To your health!
Tracing health in urban environments in medieval Northern Europe
Although inhabitants of Northern European medieval towns conceived of and knew about disease and “not being healthy” in ways other than ours, similar health risk factors were at play, such as poverty, lifestyle, environment, mobility and gender differences. This session aims to explore the relationship between health and the physical environment, including climate, nutrition, diet and mobility, are how they are linked together by complex cultural and social practices which constituted the dynamics of medieval urban living. There is considerable potential to come to a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between the advancement of public health and the physical factors that played a fundamental role in the development of the ‘medieval urban way of life’. New and improved methods in genetics, physics, paleometereology, archaeo-osteology, paleobotany, parasitology, archeo-zoology, histotaphonomy, high-density dating, etc. offer entirely new avenues to extract health- and environment meaning both from skeletal and conventional archaeological sources. How can these untapped sources provide profound new insights into the overall health of urban communities and shows how particular environmental elements in the urban landscape are linked to external factors, such as climate, nutrition, mobility and dietary practices.
Theme: Theories and methods in archaeological sciences
Session format: Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each
Organisers: Axel Christophersen (Norway), Joackim Kjellberg (Sweden)
Submit paper abstracts through: https://www.e-a-a.org/EAA2018/
Contacts: axel.christophersen@ntnu.no or joakim.kjellberg@arkeologi.uu.se
Session 208 is associated with MERC
Take a look at their flyer: EAA 2018 session flyer
