 Yes, my name is Michael Legg. I'm a PhD student at university. I'm quite glad I'm going last, to be honest, because there's been some amazing, incredible, deeply scientific research that's just blown my mind these last few hours, and I'm going to just go really low tech for the next 15 minutes, so bear with me, forgive me. So, for context, I'm entering the final year of my PhD project, which examines the treatment of the dead in the Iron Age of Eastern England, so Adele Cup is that bit, I'm doing that bit over there. Through a combination of osteological techniques, macroscopic toponymy, and archaeological theory, I am discussing demography and health as well as post-mortem treatment and what this may tell us about regional Iron Age society. So, this paper is actually covering a really small sort of subset of my larger PhD project. Most of what I do is infumations. This would be the disarticulated bone. I don't want to waste time reiterating what Adele said with regards to the Iron Age, so yes, the Iron Age covers 800 BC to about a generation after 43 AD. My study region is the area in purple, which broadly covers the modern-day counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent, and within this period, same as within Adele's region, you find tiny fragments or larger fragments of disarticulated bone in pretty much every imaginable context. They are found in all site types. They are found in pits, ditches, in roundhouse gullys, in wells. Everywhere you think you might find little bits of human bone, they are there. And since at least 1970, it's been widely suggested that these people have been placed on excarnation platforms that are being exposed outside. And more recently, arguments have come up to combat this here and some of these authors have been discussing it quite a while. And as Adele has just explained for the west of the country, so what I've been trying to do is see if these conclusions, if these arguments are applicable for my study region, because most of the research has been done in sort of here and across. And which parts of people are being deposited? Are there patterns in their selection choices of what really interests me? And what taffonomic evidence is left macroscopically on the bone that might tell us about the various postmortem processes that are being undertaken? So the material under study amounts to 75 assemblages totaling around 395 bones or deposits, representing the majority of all the dysarticulated bone from my study region. Examinations all undertaken at the storage location using 20 times and 10 times hand lenses with USB microscopes built in cameras to confirm or disprove more questionable modifications and taffonomic alterations. And I was looking for signs of weathering, trampling, gnawering, abrasion, fractures, polishing, cut marks, chop marks, bone working, according to established criteria like the FFI scores and their entire weathering stages. So this is my geographic distribution. Bones from the Cambridgeshire region make up about 40% of the total, but there's also a fair representation in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire and Kent. On the map each pin represents one assemblage, the bigger the pin the more material found within that assemblage. So Norfolk and Suffolk on the coast, pretty much nothing. I would suggest I'm pretty sure that this is a result of quite acidic soils having a serious effect on my material here. But there appears to be a sort of conglomeration of heavy activity, heavy occupation in this region representing southern Cambridgeshire, eastern Hertfordshire, northern Hertfordshire, and I think that's real as a conglomeration. So this graph shows the number of bones identifiable to each element over the entire assemblage of 400 bone fragments and it's pretty clear that they're mostly skulls. It's pretty much all skulls. There's 152 instances of cranial bones. The next thing would be femora, but there's only 52 femoral bones. Even if you collect together all the sort of major long bones into one long bone category, you still only have 129 of those compared to 152 skulls and at least nearly every site in the region has at least one skull fragment somewhere. I should also point out as well that if you find five fragments of a parietal in a pit, that's one on this graph. That's not five. It's not sort of over-representing the fragmentary nature of the skull. Obviously there's issues with this. Smaller bones, less distinctive bones are more likely to get lost or to be ignored. Certain elements might not survive as well. A scapulae, for example, they're probably under-represented here. But I think there's a real pattern. I think there's selecting skulls and that's something that Johanna said. You have movement of particular bone skulls being taken out of the back end. I think that's what we have here as well. I wondered if other factors are playing a role in which bones are being chosen. I looked at sidedness and that appears not really to have much of an effect. 