Tools of the trade

Today I have been mostly measuring bones. I also had a couple of meetings with my grant-funded project colleagues and had chats about human remains with various workmen and other volunteers who were round and about. One guy asked me this morning, "Is that a human skull?" (it was) and then got his colleagues to come over and have a look followed by an in-depth discussion about how you can work out sex and age from a skeleton. Later a guy from Estates came past with a couple of colleagues and said, "That's a femur, isn't it?" (it was) "and it's got arthritis, hasn't it?" (it had)...and so it went on. People are always interested in bones, I find, and the room I work in is going to be open to the general public soon so I expect I'll be spending a fair bit of time discussing them with museum visitors - which I don't mind at all :)