Arma Veirana 2022 Season: Post 1


T- 5 days until we're off! 

Welcome to the first blog post from the Arma Veirana 2022 Summer season! Our group consists of Dr. Jamie Hodgkins, Dr. Caley Orr, their daughter Noor, and the following graduate students from CU Denver: Kyle Pontieri, Sarah Manassee, Ari Del Olmo Medina, Caitlin Konchan, and Lia Plankenhorn-Farrell. We are beyond excited for the incredible opportunity to work in the field and to grow our knowledge base and skills in zooarchaeology and anthropological lab work. For four weeks, we will be analyzing faunal material from the Arma Veirana site and entering data into two separate computer programs, Access and ArcMap, for later analyses. Alongside this lab work in Erli, we will also have the opportunity to visit local museums and immerse ourselves in the local culture and landscape. 

Our first day in Italy is Monday July 11th, stay tuned for more updates and posts as the field season gets underway!

Location of Arma Veirana Cave (Map taken from this Article on the project)

Erli, Italy (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)


To prepare for the field season, we students have been working in Dr. Hodgkins' lab at CU Denver, practicing bone coding, identifying faunal remains, and gathering up our lab equipment. 


Sarah and Ari practicing bone coding in the lab.

Caitlin prepping computer programs in the lab. 

Sarah working on identifying this animal bone and entering data into Access. 



 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 8: Tutto Bene!

Image
Ciao friends! We have been hard at work in the lab this past week getting the final faunal remains coded into our system for further analysis, which we will begin shortly. The work has been extremely rewarding and humbling, looking through thousands of small animal bone fragments for hints of human and Neandertal influence such as cut marks and fire. As we continue to build our relationship with the local landscape and people, it becomes even more evident that this valley must have been a place of beauty, serenity, and shelter for ancient peoples and animals of all kinds for a long time. The sense of place is strong and it is easy to see why. We took two days off so Jamie, Caley, and Noor could travel to Nice to bring Nonna Deb to the airport, who graciously and with much energy provided 4 year-old Noor with entertainment and care for three weeks.  Now Noor plays sweetly in the lab while we work, entertaining us with her fantastic imagination 😊 During our two days off, we students to
Read more

Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 9: Museums

Image
 We have officially finished coding all the faunal material and are working on preliminary analyses to get an overview of the Arma Veirana site and faunal specimens. Questions we are interested in asking are: What are the differences in the assemblages in each stratigraphic layer? What animals are represented and what skeletal elements make up the majority of each assemblage? What can this tell us about hominin use of the cave? While working on data analysis, we are also enjoying our final days in this special part of the world. We've had the privelege of traveling along the coast and visiting two fantastic museums. The first, the Museum of Prehistory at Balzi Rossi, is situated right along a massive cliff face that houses several paleolithic cave sites. An enthusiastic tour guide showed us around the museum, pointing out significant finds such as the skeletal remains of a female individual ("La Donna") who up until a decade ago was mislabeled as male, Mousterian lithics,
Read more