47% of those that could be sided were from the left, 53% from the right. Sets is a little bit trickier. In the adult bones of those that I could set, it initially appears that there's more male than female at 60-40 split, but the numbers of those are really quite small. And I think what really you have here is that more male, more masculine characteristics are easier to identify in fragmented remains and that you may have an overestimation. I don't think it's statistically really that relevant. Age, though, does seem to be a clear selection factor. Those individuals under about three years of age are better represented than any other sub-adult period. I think this may be because identifying neonate bones to a specific age group is easier than it would be for older children, especially if you don't have fusion centres. But adults of over 20 years are overwhelmingly what we are finding here. Actual to follow me, and there's really not that much. In looking for signs of sub-area exposure or the lack of signs of sub-area exposure, I was expecting to find whether in noro, trampoline, erosion, some indications that these bones have been left open to the elements. Of the 395 bones, 11 were weathered, all to stage one to two, which is if it's a climate, but a temperate climate. Of those, none had any other signs of any other modification. Another nine bones had gnawing marks, mostly rodent. Of those, one was also trampled, and that's the only trampled bone from the whole assemblage. So only 20 had any sign of natural taffanomic modification. Taffanomic overprinting is going to be a factor here, especially with the weathered material. Obviously, you have to deal with the taffanomic paradox of the stuff that may have been more extensively modified and more extensively affected, may not have survived at all. All but one of the gnawed bones were long bones, because that's kind of expected. It's much less likely that a cranial bone is going to be gnawed, and most of it is cranial bones. But the weathered bones are around a 50-50 split. So what about other modifications? Cut marks were present on 25 bones, four of which were also chopped, and seven in total had chopped marks. So already more elements have evidence of human manipulation than they do of natural modification. 13 elements were worked in some way beyond one or two cut marks. Seven of these were also cut and fired, but also polished, and some of these work bones were turned into objects, or digging tools in some cases, or bowls, or pendants in things like that. 31 bones were polished, and in most, if not all cases, it appears to be the result of handling and curation rather than the action of water or natural sources, because the same bones also have cut marks, they also have been shaped and chopped and worked. So this is a femur that you can't sell on the screen so much on my screen, trust me, it looks better. But it's been smooth and polished to a point in the end, and you also have these cut marks part of the way along. So generally, what we're seeing is that the majority of the surviving material is made up of adult cranial bones, of both sexes, 73% are completely unaltered, and of those that are, human manipulation is far more common than natural technical alteration, I'm really sorry about how blurry those photos are. So what's going on? And it seems that here, as with other better studied parts of the country, in line with the conclusions that Adele's found using far more high-tech methods than me, people in the Iron Age are not being exposed outside, they are being protected during decay, and then manipulated later on. A few of these bones have been radiocarbon dated, and there are cases of curation. Several of them have produced dates decidedly earlier than the contextual surroundings, so I have cases of incubations in ditches with skull fragments dotted along and with, and the skull fragments date to 80 to 200 years earlier than the incubations that they have been placed with. The buildings were in Lincolnshire, and in Helpringham Fenn, they are perforating cranial fragments for suspension. This is a frontal, it's the wrong way up, but this is cut marks along here, and these appear to be waste fragments from cutting along here to create a bowl or a container of some kind. Skulls are found over and over, manipulated, retained, so far from exposure what we have is protection and a selection of bones for a complex postmortem process. One final point to support this idea in gathering all this data, as I said, I'm also dealing with a lot of information, information in pits, information in ditches. I don't get middens in the same ways that you get in the west, but I found at least 12 examples of semi-articulated and incomplete information. So, one example from Kent contained 50% of an adult male skeleton with the head, the left arm and the left leg missing. Another one from Bedfordshire contained the body of a neonate, again with no head, and the right arm was also missing. Another one from Essex, the crouched incubation of an adult male, no skull, but there were loose teeth found in the grave and the rest of the skeleton was complete. So, this might tie in with what Edel Trowd and Anastrid were saying about the revisitation for different purposes, because they're not revisiting to take artifacts and to move things, they're revisiting, I think, to take elements. And I believe that these kind of incomplete burials are what's left over from the process of a primary burial as part of a protracted postmortem process involving the exhumation of skulls or other important or valuable elements after defleshing for reuse and reuse and curation. And that's why the taffanomic markers on these burials are so rare.