Ancient DNA Analysis of the Victims of a Medieval Mass Murder

In 2004, construction workers digging in advance of a shopping centre development in Norwich, UK, uncovered a medieval well containing the human remains of at least 17 individuals, most of whom were children. Dating by radiocarbon and pottery placed the burials in the 12th–13th century. This very unusual assemblage was suggested to represent the disposal of victims of famine or disease, or violence against the Jewish population of Norwich. In 2011, I was part of a team asked to use ancient DNA analysis to test whether the remains could be those of Jewish individuals for a BBC documentary, a question which we finally answered last year. In this talk I will discuss how we resolved the identity of the remains, what the results mean for our understanding of Jewish history, and why it took so long.

Ian Barnes is a Research Leader in Collections Genomics at the Natural History Museum in London. He is an evolutionary geneticist who works on ancient DNA, human and animal migration, and phylogenetics. He obtained a BSc in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Bradford, and a DPhil in Biology from the University of York. Following his doctoral research, Barnes worked with Mark Thomas at UCL on the recovery of DNA from medical museum specimens, and with Alan Cooper at the University of Oxford. He was then awarded a Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeology Fellowship and returned to UCL, and subsequently received a NERC fellowship to work on the Late Pleistocene megafauna at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was made Professor of Molecular Palaeobiology there in 2013 and moved that year to the Natural History Museum.