The Museum of London's Centre for Human Bioarchaeology currently stores the remains of nearly 5000 Londoners who died during the Roman and Saxon periods, as well as 600 plague victims of the 14th-century Black Death who were buried in a mass grave on the former Royal Mint site in East Smithfield.

The bones are packed in 10 000 cardboard boxes stacked in the museum's vault and have been collected over the last 30 years from around 50 cemeteries scattered throughout the city.

Now, with the help of a £438 000 grant from the Wellcome Trust, the museum is creating a database of all the remains to help researchers studying disease trends and lifestyle changes throughout the last two millennia. Careful physical and chemical analysis can provide an extraordinary amount of information about long-deceased people - from what they typically ate to the diseases they endured, all of which leave tell - tale signatures in the bones and teeth they leave behind.

The skeleton collection attracts interest from researchers in North America, Australia and Japan as well as the UK. Once the database is running the number of studies should increase - and many projects will be completed without a bone being disturbed.

"Having this unique collection properly recorded will be of huge benefit to mankind," says Gustav Milne, Head of Archaeological Research at the museum. "No other city in the world has such a large selection of excavated skeletal samples ranging from all periods in its development."

Other than the age in which they lived, very little is known about the remains. "We have no idea of the identities of most of these people. There could well be many unsung heroes and great generals among the shoemakers, bakers, young, old, rich and the poor. There are so many stories here that we will never know about. However, these anonymous people will be helping academics who are investigating diseases or trends."

The database will mean this kind of information is much more accessible, says Dr Milne. "If someone wants to study, say, the teeth of medieval children we currently have to check innumerable boxes to secure the samples that might be needed, which is obviously very time consuming. With a database the researcher will be able to see how many skulls we have with the sort of teeth they are looking for without disturbing any of the bones. There will be some instances where they will still have to physically handle the collection but these occasions should become rarer."

The project will enable all the material to be analysed to a consistently high standard, and key information captured for posterity. Cataloguing will be carried out by a team of osteo-archaeologists led by Bill White, the museum's Curator of Human Osteology. Information stored will include the date, type of burial, artefacts found with the body, notes of associated graves and details of the skeleton including size, sex, bone and tooth inventory, age assessment and pathology. The database will be backed-up by selective digital photography and some X-rays to support diagnoses of skeletal pathology.

The museum's skeletons come from a range of burial places, including pagan, parish, monastic, municipal and 'catastrophic' cemeteries. Eventually, the museum also hopes to add details of over 10 000 burials from the recent Spitalfields Market excavation to the database - creating a resource of enormous value to those studying the history of human disease.

External links

• Museum of London
• Gustav Milne: Research interests