Louise Loe

• University of Reading

Direct physical evidence for violent interpersonal conflict is seen only sporadically in the archaeological record for prehistoric Britain. Human remains from Charterhouse Warren, south-west England, therefore present a unique opportunity for the study of mass violence in the Early Bronze Age. At least 37 men, women and children were killed and but...

Direct physical evidence for violent interpersonal conflict is seen only sporadically in the archaeological record for prehistoric Britain. Human remains from Charterhouse Warren, southwest England, therefore present a unique opportunity for the study of mass violence in the Early Bronze Age. At least 37 men, women and children were killed and butc...

Ancient DNA is a valuable tool for investigating genetic and evolutionary history that can also provide detailed profiles of the lives of ancient individuals. In this study, we develop a generalised computational approach to detect aneuploidies (atypical autosomal and sex chromosome karyotypes) in the ancient genetic record and distinguish such kar...

Extinct lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, have been identified in several individuals from Eurasia between 5000 and 2500 years before present (BP). One of these, termed the ‘LNBA lineage’ (Late Neolithic and Bronze Age), has been suggested to have spread into Europe with human groups expanding from the Eurasian steppe....

The identification and interpretation of skeletal trauma is an important topic in osteoarchaeology, forensic anthropology and palaeosciences. Trauma analysis is a fast‐moving sub‐discipline with constantly evolving methodological approaches. This paper describes the process of a particular form of fracturing that propagates specifically from the fl...

Intestinal helminth parasites (worms) have afflicted humans throughout history and their eggs are readily detected in archaeological deposits including at locations where intestinal parasites are no longer considered endemic (e.g. the UK). Parasites provide valuable archaeological insights into historical health, sanitation, hygiene, dietary and cu...

Present-day people from England and Wales harbour more ancestry derived from Early European Farmers (EEF) than people of the Early Bronze Age¹. To understand this, we generated genome-wide data from 793 individuals, increasing data from the Middle to Late Bronze and Iron Age in Britain by 12-fold, and Western and Central Europe by 3.5-fold. Between...

Extinct lineages of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of the plague, have been identified in several individuals from Central Europe and Asia between 5,000 and 3,500 years before present (BP). One of these, the 'LNBA lineage' (Late Neolithic and Bronze Age), has been suggested to have spread into Central Europe with human groups expanding from t...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) has been infecting humans for millennia and remains a global health problem, but its past diversity and dispersal routes are largely unknown. We generated HBV genomic data from 137 Eurasians and Native Americans dated between ~10,500 and ~400 years ago. We date the most recent common ancestor of all HBV lineages to between ~...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03328-2.

The maritime expansion of Scandinavian populations during the Viking Age (about ad 750–1050) was a far-flung transformation in world history1,2. Here we sequenced the genomes of 442 humans from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland (to a median depth of about 1×) to understand the global influence of this expansion. We find the Viking pe...

Helminth infections are among the World Health Organization’s top neglected diseases with significant impact in many Less Economically Developed Countries. Despite no longer being endemic in Europe, the widespread presence of helminth eggs in archaeological deposits indicates that helminths represented a considerable burden in past European populat...

The Viking maritime expansion from Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) marks one of the swiftest and most far-flung cultural transformations in global history. During this time (c. 750 to 1050 CE), the Vikings reached most of western Eurasia, Greenland, and North America, and left a cultural legacy that persists till today. To understand the...

Background: Dental calculus, calcified oral plaque biofilm, contains microbial and host biomolecules that can be used to study historic microbiome communities and host responses. Dental calculus does not typically accumulate as much today as historically, and clinical oral microbiome research studies focus primarily on living dental plaque biofilm...

Excavating burials presents a myriad of ethical considerations involving legal constraints and regulations, religion (lay and formal), health and safety, public and academic interest, and descendants. These considerations are arguably more complex when the excavation is undertaken within the context of developer led practice in which the realities...

Lead analysis of tooth enamel from individuals recovered from a Viking Age burial pit in southern England provides further evidence for their childhood origins outside Britain. All except one of the men have very low Pb concentrations that exclude anthropogenic Pb exposure. Strontium and oxygen isotope compositions identify a core group of men who...

Introduction: Dental calculus is a mineralized microbial dental plaque biofilm that forms throughout life by precipitation of salivary calcium salts. Successive cycles of dental plaque growth and calcification make it an unusually well-preserved, long-term record of host-microbial interaction in the archaeological record. Recent studies have confi...

Introduction Dental calculus is a mineralized microbial dental plaque biofilm that forms throughout life by precipitation of salivary calcium salts. Successive cycles of dental plaque growth and calcification make it an unusually well-preserved, long-term record of host-microbial interaction in the archaeological record. Recent studies have confirm...

In palaeopathology, diagnosis of skeletal disease is classically made with reference to changes wrought by known diseases in modern or recent cases. This report presents a skeleton from Mediaeval England which shows a form of erosive arthropathy. A more precise diagnosis is problematic because the alterations appear inconsistent with any of the pri...

As reported in MM 23.2, a site in Langford, Essex, has yielded the first cremation deposit dated to the Mesolithic in Britain (Gilmour and Loe 2015). Directly dated to 5657–5561 cal BC (95.4% probability, based on two separate dates on calcined bone successfully combined in OxCal 4.2: 6692 ± 21 BP, χ2, T = 0.0(5%3.8)), the deposit contained what ap...

British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations after 400 CE. It remains an open question how these events affected the genetic composition of the current British population. Here, we present whole-genome sequences from 10 individuals excavated close to Cambridge in the East of Engl...

Supplementary Figures 1-12, Supplementary Tables 1-4, Supplementary Notes 1-6 and Supplementary References

Data file containing the allele sharing counts of modern and ancient English samples, as shown in Figure 2

Connell Brian , Jones Amy Gray , Redfern Rebecca & Walker Don . A bioarchaeological study of medieval burials on the site of St Mary Spital. Excavations at Spitalfields Market, London E1, 1991–2007. xxii+304 pages, 250 colour and b&w illustrations, 172 tables. 2012. London: Museum of London; 978-1-907586-11-8 hardback £ 28. - Volume 87 Issue 336 -...

High resolution incremental isotopic analysis of the dentine from early forming teeth, especially first molars (M1s), provides a means to assess the effects of poor childhood nutrition and healthcare on individuals in an assemblage where there are no infants to study. This approach is applied to an 18th and 19th century cemetery population associat...

During the First World War, 250 soldiers were buried behind enemy lines in unmarked mass graves on the outskirts of the village of Fromelles, Northern France. They were among several thousand Australian and British soldiers who were killed in the Battle of Fromelles on the 19th and 20th July 1916, the first action on the Western Front to involve th...

Dr Juliet Rogers (Fig. 1), who died in 2001, aged 61, devoted her working life to the study of ancient human skeletons to aid our understanding of disease – the science of ‘skeletal paleopathology’ (1, 2). She made many important contributions to rheumatology. Here we celebrate her work through a brief resume of some of the things her work has taug...

Of the many types of find recorded by archaeologists, human skeletons are amongst the most difficult to record and visualize due to their innate complexity and homogeneous appearance. Questions of legitimate inference are also brought into play when interpolative assumptions are made based on a limited set of observations. Furthermore, attempts to...