This talk provides an update on the scientific research conducted on the human remains from the Croftgowan Pictish barrow cemetery, which was excavated in 2021 as part of the Torr Alvie Environs Project. Three of the barrows excavated during this project contained human remains dating to between the 5th–7th centuries AD which were analysed by Dr Lucy Koster as part of her PhD at the University of Aberdeen. Despite poor preservation of the remains, radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analyses, and aDNA analysis were successfully performed.
This talk presents the results of these analyses and the insights they give us into the diet (carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur isotopes), lifetime mobility (strontium, oxygen, and sulphur analyses), and genetics of these three people who were buried in the cemetery, giving a better idea of who these people might have been. The talk will also discuss the importance of the scientific results from the Croftgowan individuals in understanding the lives of the Picts more generally, in the context of research being conducted at the University of Aberdeen.
Dr Lucy Koster is an archaeological scientist who specialises in combining multiple forms of biomolecular analyses (stable isotopes, aDNA) to investigate the life histories of people in the past. She obtained her PhD in Archaeology from the University of Aberdeen (2025).
Her thesis focused on investigating the life histories of Pictish individuals from two sites in Scotland, Croftgowan barrow cemetery in Inverness-shire (the subject of this talk) and Lochhead Quarry in Angus.
She previously undertook a BA (Hons) in Archaeology and Anthropology (2021) and an MSc in Archaeological Science (2021) at the University of Oxford, during which she specialised in human osteology and isotopic methods. She has been involved in since 2016 through the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project, where she is a human remains team supervisor and trustee/committee member.
She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Analytical, Environmental, and Geo-Chemistry Research unit at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, on the Make-Up of the Cities project, where she is using isotopic analyses to investigate early life history from five urban centres from across medieval Flanders.
