On July 14th 2012 Dr. Waters-Rist presented an invited lecture entitled "Ancient Peoples from Lake Baikal: Reconstructing Past Health" at the 16th Annual Barge Forum. Barge's Anthropologica, named in honor of the late anatomy professor Prof. Dr. JAJ Barge (1884-1952), is a cooperation between the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, and the Faculty of Archaeology of Leiden University. It is unique in the Netherlands with respect to research and teaching in the field of physical anthropology. A review of Dr.Waters-Rist talk called "Prehistorische botten bij het Baikalmeer" was published in the LUMC monthly magazine, called Cicero (issue #6, August 28th, p.14, download under 'publications' ).

The upcoming National Geographic magazine issued in the Netherlands and Belgium will feature an article about the mass graves from the 80-year war, discovered at the 'Paardenmarkt' in Alkmaar in 2010. Different aspects of the investigation will be higlighted, such as the historical, osteological and isotope analysis. The results first published here are a sneak preview of Rachel Schats' extensive Phd-research, focusing not only on the Alkmaar massgrave, but on the Paardenmarkt cemetery as a whole, compared to several other Medieval cemeteries from rural and urban settings.

PhD candidate Rachel Schats was awarded the Eve Cockburn student prize for best podium presentation at the 19th European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association. The meetings were held from August 27th to 29th in Lille, France. Her presentation entitled "A Forensic Approach to Medieval Gunshot Trauma", with co-authors A. Waters-Rist, R. Hermsen, A. Stamouli, G. Davies and M. Hoogland, was deemed to be an excellent example of interdisciplinary research that combines forensic and paleopathological perspectives.

Rachel Schats

Rachel Schats studied Caribbean Archaeology with a focus on human skeletal remains at Leiden University. In addition, she followed several courses focused on skeletal anatomy and palaeopathology with Prof. Simon Hillson and Prof. Tony Waldron at University College London, UK. Currently, she is a research assistant and PhD researcher in the Laboratory for Human Osteoarchaeology. She is analysing the skeletal remains from the Alkmaar excavation and writing the physical anthropological report. Her PhD research focuses on the reflection of urbanisation in human skeletal remains. This bioarchaeological research uses the Alkmaar material (urban) as well as skeletal remains from the Blokhuizen site (rural) as the main collections to observe possible differnece between rural and urban living. In addition, the results of the osteological analysis are compared to other, already analysed, rural and urban assemblages from both the Nehterlands and the United Kingdom in order to fully understand the consequences of urbanisation

Congratulations to Tristan Krap, Heidi Leroux, Annick Meurrens, Barbara Veselka, Jessica Palmer and Jaap Saers 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, and the investigation of the Middenbeemster collection in particular. The titles of the theses are as following:

Tristan Krap: Changes in human cortical bone due to thermal stress. An experimental histological approach.
Heidi Leroux: The use of dental nonmetric traits for intracemetery kinship analysis andt cemetery structure analysis from the site of Middenbeemster, the Netherlands.
Annick Meurrens: Tattling Teeth: Occurence of enamel hypoplasia in a 19th century Dutch rural agricultural population.
Barbara Veselka: Rural Rickets: Beemster, a rural farming community in post-medieval Netherlands
Jessica Palmer: Busy Bones. Osteoarthritis and musculoskeletal markers as evidence of physical activity and social differentiation in post-medieval the Netherlands.
Jaap Saers: Sexual division of labour in rural 17th to 19th century Holland: A study of limb bone cross-sectional geometry

By clicking on the different titles, you will be redirected to the individual thesis-sections in the Leiden University Repository where additional information is provided and the complete thesis can be downloaded!