PhD student Christopher Aris, whose thesis is entitled Enamel growth in modern history and its impact on ageing juvenile skeletal remains supervised by Dr Chris Deter, has been awarded an Academic Research Grant from the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaelogy (BABAO). The project title that has been funded is Testing a new multivariate dental morphometric method of juvenile assessment on a known sex population.
Chris will be working at the Natural History Museum for five days, conducting research on the Spitalfields Crypt skeletal collection. His research will involve analysing the upper first molars of both adult and child remains, in order to test whether they can be used to determine the sex of deceased individuals. Should the project prove successful, Chris will be able to formulate a method of determining the biological sex of young children, in both archaeological and forensic contexts, which is currently impossible to do using similar existing methods.