College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

• April 2, 2006

  Team begins excavating bones found at ISU Memorial Union construction site
  
  

• Editor's Note: Check back daily for updates on the progress and new photos of the Department of Anthropology's team's dig at the Memorial Union.
  
  Original release
  
  Saturday, April 1
  For the next nine days a team of archaeologists from the Department of Anthropology will be spending a majority of their time in small construction site just south of the Memorial Union.
  
  The team will excavate and eventually study bones found by contractors who were excavating south of the Memorial Union for a planned addition to that building. The bones are thought to been placed there when Iowa State's College of Veterinary Medicine was in that location from 1885-1891. Old photographs indicate a ravine was located in the area at that time, and back then; it was common practice to bury the animal remains there.
  
  Over a century later those bones are fascinating to the team led by Matt Hill, assistant professor of anthropology, and David Rapson, adjunct assistant professor (affiliate) of anthropology at Iowa State and adjunct faculty member at the University of Wyoming.
  
  "This is the first historical site I've worked on," Hill said, "and about 9000 years more recent than the site Dave and I work at (in western Nebraska). But it is similar in a lot of ways to the buffalo kill that we study. Just like the buffalo bones were placed in a gully, these bones were dumped into a ravine. The bones here are just cows and horses instead of buffalo."
  
  The bones are also much larger than Hill and his team is used to. Large samples are clearly visible at the edge of the dig site.
  
  Initially it is thought theVeterinary Medicine school's anatomy classes used the bones from the site. Bone samples retrieved from the site clearly show saw marks that would typically be made for use by an anatomy class. But the bones aren't the only items recovered from the site. An intact bottle from the period was found as was a metal showerhead.
  
  Hill says the team will use the same methods and techniques that are typically employed at a dig site - however just a little bit faster than they normally would work.
  
  "There are a certain number of key variables that were can be flexible with in how much coding we do in the field and we can streamline those," Rapson said. "Graduate students (working on the project) will analyze and code the bone later in the lab.
  
  "But what we can't streamline is where the bones are located, how they are oriented at the site and which side is up. We have to map those in the field. There are a number of critical renderings that we always do in the field and we'll do a this site as well."
  
  Because the dig is located on a construction, Iowa State is allowing nine days to complete the dig. The work won't impact the construction of the Memorial Union because work should be able to continue elsewhere at the site.
  
  Hill and Rapson say that the nine days will be a challenge to complete everything. Already they are concentrating their efforts to one area leaving two other identified sections where bones are located.
  
  "We simply don't have the time to exam all three sites," Hill said, "but after a while I anticipate we'll uncover a lot of redundancy."
  

Day 1 - Saturday, April 1

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