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Blog posted by Dante Ayala Chem-Mysteries of Bones and Plants So, this year, I’m one of two students using chemistry to tackle some of BAKOTA’s pending questions. And the question that really my mentor, Dr. Julia Giblin, and I are trying to crack down on, is whether or not people were moving around in Middle Bronze Age Hungary, and if they were, to what extent? And we’re gonna go ahead and use some chemicals and really expensive plasma-making machines to figure this one out! Unfortunately, all that really cool chem stuff where we turn bone into a super-hot plasma and use magnets to shoot it through a machine that tells…
Blog posted by Heleinna Cruz Burning Beyond Color: The Flaming Perspective of a Returning BAKOTA Student In the summer of 2016, I was a 19-year-old girl who just finished her Freshman year, excited to join a team of students on an adventure to Hungary as part of the BAKOTA Project. It was an absolutely exhilarating and challenging once in a lifetime opportunity. Fortunately for me, no one made a formal rule that once in a lifetime opportunities had to happen only once. Getting accepted to the BAKOTA Project for the 2018 field season allowed me a second opportunity to grow the project I started two years ago. My 2016 field season experience was spent scoring bones for their color using the Munsell Soil Color Charts and observing if there were any…
Blog posted by Aras Troy Breaking Bone So, you’ve died. Now what? You could probably expect your family to turn your body over to a specialist, who will embalm you and place you in a casket. Then, your loved ones will gather at a cemetery with a holy man and say a few nice things about you before burying your casket six feet underground and putting up a tombstone with your name and age on it. We may take this processes for granted, but it represents a highly complex, codified burial custom that was developed over thousands of years. Now, imagine the challenge a future archaeologist might have in recreating…