Congratulations to Esther 't Gilde, Joanne Veldman, Rachel Olsthoorn, Leonie Ouwerkerk, Kirsten Ziesemer, Irene Vikatou, Emma de Boo van Uijen for completing the Master program Human osteology and funerary archaeology and obtaining their MSc degree! Their research is a valuable contribution to the field of osteoarchaeology! Titles and links of their theses will be available her shortly.

We are very happy to announce that Dr. Sarah Inskip from Bournemouth University is coming to Leiden! She has taught several osteology courses in the UK and supervised many students. Here, she will be teaching the BA and Master lectures as well as lead all the practical sessions. More on Sarah can be found in the Researchers section shortly. 

Simone Lemmers has been awarded a Leverhume trust funded PhD Position at the University of Durham, UK in the field of Biological Anthropology supervised by Dr. Jo Setchell (Antropology, Durham University) and Dr Wendy Dirks (Newcastle University) starting October 2013.

The research project is called Stress, life history and dental development in primates, where she will be analysing indicators of stress corresponding with the life history of primates and modern humans.
The project combines Human physiology, primatology and histology to compare the timing of accentuated increments in teeth with important life history events to test whether these events are recorded in tooth sections. The ultimate aim is to apply this methodology to the fossil record to understand the evolution of our own unique life history pattern.

Dr. Andrea Waters-Rist and Rachel Schats both received grants to do more interesting osteological research!

Dr. Waters-Rist received not one but two grants for projects in the Lake Baikal Project. The first is funded by a small project grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung foundation, on a project entitled "The Osteoarchaeology of Pastoralism in Cis-Baikal, Russia (Southern Siberia)".  Project leader Prof. Dr. Rob Losey of the University of Alberta, and co-applicants Dr. Tania Nomokonova and Dr. Kharinskii, will conduct osteological analysis, radiocarbon dating, and stable isotope analysis of human skeletal remains from early to late period pastoralists in the Cis-Baikal region of Southern Siberia. Dr. Waters-Rist will be heading-up the human osteological and stable isotope analyses of pastoralist skeletons.

The second grant she recieved is form the  SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Insight Development Grant for three years of research on a project entitled “Small Places of Large Importance: A Bioarchaeological Exploration of Small Prehistoric Mortuary Sites in the Lake Baikal Region of Siberia, Russia”. Project applicant Dr. Hugh McKenzie and co-applicants Drs. Angela Lieverse and Alexi Novikov, as well as several other collaborators, will investigate the nature of the small mortuary sites in the Baikal region to complement and extend their previous work on large sites, in order to improve our understanding of prehistoric Siberian lifeways. Dr. Waters-Rist will be conducting the stable isotope analyses and participating in dental anthropology research.

Rachel Schats received a grant from the Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Anthropologie en Praehistorie (SNMAP) to perform stable isotope research to study the differences between rural and urban diets in the Medieval period. Samples from the Alkmaar and Blokhuizen collections have been taken and will be analysed soon!