Dr. Piers Mitchell
- Affiliated researcher, McDonald Institute, Department of Archaeology
- Hospital Consultant (specialist) in NHS
Contact
Connect
Location
- Department of Archaeology, The Henry Wellcome Building, Fitzwilliam Street, Cambridge, CB2 1QH
About
Piers is qualified in medicine, in biological anthropology and medical history.
- He has taught as a lecturer at Imperial College London and the University of Sydney before moving to Cambridge in 2009.
- From 2011-2020 he taught the course on Human Evolution and Health in the Department of Archaeology.
- Piers is co-editor of the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology and is on the editorial board of the journal Parasitology.
- He is founding editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Cambridge Texts in Human Bioarchaeology and Osteoarchaeology.
- President of the Paleopathology Association 2015-17, the worldwide organisation for the study of ancient diseases. https://paleopathology-association.wildapricot.org
Research
Research interests
- Parasitology
- Tuberculosis
1) Ancient Parasites and Dysentery
- Piers' research interest is to identify when and how parasites and dysentery came to cause disease in humans, how we spread these parasites around the planet, and what impact these diseases had upon human evolution and civilizations in the past.
2) Paleopathology
- Piers also studies infectious disease from the lesions in human skeletal remains - e.g. treponemal disease (syphilis), tuberculosis, leprosy.
3) Bubonic Plague.
- Piers is co-investigator on the Wellcome Trust funded project 'After the Plague: Health in Medieval Cambridge'. This 4 year project aims to determine the biological consequences of the medieval Black Death (1348-1352 AD) upon the population of Britain by comparative analysis of the skeletal remains of those who survived with those who died.