Prisoners of war: Durham and the fate of the Scots in 1650

Date: 

Thursday, October 27, 2016, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Tozzer Anthropology Building, Room 203

 

Archaeologists from Durham University, UK, will tell the fascinating history of how prisoners from a seventeenth century battle between England and Scotland came to Massachusetts.

Transported to the US as indentured servants, some of the men went on to become successful farmers and there are now hundreds of descendants of these soldiers living in New England and beyond.

The talk will also set out the research methods used by the archaeologists on human remains, discovered during construction of a new café at Durham University in 2013. This research has helped solve the almost 400-year-old mystery of where hundreds of soldiers, who died whilst held captive in Durham, were buried.