Zooarchaeology

In July, the Box Office Bears team visited Wildwood Trust in Kent. Wildwood has three rescued captive bears, who are living new lives in a large, wooded enclosure at the Trust.

What can the bone of an adult bear tell us about the life it led and the world around it?

This cranium, from excavations at the Davies’ Bear Garden on London’s Bankside, contains the story of the life and death of this individual dog, which we can recover through zooarchaeological analysis.

Two months ago, I had the privilege of travelling with some early modern bear bones from Oxford to Nottingham. These bear bones were found during excavations by MOLA in Southwark in London, and were analysed for zooarchaeology and isotopes in Nottingham, before being taken to Oxford to be sampled for ancient DNA analysis.