My friends and colleagues are trying to find some references to African women whose remains were uncovered in England. If any of my archaeologist friends have some ideas of where to go next, it would be much appreciated.https://twitter.com/ISASaxonists/status/1286373846774362112 …
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But while the article highlights that this woman is important for showing the diversity of Roman Britain, language like this strikes me as highly defensive and does not reckon with the issues inherent within equating race with someone's skull structure.pic.twitter.com/ODUkkPUDck
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I looked up some more stuff on cranial recon. I saw the three different reconstructions of Tutankhamun and I saw three different men. It seems that making any kind of conclusions from the cranial construction of this woman relating to geophysical location and race are problematic
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Related to this is the Beachy Head Lady, another person who is apparently of Sub-Saharah African descent according to the wikipedia page. But no aDNA evidence has been collected.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beachy_Head_Lady …
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Isotope analysis says she lived most of her life in S. Britain, but the issue here was she was identified as being Sub-Saharan African descent because of her cranial structure.
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I cannot find anything on this woman past that apparently David Olusoga discusses her in his book, Black and British: a Forgotten History, but I don't have access to the book atm so if someone does and can check, I would appreciate it.
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Oh, one other thing regarding the Ivory Bangle Lady. Her cranial structure was compared with African American women from the nineteenth century. This strikes me as being as problematic as comparing modern DNA with ancient DNA.pic.twitter.com/9l7REX4PZZ
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Isotope analysis is useful for identifying people who migrate, and the analysis of this woman suggests she was from outside Britain. No attempts, as far as I can tell, were made to compare aDNA with comparable individuals from North Africa.
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There are of course plenty of issues with aDNA and efforts to chart the aDNA of peoples is fraught also.
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But it reaffirms the problems we have when discussing identity in the archaeological record. I'm fairly certain that with burials found that have been deemed "Anglo-Saxon" we haven't done cranial recon to see what 'white' features they have.
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See also the recon of the Kennewick Man's face and how it reaffirmed the bullshit from the archaeologists that he was not related to the Umatilla peoples and other Indigenous groups in the area, and their refusal to allow others to test his DNA.
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Cycling back to what
@ISASaxonists and@erik_kaars are looking for with these African women, it is frustrating that when there is scholarly info it falls into the problems I outlined above but it is frequently ignored and pushed aside.Show this thread -
Even the Ivory Bangle Lady, aside from that article, has few scholarly articles on her that I can find.
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End of conversation
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