Miriam Tildesley

Miriam Louise Tildesley MBE (1 July 1883 – 31 January 1979) was an English educator, anthropologist and museum curator. Also in 1923, she was named a research assistant in charge of the collections at the Hunterian Museum in London. She served as a curator of human osteology for the museum from 1932 to 1934. She also served as chair of the Comité de Standardisation de la Technique Anthropologique. In 1930, she delivered a speech to the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO) meeting in Farnham, Surrey, speaking to the eugenicists about how anthropology techniques could be used to clarify racial characteristics, how the environment influences human development and hereditary laws.

During excavations on Whitehawk Hill in Brighton and Hove in the 1930s and 1940s, Tildesley was consulted on the human remains of an infant and concluded that the infant was a few weeks old when it died. In 1932, during housing developments in Barking, a Roman stone coffin was unearthed and Tildesley was called out to the site along with Christopher Hawkes, Assistant Keeper in the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum.

In 1939, Tildesley was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI). She served on the council for the RAI for a number of years and was vice-president from 1952 to 1955. Tildesley was also appointed a member of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to anthropology.