Dr Robert Paine

Robert R. Paine, PhD

Dr Paine is a Forensic Anthropologist currently living in Rome, Italy. His past and present research focuses on two main themes. The first research theme looks at Mediterranean skeletal material from the archaeological sites of Tarquinia, Alfedena, Urbino, Casilina, Fossa, and Povegliano, Elaiussa Sebaste Turkey; as well as modern material skeletal from Crete and Cyprus (Cawley and Paine 2015). This research examined the frequency of paleopathological lesions from of skeletal collections dating back as far as the 11th century BC and as recent as the 20th century AD. The main goal of this research is to better understand how the health of people changed over time (Table 1). One interesting bit of information from this work has shown that the Imperial Romans may have had the poorest health status among past Italian communities.

A second long term project includes work on bone biology of individuals suffering from malnutrition (Paine and Brenton, 2006). Histological findings of ribs from individuals that died of pellagra and non-specific malnutrition has been accomplished. The ribs used for this project come from the “Raymond Dart” skeletal collection housed at the University of Witwatersrand Medical School, Johannesburg, South Africa. The collection offers a unique research opportunity since most of the autopsied skeletons have demographic and cause of death data available. We found that Black South African individuals experienced considerably slower bone turnover rates from what would be expected for their age (an average of 46% lower than expected OPD values). These findings have specific implications for the evaluation of age-at-death assessment and health assessment for past populations (Brenton & Paine, 2007). This research has also been the starting point for several current PhD projects conducted the University of Edinburgh; a recent publication by Garcia-Donas et al., (2016) and conference poster by Lill et al., (2017).

Table 1. Skeletal assemblages analysed.