Rebecca Gowland is a bioarchaeologist. She is a Professor of Archaeology at Durham University.

Education

Gowland studied for an undergraduate degree at Durham University. She then completed a master's degree at the University of Sheffield before returning to Durham, where she completed her PhD in 2002.^[1][2]

Career

After completing her PhD, Gowland undertook post-doctoral research at the University of Sheffield and University of Dundee. Gowland held a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. She was appointed at Durham University in 2006 as a lecturer in Bioarchaeology.^[2][3] She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and Professor in 2019.^[3][1]

She has received funding from the British Academy,^[4] and The Wenner-Gren Foundation.^[5] Gowland has been Associate Editor of the journal Antiquity since 2018.^[2][1] She is an Associate Editor at Bioarchaeology International,^[6] and the Treasurer of The Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past.^[7]

Her research interests include health and the life course in the Roman World,^[8][9] palaeopathology, social perceptions of the physically impaired and the inter-relationship between the human skeleton and social identity. Gowland has co-edited The Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains, with Chris Knüsel (2006) and The Mother-Infant Nexus in Anthropology. Small Beginnings, Significant Outcomes (2019) with Siân Halcrow.^[1] She has co-authored Human Identity and Identification with Tim Thompson (2013).

Selected publications

• Gowland, R.L., and A. G. Western. Morbidity in the marshes: Using spatial epidemiology to investigate skeletal evidence for malaria in Anglo‐Saxon England (AD 410–1050). American Journal of Physical Anthropology 147.2: 301–311.
• Gowland, R. L., Chamberlain, A. & Redfern, R. C. (2014). On the brink of being: re-evaluating infanticide and infant burial in Roman Britain. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 96: 69–88.
• Gowland, R. L. (2015). Entangled lives: Implications of the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis for bioarchaeology and the life course. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 158(4): 530–540.
• Gowland, R. L. (2016). Elder abuse: evaluating the potentials and problems of diagnosis in the archaeological record. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 26(3): 514–523.
• Gowland, R. L. (2017). Embodied Identities in Roman Britain: A Bioarchaeological Approach. Britannia 48: 175–194.
• Gowland, R. L., Caffell, A. C., Newman, S., Levene, A. & Holst, M. (2018). Broken Childhoods: Rural and Urban Non-Adult Health during the Industrial Revolution in Northern England (Eighteenth-Nineteenth Centuries). Bioarchaeology International 2(1): 44–62.