Congratulations to Dr Jo Buckberry for her new AHRC-SBE project -" Dead and Buried:Investigating changes in health during the Industrial Revolution using documentary records and human skeletal remains" Starting in early 2026, the project will last for 3 years, working with project partners the Thackray Museum and Historic England.

Dead and Buried will explore the impact the Industrial Revolution had on human health. The research will investigate mortality (age-at- and cause-of-death) and morbidity (chronic health conditions and the lived experience) on a large scale in the UK and USA. Uniquely this research will interweave data gleaned from human skeletal remains and documentary evidence to investigate the lived experience of individuals and their risk factors for disease within a spatial framework. A big data approach to past population health will draw together skeletal and vital statistics data using GIS tools, to answer the following research questions:
• Which aspects of IR posed the biggest risks to health (social or environmental)? What is the interaction between these risks, and can we identify the compounding effects of this interaction?
• To what extent did spatial patterns like proximity to rural or urban environments and rate of urbanisation impact patterns of acute disease, chronic disease, infant mortality and adult longevity?
• Was the experience of industrialisation in the US different to the UK? Were there any pre-existing conditions that mitigated or exacerbated the effects of IR on health that differed between the UK and US contexts?
• Were there differential patterns of health and longevity related to social status, or demographic trends? Were some sub-sections of society able to buffer themselves more effectively from environmental risks?

Well done Jo and colleagues!!!!