ABSTRACT
The study of human remains from archaeological sites has a long history in Europe, as it has in North America. However, some parts of Europe have seen more rapid development than others. In Britain it is only fairly recently (since the mid-1980s) where we have seen a significant change in the quantity and quality of data produced from skeletal analysis, data that have been used from a bioarchaeological perspective. It is noticeable, but not surprising, that Europe as a whole (but particularly Britain) has lagged behind in the development of a biocultural/bioarchaeological approach to using skeletal data to contribute to our understanding of past human populations. First, this is probably because most work, until recently, had been undertaken by people working in other disciplines such as anatomy, dentistry, and medicine who had little background knowledge of archaeology to allow them to contextualize their biological data. Second, until the 1980s, there was no specific training for people wishing to work in the field of (palaeo) physical anthropology/bioarchaeology (i.e., archaeologically derived human remains and not early hominid remains), at both undergraduate and graduate levels, nor were there many people employed as (palaeo) physical anthropologists to teach in departments of archaeology, certainly in Britain. Key to this problem has been the emphasis on archaeology departments in universities rather than anthropology departments, as seen in North America.
