Dr Catherine Swift

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91 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 25 Jun

Dr Catherine Swift’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Medieval Dublin · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

And it this is text which is written in the eleven seventies.

So the the Normans have only just arrived.

But d the there there's reference to the Irish and and the Scots and the Welsh all attending at this course.

Well, the the uh ancient DNA is is is a bit controversial, um or uh it it's becoming less controversial now over time, but it w it it started off being quite controversial about the degree of contamination.

Um, that you might be p what you might be picking up in the lab is sort of not their original DNA of the original skeleton, but as it were floating fragments of of of the excavator or the soil in which it stays.

it was found, et cetera, et cetera.

Um so for a while people people think they've s solved all those problems now through mathematical modelling.

But for a while then DNA people started saying, well if we can't be really sure about ancient

human.

At least if we study ancient rats or ancient badgers or ancient cows or whatever, we can be sure that we're not picking up, you know, the the scientists' DNA uh or or any contamination.

There was a project there's a guy called Jamies Barrett in Cambridge and he's done a lot on um fisheries and and marine archaeology in general in the Viking period.

And he was involved in this big project about looking at uh walrus ivory.

Um and where the walnuts came from because ivory starts becoming a material which is used a lot in particularly high status objects in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth century.

We there's the crozier head, for example, from Curry which is in in Walness ivory.

So people were interested in where did these wellnesses come from?

And so they did DNA studies of us.

And they discovered that uh and and and Ireland, because of the Wood Key excavations, has provided four different samples

for the for the study.

there.

We're looking at Walner Saibre as it was found in various archaeological excavations around Western Europe.

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