There are many things we don’t know about the day-to-day lives of colonists who lived in Jamestown and Colonial Maryland in the 1600s and 1700s, so teams of special scientists called forensic anthropologists set out to learn more about the colonists—by studying their bones!  Written in Bone is the fascinating story of how these scientists located and examined 300- and 400-year-old skeletons and combined their knowledge of the human body and their knowledge of history to learn things like what the colonists ate, what diseases they suffered from, how old they were when they died, and what kinds of jobs they performed within their community.  An interesting nonfiction read for older children.

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Recommended by Beth