Project information
Big city life: Toward a bioarcheology of Brno’s urbanization (9th-19th Century) (BITE)

BITE Brno project, funded by the Czech Science Foundation, seeks to explore the biological and biosocial dimensions inherent in Brno’ s urbanization, as embodied by its cohesive population over a millennium, from the 9th to the 19th centuries, using bioarcheology. To achieve it, the project will rely on 3 pillars: 1 – a tailored research question based on the triptych demography-health-landscape use to explore the consequences of urbanization on urban inhabitants; 2 – a transgressive, integrated approach, which includes state-of-the-art methodologies, relying on two premises, i.e. a) assessing the evolution of the response in the longue durée while focusing on a single urban setting, that is Brno; b) departing from conventional archaeological practices by eschewing the categorization of individual cemeteries as disparate urban populations, and opting instead to perceive them as integral components of a coherent whole, focusing on the study of 1,000 skeletons; 3 – a formalized consortium including involving local stakeholders and benefit corporation to foster new research synergies in bioarcheology of urbanization.