Skin and Bone: Interdisciplinary analysis of accidents, injury, and violence in industrialising London, 1760-1901 Data Blog

Alker, Zoë and Howard, Sharon (2025) Skin and Bone: Interdisciplinary analysis of accidents, injury, and violence in industrialising London, 1760-1901 Data Blog. Skin and Bone in London, 1760-1901.

Abstract

This is a data blog for the Skin and Bone project, which seeks to chart the embodied experience of work-related injury, accidents, and interpersonal violence of c.50,000 Londoners during the Industrial Revolution. In both archaeology and history, the period 1760-1901 represents a significant transformation for the body. Injuries, accidents and interpersonal violence profoundly affected lived experiences of the body in England during this intense period of industrialisation. Led by a historian of the period with expertise in digital humanities, and an osteoarchaeologist who has collated data on trauma and injury in eighteenth-century bodies, the project has created a new open-access dataset, which this blog will document, explore and visualise.