麻豆精选

Five 麻豆精选Experimental Archaeology Graduates Earn Full-Rides to Grad Schools

Sometimes it just takes a small spark to ignite a fire within you.

For Anna Mika, who started as a geology major her freshman year and switched to anthropology the following year, that spark came in 2017 while taking an Anthropology course called North America鈥檚 Ice Aged Hunters, taught by Metin I. Eren, Ph.D., associate professor and director of archaeology in the College of Arts & Sciences at 麻豆精选. She said that course changed her perspective on everything.  

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Anna Mika looks at the stone knives she created in the Experimental Archaeology Lab
At the time, Mika probably couldn鈥檛 have imagined that spark leading her to being named one of just 25 who will attend the University of Cambridge (UK) on a full ride scholarship thanks to a very successful academic and research career at 麻豆精选where she earned her B.S. (2019) and M.A. (2022) degrees. Not bad for a quiet kid from Parma, Ohio.

鈥淭he Harding program was established in February 2019 thanks to an extraordinarily generous donation from the David and Claudia Harding Foundation, the biggest single gift made to a university in the UK by a British philanthropist,鈥 the University of Cambridge web site states.

鈥淭he thing about Anna is this person shows up in my class who I鈥檝e never seen before,鈥 Eren said. 鈥淏y the end of the semester there was just one person who had an over 100 percent grade in the class, and it was this quiet student who didn鈥檛 say a lot during the semester, just because she is quiet by nature. I鈥檓 thinking鈥ho is this? This person needs to join the lab! So, it was fortuitous.鈥

Mika is just one of five success stories that the Experimental Archaeology lab group, led by Eren and Assistant Professor Michelle Bebber, Ph.D., shared recently. Ashley Rutkoski, a Groveport, Ohio native, earned her M.A. in 2019 and will attend the University of Florida and pursue a doctorate. Burlington, Connecticut native Dan Wilcox earned his M.A. and will attend the University of Albany and pursue a doctorate. Honors Student Nicholas Gala, a Geneva, Ohio native, earned his B.S. and will pursue a master鈥檚 degree at the University of Tulsa. Grace Conrad, a Medina, Ohio native who also graduated with Honors, earned her B.S. and will pursue a Ph.D. at the Ohio State University.    

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Metin Eren
鈥淲e鈥檝e had a banner year,鈥 Eren said. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think we鈥檙e ever going to have another year where we have five people get full rides to top graduate programs. That鈥檚 a testament to just how special this group of hard-working and brilliant students are and all of 麻豆精选should be proud of these archaeology students.鈥

鈥淣ot only are they all successful, but they did it during the worst time to be in college ever (during the Covid pandemic),鈥 Eren said. 鈥淭hey all essentially lost a full year in the lab. Despite that, we haven鈥檛 had as many students publish as much. So, that is just a testament to how much they鈥檝e worked outside the lab to pursue their dreams, so their success is their own.鈥   

Anna Mika
When Mika first joined the lab group she measured artifacts, conducting morphometrics, and it translated into a study on and small stone points for arrowheads commonly and used during the Woodland period (600 鈥 1600 A.D.). These points became one of her favorite topics to study.

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Anna Mika in Lowry Hall
鈥淲e ended up doing a comparative study between the archaeological artifacts that we had housed here with the experimental work that Dr. Bebber had done,鈥 Mika said. 鈥淲e found that the point sizes were decreasing in conjunction with the increase in warfare and hunting. As people were coming into a larger population size this created a lot more stress, which led to warfare, but there was also hunting going on at the same time, so those combinations resulted in small-sized points.鈥

Based off that idea, she wanted to understand the human biological and anatomical sides of it too, determining if the ribs were a factor. It begged the question: What is it about small-sized points that is functional?

鈥淪mall sizes penetrate deeper into the prey versus larger sizes that cause bigger wound damage, but don鈥檛 go as deep,鈥 Mika said.

鈥淪o, the fact that Anna found that these points are getting smaller at the same time as warfare and hunting is increasing shows that people were really keen on killing whatever they were shooting,鈥 Eren said. 鈥淚t needed to be more lethal.鈥

鈥淚 don鈥檛 know how to stop when it comes to any type of research,鈥 Mika said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just fascinating to me. I just want to do everything.鈥

Mika then dove into other topics in the lab, including ceramics and limestone and grit temper pottery.

