The environment, particularly climate, are at times a catalyst for human resilience and adaptation. Notwithstanding, environmental and climatic variability can have catastrophic effects on human health. In this PhD project, we test the hypothesis that human health tracks environmental and climatic variability. While supported by state-of-the-art archaeological method and theory, this project is osteologically driven and is founded on a wealth of human skeletal and dental series curated at the University of Aberdeen and Queens and other museums in the region. This project targets the role of the environment with respect to human health through consideration of how past societies responded and adapted to the impact of differential environmental conditions. Environmental (including climate) volatility is a vexed issue in the modern world, thus the implications of sea level rises, loss of habitable and arable land and the flow on effects of food and border security, with associated population packing, are of clear public interest. But to what degree, and in what manner, did environment variability, and volatility, influence human mobility, population stability, health, disease loads and behaviour in the past? In particular, what role did it play in the development of early historic communities in Scotland and Ireland?
Clearly, environment, both natural and human engineered, is the single most significant moderation of human health both now and in the past. A knowledge of the effects of environmental conditions, and change, on the health of early historic communities in Scotland and Ireland has the potential to inform critical components of modern human health in the region. One aspect of human health that is particularly sensitive to a region’s underlying geochemistry, topography, climate (including volatility and change) and human manipulated landscape (e.g., urban v. rural settings) is oral health.
The aim of this project is to examine the interplay between a range of environmental variables (including broadly defined geochemical landscapes, topography and geography, e.g., plains v uplands, and rural v urban settings), which combine to influence subsistence patterns and thus diet, which in turn inform both the demographic characteristics of communities and their oral health. Core variables targeted will include dental caries, antemortem tooth loss, periodontal disease, periapical abscesses and alveolar defects, while oral health will be further contextualised within the oral microbiome as assayed through the study of archaeological dental calculus (Kinaston et al. 2019).
In terms of research training, the University of Aberdeen is home to Scotland’s most prestigious geosciences school, with the expertise and capacity to both train and support the student in their palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and modelling of targeted sites in Scotland and Ireland. Aberdeen and Queens have extensive experience and considerable internationally recognised expertise in researching health in ancient populations, providing the best possible training in this area. Moreover, given recent research suggesting a link between oral health outcomes and fertility rates (associated with population growth and decline), a substantive component of this PhD project will involve modelling historic demographic patterns, supported by researchers with the Centre for Palaeodemography and Paleoepidemiology (CPP 2021).
More project details are available here: https://www.quadrat.ac.uk/quadrat-projects/
How to apply: https://www.quadrat.ac.uk/how-to-apply/
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