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Supervisors: 

• Elizabeth Craig-Atkins (Primary) 
• Chris Milliard (Secondary)

Thesis Abstract

The study of child abuse in the past offers opportunities to explore past perceptions of childhood and childcare and can yield important insights into the lives of past children. The priority placed upon preventing child mistreatment today has led to an increasing appreciation of the ways it both illuminates societal attitudes and impacts individual experiences. This challenges bioarchaeologists to find novel ways to identify these behaviours and their consequences in the past. Past studies exhibited a lack of consistency in their approaches, leading to questions regarding the feasibility and potential of this area of research.

To move forwards, it is crucial to critically explore the extent to which the evidence of the abuse of children in the past might be rendered more visible and its interpretation more reliable. This project will evaluate the potential of a novel interdisciplinary approach that that combines osteological and clinical evidence with radiological and bioengineering data and interprets these data within their historical, archaeological, psychological and socio-cultural context. It takes a multi-scale sample approach, re-evaluating extant cases of suspected child abuse and examining a large medieval and post-medieval dataset (c.901-1900 AD;n=1074) to identify instances of childhood skeletal trauma in order to discover new cases of child abuse in the bioarchaeological record.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this project will offer a critical perspective on child abuse in the past, including questioning prior assumptions and expectations around what we mean when we talk about child abuse in the bioarchaeological record. Overall, this project will provide methodological and interpretive theoretical advances in order to reframe and improve the way that we approach the topic of child abuse in the past.

Research Interests Include:

• Human Osteology
• Childhood Bioarchaeology 
• Health and wellbeing of juvenile skeletons
• Skeletal growth and development
• Child abuse and mistreatment
• Skeletal sexual dimorphism
• Human identification in forensic contexts