Susan Sheridan

Sheridan is bioarchaeologist studying ancient diet and disease, childhood adaptability, occupational stress, and the utility of commingled and legacy collections of interred humans for understanding life in the past. Her research focuses on the interplay of health, violence, mobility, and daily life in the ancient world utilizing paleodietary and paleopathological methods. She has worked on projects in the Near East, including Byzantine St. Stephen’s monastery in Jerusalem, Early Bronze Age Bab adh-Dhra’, the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery at Qumran, and the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age site of Tel Dothan. She has also worked on mummies from the Sudan (Nubians), as well as burials and cremations from the American Southwest (Hohokam).

 

Sheridan and her students exhumed the large Byzantine St. Stephen’s monastic assemblage on the grounds of the Couvent Saint-Étienne/École Biblique in Jerusalem, and have built a detailed bioarchaeological reconstruction of daily life related to health, prayer practice, diet, pilgrimage, and the role of children found at this large, wealthy monastery. They have been able to explore the ‘ideal’ as evidenced in written records, to the ‘lived’ seen in skeletal indicators from the people themselves. Sheridan has also studied early urban life, interpersonal violence, health, and social dynamics at the walled town of Bab adh-Dhra’, on the shores of the Dead Sea. Located between monumental empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the southern Levant saw the advent of nascent urbanism and increased social complexity --by combining an excellent archaeological record with studies of nearly a thousand occupants of the site, a rich bioarchaeological account of daily life in this hinterland has emerged.