Alexandra Johnson

Project Officer
(Post-excavation: osteoarchaeologist)

Alexandra joined AOC in October 2021, working on the development of Post-excavation Research Designs for a range of sites throughout Scotland, from the Neolithic to post-medieval periods.

She is an osteoarchaeologist, specialising in health, diet and mobility in Late Iron Age, Viking Age, and medieval Scottish populations, and has been a member of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology since 2009. For AOC, she has worked on skeletal assemblages from across Britain, in particular remains from sites in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, including material from  Rosemarkie on the Black Isle, and Scalloway, Shetland.

She recently completed her doctoral research at the University of Oxford, utilising osteological and isotopic methods to interpret changes in socioeconomic activity and subsistence practices in Pictish to Late Norse Orkney, while using strontium and oxygen isotopes to explore mobility.

Upon graduation from the University of Sheffield with an MSc in Human Osteology and Funerary Archaeology, she worked in Cultural Resource Management in the United States, where she served as Logistics Coordinator, Archaeology Field Supervisor and Osteologist. In 2014, Alexandra received her MSc in Archaeology from Oxford, focusing on the disarticulated human remains from Stoke Quay, Ipswich before continuing on to complete her DPhil.

She is currently an Early Career Researcher at the University of Oxford and serves as an ad hoc osteological consultant for the University of Highlands and Islands, Kirkwall. Her primary research interests involve health and diet in Viking Age Orkney, Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, sequential dentine carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis for interpreting patterns in adolescent diet relating to conceptions of adulthood, gender, and cultural identity, and palaeopathological indicators of load-bearing and physiological stress in the early medieval period.

Selected and forthcoming publications

Johnson, A. 2013 ‘The Vikings and Early Medieval Ireland: an Osteological study on the effects of the invasions on Irish health‘, in: T. Finan (ed.), Archaeology, Peoples, and Landscapes: Essays in Honor of Jenna Higgins. Institute of European Archaeology Press.

Johnson, A., Snoeck, C. & Schulting, R. In Progress ‘A new look at the Viking Age in Orkney: dietary and socio-cultural change from the Pictish/Norse transition through the Late Norse phase (AD 500–1300)’.