Our research on show at the New Zealand Archaeological Association conference 2021

A couple of weeks ago the NZAA’s annual conference was held in Taupō, and the Southern Cemeteries Archaeology Project was there sharing our research and telling the archaeology community about all the amazing things we have learned from our project! There was a whole session focused on historic cemeteries research – which suited us perfectly.  In that session Hallie spoke about our findings from the bioarchaeology perspective by getting into some of the lost stories of the settlers, Peter talked about the ongoing search for the settlement of Drybread, and one of our honours students Brittany Moller spoke about the ground-breaking work she’s doing investigating the preserved brain material from the sites. Meanwhile over in the technical advances session Charlotte spoke about the stories that archaeological hair can tell us… 

In the poster session three of our students – Meriam van Os, Lucy Henderson and Bridget Sheehan showed off the diverse research they’re doing based on the Southern cemeteries work. Meriam presented her early pathogen DNA results, Lucy showed us the stories of childhood stress she’s finding out by looking microscopically at teeth, and Bridget introduced us to the world of paleoparasitology – looking for signs of gut parasite infection in colonial New Zealand. Special shout out goes to Meriam, for winning the student poster prize at both NZAA and at the Otago University Biomedical Sciences Postgraduate conference – we couldn’t be prouder of her!

We’ll be telling stories of this research in more detail on the blog over time, so stay tuned… 

From left to right: Lucy Henderson with her poster on histological analysis of colonial teeth, Bridget Sheehan with her poster on paleoparasitology in the cemeteries project, and Meriam van Os shows off her poster prize winnings at the conference dinner