Orcid ID – 0000-0002-4209-7889
Email – maia.casna@usc.es

Maia Casna’s main research interests involve palaeopathology as a tool to investigate the human past. Her current research at PollutedPast Project explores the spread of respiratory infections (sinusitis, otitis, pulmonary diseases) in relation to metal pollution in several medieval and post-medieval contexts. As recent clinical studies have pointed out a huge health gap between higher and lower socioeconomic in exposure to pollutants, with her work Maia aims to raise awareness on how social inequalities from the past influenced the ones existing today.

Maia Casna (MSc) graduated in 2017 from a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Bologna, Italy. She joined the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University in 2018 for a Master of Science in Osteoarchaeology, from which she graduated cum laude in 2019. In 2025, she awarded a PhD cum laude from Leiden University for her dissertation on the impact of socioeconomic shifts on the hearth of several medieval and post-medieval Dutch populations.

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