Science And The Dead Destructive Sampling Of Archaeological Human Remains For Scientific Analysis 2nd Edition Simon Mays by Simon Mays, Joseph Elders, Louise Humphrey, William White, Peter Marshall instant download after payment.

Scientific analyses involving destruction of samples of bones or teeth from human remains are widely used in archaeology. Institutions responsible for curating archaeological human remains in the long or medium term, principally museums, university departments and commercial archaeological contractors, are increasingly receiving requests from researchers to sample remains in their care. Clegy and others responsible for historic churchyards and other burial grounds are also receiving an increasing number of requests from those wishing to exhume ancient burials for research purposes. The purpose of this document is to provide a framework to help organisations in responding to such requests.

This document represdents an update to the first edition of Science and the Dead, published in 2013. This edition is intended not only to reflect advances that have taken place in scientific techniques but also in other areas. The remit remains as before, skeletal remains more than 100 years old from burial sites in England.

Legal and ethical considerations pertaining to destructive sampling for the purposes of scientific research are set out. There then follow sections devoted to some of the more commonly applied techniques: radiocarbon dating, stable isotopic analyses to study ancient diets, isotopic analyses to study geographical origins of people, ancient DNA studies, proteomics (the study of proteins), and microscopy. In each of these sections, the science behind the technique is summarised, the sorts of information that it can yield are outlined and the bone or tooth samples that are likely to be needed are described. Some case studies are then given for illustrative purposes.