Blog posted by Teresa Godinez Communication Beyond Words As I walked down the aisle of the airplane and found my designated seat, a rush of excitement came over me as I realized that I was officially on my way to Hungary! If someone had told me that I would one day end up in Hungary, following my dreams and partaking in field school, I might not have believed them, much less even imagined it would be possible. However, there I was, a first-generation college student getting the opportunity to participate in the 2018 BAKOTA field school. Now that I reflect on myself before the trip, I realize that my knowledge…
Blog posted by Ákos Mengyan Write Bronze Age stories with the help of numbers. Think about trying to tell a story about someone or about a community through their material culture and their funerary practices. Is it difficult? I say it is. In the BAKOTA project’s 2018 season, we are trying to recognize a community through their known and excavated material culture. We are investigating a Bronze Age site in Southeastern Hungary to understand their social organization and to understand their life. I am a part of the ceramic team, where we are analyzing the vessels and sherds from a Bronze Age cemetery and settlement. We are measuring their ornaments…
Blog posted by Zachary Bible Leaving this World in Style: A Study of Bronze Age Ceramic Urn Designs How would you like to be remembered? Leaving a “mark” on the rest of the world does not only apply to others’ memories, but can also refer to physical objects associated with someone — long after they have “left this world.” For example, if you would prefer to be cremated rather than buried, and chose to be contained in an urn, is there a specific style that you would like the urn to express? Would it reflect favorite colors, shapes, and patterns? Perhaps decorations common to your heritage or background? Would it…
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…
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”…