Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology

These fourteen conference papers report on osteoarchaeological evidence from sites across Britain and, in addition to discussing what this material reveals about past populations, propose methodologies for handling and analysing old bone and for understanding the deposition processes. The largely technical papers cover such subjects as: the effects of taphonomy and funerary practices on the state of preservation of human remains; why post-mortem features should not be ignored; bacterial growth and the preservation of the dead; burial in Irish megalithic tombs; the deplacement and destruction of skeletal remains in early medieval Wessex; post-medieval Tallow Hill Cemetery in Worcester; late Neolithic skeletal remains from Raven Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales; evidence of Paget's disease at Norton Priory in Cheshire; northwest European bog bodies; gender roles among the hunter-gatherers of Florida; local human evolution in the Pampas of Argentina; remains from the Neolithic tombs of Orkney; biological asymmetry in humans; variations in the occipital bone; estimating age at death.