Hidden Histories Tour & Talk with Professor Lizzy Craig-Atkins

This tour will not take you to the beautiful and impressive gravestones and monuments within Sheffield General Cemetery, but it will tell you about some of the women, men and children whose lives were just as important, many of whom contributed to the continued success of society at the time through their hard work and resilience.

Professor Lizzy Craig-Atkins will deliver a talk entitled ‘Revealing Hidden Histories: Integrating archaeological and historical evidence to explore family, work and leisure in the 18th and 19th centuries’.

Exploring the range of evidence that historians and archaeologists use to write hidden histories – from skeletons excavated in cemeteries to newspaper small ads – and the questions these sources enable us to answer about everyday life in the 18th-19th centuries in cities like Sheffield.

Lizzy will use three case studies from her recent book The material body: embodiment, history and archaeology in industrialising England, 1700-1850 that relate to histories of family, work and leisure: an investigation of a group of burials of infants that opens up an investigation of maternity and pregnancy; how the study of bones alongside archives can reveal the impact of labour on the body; and how studying teeth can change how we think about smoking habits.