This month Hallie, Peter and Charlotte have been chatting to George Driver (North and South Magazine) about our ongoing research on the Otago Goldfields. Grab yourself a copy of their September issue or head to their online magazine to find out more! Photo by Ekrulila on Pexels.com
In the Southern Cemeteries project we mostly study skeletal remains and archaeology relating to death and burial. Not always the cheeriest topic! It's really important for us to remember that the people we're looking at lived lives before they died. They experienced hardships certainly, but they also had fun times! So for the final blogs … Continue reading Archaeology – it’s child’s play
How and what we feed our children depends on a whole lot of different factors. It follows fashions, medical knowledge of the time and depends on the availability of different foods. We can learn a lot about childhood diet just by looking at or analysing teeth. In this blog post we look at the archaeological … Continue reading Teething problems?
In our last post we talked about the tragic story of the sisters who died of whooping cough just one day apart. Today in blog 4 of our Little Lives series, paleopathologist Dr. Annie Snoddy talks about the diseases that used to make childhood so dangerous for our colonists. Infants and children are the “canary … Continue reading Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases
As we write this blog post our country is just beginning to feel the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. This kind of pandemic is relatively rare in modern society... but the colonial settlers of Dunedin knew all about it. In this blog post we're exploring how our forebears dealt with concerns over disease spread. We … Continue reading Pandemics in the Past