Hi All!

I am Alysha Lieurance a 2nd year PhD student in anthropology here at Pitt. I received a Masters in Anthropology from East Carolina University studying social inequality and urbanization at Petra, Jordan but have recently moved areas (and time periods) to Late Antique and Early Medieval Germany.

I work at Straubing, a small site along the Danube where Romans encountered and interacted with various migrating populations, often referred to as barbarians. Scholarship over the Late Antique and the Early Medieval periods disagrees on the nature of the fall of the Roman empire, some researchers argue that it is the result of ruthless attacks and disruption by roaming barbarians, while others argue that the transition was relatively smooth and characterized by new forms of social integration and assimilation as well as the formation of new identities along the borderlands. My research seeks to explore local shifts in demography, diet, health, and mortuary treatment at Straubing to assess how the individuals at Straubing negotiated new ideas and expressions of community within the Roman hinterlands.

One of the major issues that needs to be addressed within these contexts is to test if archaeologically created categories of difference (like ethnic groups or polities) were readily identified and acted upon by people in the past. Digital methods like GIS and spatial analysis of mortuary spaces can help address this question, however uncritical application of these methods often reinforces archaeological assumptions rather than challenging them. I am in this class in the hopes that I can better contextualize and apply digital methods in my future research.