Blog posted by Alyssa McGrath A BAKOTA CheMystery Not everyone gets to spend their summer off-roading through rural Hungary. Thankfully, since I am part of the BAKOTA project, I do. So why am I off-roading through Hungary? It has to do with my project here, where I am working with my mentor, Dr. Mark Golitko. His work centers around finding out where the ceramic vessels at the Bekes 103 site originate. To do this, he needs to sample and chemically analyze clays from throughout the Great Hungarian Plain to compare to the ceramics that the BAKOTA team has excavated over past seasons. However, none of the clays samples that Dr….
Blog posted by Crystina Friese Break a leg! (Or any bone, really) Hey y’all! I’m Crystina and I’m part of the Bone Team for the BAKOTA 2018 field season. Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me explain what we do and where these bones are coming from in the first place. The BAKOTA Project seeks to find more information about a known Bronze Age Cemetery here in Hungary. What were these people’s death rituals? Were there differences in treatment between men and women? Adults and children? What do those differences look like? These are just a few of the questions we are looking to answer. This culture…
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…
Blog posted by Erika Danella Level Up! – Exploring Skeletal Distribution in Cremation Urns Think about your morning routine. Is there a certain order you like to do things in? Some people might get dressed and then brush their teeth, others may brush their teeth first and then get dressed. There are also people who don’t have any preference at all! Essentially, humans have various ways of reaching the same end goal. In the context of this research project, we are trying to determine how Bronze Age people placed cremated bodies into funerary vessels, or urns. We are interested in seeing whether or not there was a systematic, orderly way of…
OT student digs for answers As an occupational therapy major, sophomore Heleinna Cruz learns by observing how people move. Over the summer, Cruz had a chance to learn from bodies that hadn’t moved in nearly 5,000 years. Cruz was a member of an international team of specialists and students from around the world who excavated and analyzed material from burial sites in the Bronze Age cemetery of Békés 103 in Hungary. The work is part of the BAKOTA project, an international, multidisciplinary archaeological project. This fall, Cruz presented her research findings at a professional conference and will continue developing her work to present at a conference in Canada in…
Blog posted by Virag Varga and Anna Szigeti Death Metals: Trade Networks of Doom Have you ever wondered how people in the ancient world got their hands on the materials they used in their daily lives? Sometimes we look at the people of the past, and assume that they made everything they needed themselves. The thing is, this is usually not the case. Just like us humans today, the people of the past usually worked very hard, and could do a few jobs very well, but weren’t able to make everything they needed. So what they couldn’t make for themselves, they would trade in from other places. The “Death Metals”…
Blog posted by Pravani Ramireddy Perspectives from a BAKOTA alum Hey Bakota team and friends! I was an REU participant during the 2015 and 2016 field season and I wanted to update you all with what’s going on my in my life! Some context: at the tail end of the 2015 season, while I was passing through the Budapest Keleti train station, I saw hundreds of people living underground. The news came alive for me as I realized the people I saw were refugees. I have since kept up with the news and politics that continue to shape the refugee crisis, and am now studying refugees, health, and humanitarian…
Blog posted by Pravani Ramireddy Measuring what (C)remains at Békés 103! What do most people think of when they hear about an archaeology dig at a cemetery site? For me, it used to be inhumations: (NPR ). As it turns out, Békés 103 has far more cremated burials than inhumations. The cremated remains, or cremains, were buried either within an urn, or scattered with small empty vessels marking the grave. For several decades, cremated remains were disregarded and even thrown out before in-depth analysis because they were thought of as far more useless than intact bones. Luckily, at BAKOTA we are making full use of those cremains In previous…