Breathing Life into Old Bones: New Perspectives on Medieval to Early Modern Denmark
George R. Milner, Distinguished Professor
Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University
Contextually well-controlled skeletons from multiple archaeological sites enhance understandings of individual, household, and community life in medieval to early modern Denmark. New developments in paleodemography, paleoepidemiology, and bone chemistry permit estimates of how long people lived, what happened to survivors of life-threatening trauma, and changes in diets and residence locations during individual lifetimes (the basis of future work on rural-to-urban migration). Taken together, they provide quantifiable perspectives on the deep roots of the world as we know it today.