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Tuesday 17 May 2011

A Little Archaeology

OK, so when I set this blog up I did say that occasionally I would post about my other passion, archaeology...

At the moment I am busy working on a ton of different projects (possibly too many, who knows...), but the one that is really exciting (well, one of the ones that is really exciting...) is called 'From Cemetery to Clinic', funded by JISC.

Basically, with a group of colleagues in both Archaeological Sciences and Visual Computung we are creating an online resource about a medeival cemetery in Chichester. It's not just any cemetery, but was attached to a leper hospital, which later became an alms house. And lots of the skeletons show signs of leproy. We (well, my clever colleagues, not me!) are busy creating 3D laser scans, with textured overlays, of the affected bones and linking this into a GIS map of the excavated cemetery - with lots of information about the skeletons. It's a short project (just 5 months), and scarily we're half way through - but we now have a blog about the project and what we are doing - so if you are interested in my day job, or archaeology in general, then please do have a look.


Finger bone with a groove at the far end - this is caused by the contraction of hand muscles in leprosy - the person would have been unable to straighten their fiungers, a feature called 'claw hand deformity'.

3 comments:

Giovanna said...

Wow, that's fascinating, Jo - thanks for sharing!

Anonymous said...

Very interesting! So good that you obviously love your job!

Daffycat said...

This is a really awesome project, Jo! Thanks for sharing!