My name is Dr Alistair Pike, I'm
a reader in Archaeological Sciences.
I think we're a unique department
that combines archaeology, biological
anthropology and social anthropology.
After all, we're asking
the same questions -
what it's like to be human
in the past and the present.
I think the most exciting thing
that's happened recently
in archaeology
is the development
of these chemical techniques
that allow us to reconstruct
human life ways in the past.
We've been developing methods
to measure isotopes in people's teeth
that show where they lived
when they were growing up.
We've been using this to work out how people
organised themselves in prehistory.
So we've been able to identify
family structures and the fact
that all the females
came from somewhere else,
which tells us that
they were practising exogamy.
This means "marrying out"
and it creates kinship networks.
There's a strategy used today that
social anthropology tells us about
to help people if locally it's hard to
procure food or at times of warfare.
KATE: I'm Dr Kate Robson-Brown
and I'm a senior lecturer
in Biological Anthropology.
Without a doubt, for me,
the most exciting research moment
in my career so far
was the first time I used
computer tomography, or CT,
to look inside a hominin fossil,
a fossil that was
about 450,000 years old.
I could see on the screen that all
the internal architecture was intact -
I knew we'd be able to understand more
about the growth of that individual.
One of the ways in which biological
anthropology is moving forward quickly
is at the blurring of the boundaries
of the discipline.
We're looking at micro-evolutionary
processes in living populations
to do, for example, with mate choice
or disease-pathogen spread.
We're also looking at evolutionary
processes through deep time
and trying to understand more
about the very earliest origins
of the biological aspects
of what it means to be human.
We've just completed a study of
a series of three baby Neanderthals
that are kept in a museum in Paris
which have allowed us to show that
they were developing a bit faster
than human infants,
modern human infants of the same age.
I'm Mark Horton,
I'm a Professor in Archaeology.
I've just come back,
in the last 24 hours, from Zanzibar
where we've been doing
some amazing excavations
to try and discover
not just the early history
of Zanzibar,
but how Zanzibar was connected
through international trade
to Persia, to India, to China,
to Europe, in the first millenium AD.
The world of archaeology's
completely opening up
as we're developing new perspectives,
not just in the remote past,
but also into the historical,
often recent past.
So the subject of objects,
of things, of  buildings,
how society's used them,
how they traded them,
what meaning they put onto them -
is really the cutting edge,
I think, at the moment,
of archaeology.
We have a very strong
research community here at Bristol.
For example,
apart from the full-time staff,
we also have a number of
post-doctoral fellowships,
people who are working with us
on significant projects
and in addition to that,
we have at the moment
about 70 PhD students.
So taking all of those together,
in total, we have about
150-200 researchers at any one time,
all working collaboratively in the general fields
of archaeology and anthropology.
ALISTAIR: It's an important point that
archaeology is really a team game -
we draw on specialisms
from all over the University.
I work with people in Chemistry
and in Earth Sciences in the University of Bristol,
but also with geneticists
from Denmark and Germany
and Australia,
as well as people
in museums in central Europe
where I get the bones that I analyse.
MARK: What's great about Bristol
is that it's a very porous university
where one can go off to different
departments, use their machinery, their equipment.
For a discipline
like archaeology and anthropology,
collaboration is absolutely key
for research success.
