Responsible for: The Scottish archaeological human remains collections.

Research interests: Osteobiography; multiple and collective burials; reconstructing funerary practices; curation and modification of bone; ethical approaches to studying and curating human remains.

Jess is the Curator of Osteoarchaeology and is responsible for the Scottish archaeological human remains collections. She is working on the AHRC RICHeS-funded project ‘Scotland’s Archaeological Human Remains Collections’ (SAHRC). She will advise on and oversee research undertaken on the human remains and will promote and enhance the research potential of the collections. 

Jess is interested in asking broad questions about identity, power, gender and personhood in the past through the analysis of human remains in their sociocultural context. Her research seeks to understand past peoples’ lives and deaths through an integrated approach to reconstructing their identity and the ways they were treated after death. Jess’ research acknowledges that all cultures engage with the dead through multiple burial practices, and she has experience of studying inhumations, commingled remains, and cremations. She regularly collaborates with researchers applying methods such as radiocarbon dating, isotopic analyses, ancient DNA, and proteomics. Her work focuses on placing these analyses in their archaeological context and interpreting their social importance. Growing out of her collaborative work are two main areas of current research focus: 1) ethical recommendations for sampling human remains; 2) aligning theoretical approaches to the body across the sciences and humanities.

Her BA and MA were completed at the University of Southampton, where she developed an interest in Neolithic funerary practices and began to specialise in the analysis of fragmented and commingled human remains through taphonomy. Her PhD research, carried out at the University of Cambridge between 2015­–2019, formed part of the ERC-funded ‘Fragility and Sustainability in Restricted Island Environments’ (FRAGSUS) project. She applied the first large-scale analysis of funerary taphonomy to two Late Neolithic collective burial assemblages on the Maltese Islands. She identified a consistent approach to ‘unmaking’ bodies through the disarticulation of the dead, which was mirrored in the fragmentation of anthropomorphic figurines. Her research into funerary practices, and contributions to other areas of the bioarchaeology team’s work, including palaeopathology and dental modification, was published in a co-edited monograph and several journal articles. 

Jess has experience of excavating prehistoric sites and human remains in Britain, Italy, Malta and Egypt, and has been actively involved in fieldwork in the Avebury region since 2014. She is interested in the relationship between spaces of the living and the dead in this monumental landscape, and with the dynamics of the transition from the Neolithic to the Beaker period. She is currently the osteologist for the AHRC-funded ‘Avebury Papers’ project which is reanalysing and digitising Alexander Keiller’s archive. 

Most recently, Jess was a researcher on the ERC-funded ‘Making Ancestors: The Politics of Death in European Prehistory’ project at the University of Cambridge. Jess worked with an international multidisciplinary team, leading on the bioarchaeological analysis of Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age human remains from across Italy and co-ordinating a strategy of biomolecular sampling. For this project, she has worked on identifying human bone curation, defining the range of ways the dead were treated in each of these periods, and integrating approaches to burnt and unburnt human remains.