鈥淚 was working in the lab and doing different projects and it was just a lot of fun getting to work with all these people in different fields and specialties,鈥 Mika said.

Mika also experienced working on both surface surveys and excavations with the Experimental Archaeology lab group at sites including Berlin Lake, Jackson Farm, and Paleo Crossing near Medina. For her master鈥檚 thesis, she experimented with and studied the functional capabilities of Clovis (prehistoric Paleoamerican) knives in terms of cutting efficiency.   

At the University of Cambridge, Mika will continue to pursue her dream of working with experts in the field on all sorts of new, fascinating projects. One of those experts is Cambridge Assistant Professor Alastair Key, Ph.D., (Paleolithic Archaeology) who was a visiting researcher at 麻豆精选a few years ago.

鈥淚鈥檓 actually going to be using some of that knowledge as a basis for some of my Ph.D. dissertation,鈥 Mika said. 鈥淚鈥檓 going to be looking at the cutting efficiencies, ergonomics, and a little bit of the computer modeling when it comes to different flake (stone fragments) technologies, so I just keep getting so giddy about it. Experimental archaeology is where I want to be. There are very few opportunities in the world that would grant me that type of experience, so I鈥檓 very happy with both 麻豆精选and now going on to Cambridge that I鈥檒l get to continue that work.鈥

 

 

Ashley Rutkoski
Another one of Dr. Eren鈥檚 most accomplished graduate student alums, Ashley Rutkoski, graduated in 2019 and will start her Ph.D. program, with a National Science Foundation Grant-funded research assistantship, at the University of Florida this August.

She initially found her spark for archaeology at a young age, becoming interested in Classical Studies (Egypt, Greek and Roman Archaeology) and got to try it out during a career day in middle school while shadowing an archaeologist that worked in the Cultural Resource Management (CRM) field. She was hooked.

After earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Akron, the Groveport, Ohio native enrolled in the M.A. in Anthropology program at 麻豆精选and joined its Experimental Archaeology Lab.

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Ashley Rutkosi in the Anatomy Teaching Lab in Lowry Hall
鈥淚 was interested in going to 麻豆精选because of its focus on using experimental techniques to explore archaeological questions, which most schools don鈥檛 incorporate into their curriculum,鈥 Rutkoski said.

Always drawn to both art and science, she wanted to find a way to incorporate her ceramic background while also doing scientific research exploring ceramic technology from Late Woodland and Late Precontact Societies in the Midwest.

鈥淭his lab was a really good fit for me,鈥 Rutkoski said. 鈥淚 love all the students and professors I worked with. I was able to be involved in a lot of projects and gain a ton of experience developing and conducting my own research projects.鈥

She worked on some of the same projects, surveys and excavations as Mika, and conducted some of her own unique experiments and statistical techniques to try to answer some of archaeology鈥檚 oldest questions using material science approaches. She also focused on the invention and adoption of material culture, factors that drive changes in ceramic technology, and microwear analysis.

鈥淎fter stone tools, ceramic sherds (fragments of destroyed clay pots) are one of the most abundant things we find in the archaeological record,鈥 Eren said.

After participating in a project where she looked at sherds that were recovered from rock shelters in southwest Ohio, she explored the mechanism (invention or diffusion) that led to the emergence of limestone-tempered ceramics in the Late Woodland period.

鈥淏y using a simple chemical reaction to document the presence or absence of limestone in early grit-tempered (Early Woodland) sherds, I was able to detect small traces within these early sherds at sites that later adopted limestone temper during the Late Woodland period, but not at sites that continued to use grit temper,鈥 Rutkoski said. 鈥淭he presence of limestone in these early grit-tempered sherds suggested that experimentation and independent invention led to the adoption of limestone temper in southwest Ohio and not diffusion.鈥

For her thesis research, she developed a unique experiment to explore sources of variation that impact sherd morphology. It took months to produce. Using raw clay and adding temper, she began crafting 30 identical pots based on a historical design. She wanted to see whether they can simply tell the difference between the 15 pots that were filled with corn when they break, versus the 15 empty ones.

鈥淪he then broke every single one over the course of two days,鈥 Eren said.

