A ‘Hands On’ Experience!

All the talks were excellent…..the whole workshop was well structured and provided a range of interesting topics……I enjoyed the whole course…..I particularly liked the human vs animals session and the disease table…….It was good to handle real examples…….every workshop was extremely interesting……..the workshop was brilliant and everyone was very helpful…..it was all very interesting and will lead me to do some more reading on my own……the day was excellent!

On Saturday 6th November 2010, the Thames Discovery Programme held a Riverpedia workshop on the subject of human remains from the foreshore at the LAARC. After an introduction to the work of the Osteoarchaeology Team at MoLA from Natasha Powers, and the Centre for Bioarchaeology from Jelena Bekvalac, the FROG members were thrown straight in to a session on human anatomy. After a well deserved tea break, each group then moved through different sessions learning how to lay out and record a skeleton, the differences between animal and human bones, pathology and age/sex determination. The day finished with some case studies discussing finds of human skeletal material from the foreshore.

A huge thank you goes out to all of our expert instructors: Natasha Powers, Jelena Bekvalac, Martin Hatton, Don Walker, Brenna Hassett and Jane Sidell.

The FROG Guide to Human Remains is now available on the FROG Network and the presentations from the day are available here

Find out more…

There are a number of different courses available:

The Museum of London Bare Bones course will run in April 2011.

Sedgeford History and Archaeology Research Project has two courses:
Studying Bones – An Introduction to Osteology: 10th-16th July 2011
The Archaeology of Human Remains 1: 17th-23rd July 2011

Birkbeck University London Bodies: An Introduction to the Study of Human Skeleton Remains. Enrolment has closed for this year’s programme but the course will be running again in October 2011.