carbon and nitrogen evidence which is that it's a mixed diet with meat for some individuals so some people seem to have had higher nitrogen values but it's not it's not consistently across the whole population um the diet is more abrasive when compared to modern examples so it's a lot coarser um overall older adults have more abrasive diets so perhaps they're eating more of um the plants or or meat uh men and women seem to be roughly eating the same diets which confirms the carbon nitrogen data um and there seems to be a slight change over time between bedragita and nitra perhaps indicating a shift to more meat in the diet in the later phases okay so um to kind of summarise a whole amount of analysis we tried everything that we could coro tried to put correlations between every different of the different packages that we could it's quite challenging to combine continuous and categorical data statistically um but there are a few patterns that that came out on the whole in this region males have higher nitrogen values than females suggesting that they were eating more meat um that's not something we see across the whole of the lbk it might just be particular to these particular sites um nitra there was a correlation between eating having a higher delta 15 nitrogen value so something that's come from the diet over the long term with dental wear showing higher meat intake so maybe diet we're seeing a very consistent diet is I think what this evidence is telling us so we're seeing people eat mostly eating similar things and that happening over the long term so men with polished stone axes were consistently local they weren't the people that were moving around I think in contrast to papers we saw earlier where perhaps the people who are from outside are considered to be the exotic ones here it seems to be the local people that have the biggest uh grave goods uh women more likely to move fitting into the patch alone calm models um men with higher um nitrogen 15 had full utlunus graves well kind of sort of um sometimes it's not statistically significant but it's a trend towards that kind of more diet more grave goods so in conclusion um I wonder whether because everyone's eating a very very similar diet those that do have a slight variation stand out more statistically so if you do have a slight variation from a very consistent population you're going to stand out more than someone who's slightly variable from a population that already has a lot of variability gender and age factors do seem to influence what's going on but only in particular ways not consistently across all of the data and this leads me to conclude that we're seeing moments of gender or age popping out in certain ways in the burial evidence it's not someone's complete identity which is grabbing into the grave it's happening in subtle ways and in partial ways not completely in the entire package so just to end I was going to I've run out of time but I was going to go back and pick up the idea of how we think about bioarchaeology along with um fury fury data and I guess what I wanted to say is I don't think we're seeing um a single package we have to kind of look for the threads and work out where they cross over and where they don't in interpreting the data um that we're not seeing in the bioarchaeology data necessarily identity we're seeing practice and we're seeing the ways in which people are related to each other and the kind of community engagement that people people have um and and so I guess where I'm going next with this research is therefore to think about the ways in which our bioarchaeology data tells us about connectedness and about kinship and how people were related rather than thinking about their life the individual life ways per se and I guess the next challenge therefore comes in thinking about how we can do that over refined timescales can we begin to look at these cemeteries with much more detail on the chronology to think about how these kinships were formed over time and how people passed things on to each other okay thank you very much for listening us