Theme:
Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format:
Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each
Title:
To your health!
Tracing health in urban environments in medieval Northern Europe.
Content:
Although inhabitants of Northern European medieval towns conceived of and knew about disease and “not being healthy” in ways other than ours, similar health risk factors were at play, such as poverty, lifestyle, environment, mobility and gender differences. Health and the physical environment, including climate, nutrition, diet and mobility, are linked together by complex cultural and social practices which constituted “urbanity” or the dynamics of medieval urban living for the most part. These processes can be advantageously analyzed and explained by using social practice theory. There is considerable potential to come to a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between the advancement of public health and the physical factors that played a fundamental role in the development of the ‘medieval urban way of life’.
New and improved methods in genetics, physics, paleometereology, archaeo-osteology, paleobotany, parasitology, archeo-zoology, histotaphonomy, high-density dating, etc. offer entirely new avenues to extract health- and environment meaning both from skeletal and conventional archaeological sources. This untapped source provides profound new insights into the overall health of urban communities and shows how particular environmental elements in the urban landscape are linked to external factors, such as climate, nutrition, mobility and dietary practices. The session will be organized by a cooperative effort of the ‘Enescopinge-projekt’, ongoing large scale urban excavations in the town of Enköping, Sweden, and the NFR founded project ‘Medieval Urban Health AD 1000–1600. It will comprise 9 invited scholars from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands and will be open to all conference participants.
Keywords:
health, environment, aDNA, nutrition, genomics
Session associated with MERC:
yes
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Main organiser:
Professor Axel Christophersen (Norway) 1
Co-organisers:
Project leader Joackim Kjellberg (Sweden) 2
Affiliations:
1. NTNU University Museum, Institute for Archaeology and Cultursl history
2. Uppsala University, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History
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