Research

Eóin Parkinson is the CRASSH/British School at Rome Fellow for 2019-20. Eóin will be at CRASSH in Michaelmas Term 2019 and return in July and August 2020, after spending Lent and Easter Terms at the British School at Rome.

During his postdoctoral fellowship, Eóin will extend the work of his PhD, which explored the impact of social and economic change on the human body across 5000 years of Italian prehistory through scientific analysis of archaeological human remains. This new project will further explore these processes by investigating the relationship between depictions of the human form and treatment of the body after death through consideration of prehistoric art and burial evidence. In doing so, this project seeks to re-evaluate the traditional interpretations of social change in the 4th-3rdmillennia BC in the central Mediterranean.

Whilst at the BSR, Eóin will examine excavation reports and archive materials from Copper Age (3600-2200 BC) burial sites from central Italy, drawing the results into a wider regional framework. Eóin will also use his time in Rome to prepare a major review article that synthesises the burial record for the central Mediterranean Copper Age and his fellowship will culminate in a two-day conference that will bring together scholars in the fields of art history, archaeology, anthropology, history and the visual arts to discuss theoretical and practical concepts surrounding the study of the human body from prehistory to the modern period.

Eóin’s postdoctoral research fellowship at CRASSH and the BSR will be held coterminous with a College Research Associateship at St. John’s College, Cambridge.

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, Eóin's related colloquium which was to have taken place in Cambridge on 9 and 10 July 2020,  had to be cancelled. However, you can listen to Eóin in conversation with artist Bea Bonafini on the BSR's resident podcasts

About

Eóin is an archaeologist specialised in central Mediterranean prehistory and the analysis of human remains and funerary evidence. He completed his BA in Archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast, during which he undertook an Erasmus Exchange to the University of Malta. Following his undergraduate degree, Eóin completed his MSc in Human Osteology & Funerary Archaeology at the University of Sheffield and worked as a Postgraduate Research Assistant on the ERC funded FRAGSUS Project (2014-2019), then moving to Cambridge to start his PhD (Funded by the Cambridge AHRC DTP and an honorary award Robert Gardiner Scholarship). His PhD thesis (examined July 2019), entitled Body size, skeletal biomechanics and habitual behaviour: A bioarchaeological approach to social and economic change in the Neolithic and Copper Age central Mediterranean explored the impact of social and economic change on the human body across 5000 years of Italian prehistory through scientific analysis of archaeological human remains. His thesis explored major themes of social and economic change in central Mediterranean prehistory through a bioarchaeological approach that examined skeletal evidence of nutritional status and physical activity.

Eóin’s other research interests include monumentality, funerary archaeology and radiocarbon chronologies of central Mediterranean prehistory. Beyond the Mediterranean, his previous research has investigated the long-term impacts of colonialism and identity in Ireland through analysis of funerary monuments.

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Tel: +44 1223 766886
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