Each of these disciplines has its own history, its own methods, and its own limitations.

What the Conquest Man project did was integrate them, applying each to the same subject and combining the results into the richest possible picture of a single historical individual.

This kind of integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to archaeological remains is increasingly possible as the individual techniques mature and as research infrastructure develops that can support collaboration between teams with different expertise.

The Francis Crick Institute is one of the few places in the world with the combination of ancient DNA expertise, contamination controls, sequencing technology, and analytical capacity to work reliably with medieval samples.