Fergus Holmes-Stanley

The incomplete survival of medieval cultural artefacts has created a ‘survivorship bias’, where inferences about the past are limited by survival patterns. However, by using critical models from archaeology and statistical models from ecology, we can now aim to quantify the impact of this bias, and thus move towards mitigating it. This project will apply these methods to medieval narrative fragments about the Picts, a seemingly ‘disappeared’ culture, to develop a structure for identifying and mitigating survivorship bias in historical writing. The result will be an innovative database and methodological framework for interpreting medieval sources.