鈥淚t鈥檚 going beyond typology and trying to gain more information about prehistoric human behavior, like how pots were discarded and end up in the archaeological record in the first place,鈥 said Rutkoski.

"Ash is unique," Eren said. "She鈥榮 kind, she鈥榮 caring, she鈥榮 conscientious. These are all things you not only want in a student, but in a colleague. She has a bright future ahead of her.鈥

For her doctoral work at the University of Florida, Rutkoski will explore Mississippian ceramic assemblages while working in the .

鈥淚 am excited to learn about other Late precontact societies located in the Southeast,鈥 Rutkoski said. 鈥淚 want to explore the development of these groups in the Southeast and compare it to those that thrived in the Midwest.鈥

 

 

Dan Wilcox
For Wilcox, the spark came when he first learned of ancient soapstone pottery, which was commonly used over 3,000 years ago. When he joined the Experimental Archaeology Lab at Kent State, he began working with Dr. Bebber, an expert on early ceramic technology. He began chiseling out, experimenting on, and cooking syrup and sugar with 20 heavy (~18 lbs) soapstone bowls and comparing them to other early forms of pottery that would have been available at the time.

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Anna Mika (left) and Dan Wilcox (right) show the difference between ceramic and soapstone pottery that they made in the lab.
鈥淚f you want to boil something, early pottery wasn鈥檛 going to do it for you, so soapstone vessels were a lot better at retaining heat and allowing stuff to boil,鈥 Wilcox said.

Bebber helped him get a better understanding of thermal retention and expansion of ceramic bodies and how they could apply that and do a physical test with cooking and compared the different materials for his thesis work.

鈥淚t made me realize that understanding the evolution of cooking technology is something I鈥檇 like to continue to focus on and it鈥檚 something I鈥檓 really passionate about,鈥 Wilcox said. 

The Institute for American Indian Studies posted a featuring Wilcox and his soapstone work in 2021.

After earning his undergraduate degree from the College of Wooster, Wilcox, a Burlington, Connecticut native, worked for some museums and did some archaeology excavation, geochemical sourcing, and cultural resource management (CRM) projects in the field before graduate school. 

When he joined the experimental archaeology lab at Kent, Wilcox conducted a durability study, testing how different-sized projectiles were affected after being shot repeatedly and how well they withstood each test. After each shot, he evaluated whether it was just the hafting materials (that help the point stay attach to the shaft) that broke or the stone point.

鈥淚 feel that I was really lucky to get to come here to this lab at Kent State, because I got to work on so many different projects,鈥 Wilcox said. 鈥淚t always felt like as long as you had your idea, you were given the opportunity to plan it out and follow through with it.  

While pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Albany, Wilcox plans to work with Assistant Professor of Anthropology Christopher Wolff, Ph.D., who studies prehistoric coastal people and their ecosystems.

鈥淒r. Wolff has a lot of interesting ideas involving testing the properties of soaps for oil lamps and how well they would heat structures of groups from the Eastern Subarctic/Arctic areas of North America. He wants to recreate a Dorset Paleoeskimo structure for a research project, so I might be involved in helping him build this circular structure that is partially dug into the ground.鈥 (Dr. Eren and his lab group members joked that this would be Wilcox鈥檚 first apartment in Albany).

Wilcox said this would be an opportunity to expand his knowledge by looking at a new geographic area, environment, and the subsistence practices that might influence the materials that people used to cook with 3,000 years ago in that region.

鈥淚鈥檓 not only interested in what they were trying to cook, but also to see what materials and shapes of vessels they used to try to get a better idea of the emergence of cooking technologies,鈥 Wilcox said.

Wilcox said his goal and dream is to be able to work at an institution that allows him to pass on what he鈥檚 learned to students, continue with his research projects, and contribute to the scientific community as a whole.

 

 

Nicholas Gala
Though he had already taken the Intro to Cultural Anthropology (at the 麻豆精选Ashtabula campus) and the Intro to Archaeology courses, Gala, a Geneva, Ohio native, wasn鈥檛 sure what he wanted to do when he first came to Kent State. Then, he met Dr. Eren and the fire was lit.

Gala persistently visited Eren鈥檚 office to discuss joining his lab, starting an honors thesis, and then took his class, North America鈥檚 Ice Age Hunters, which is a study of the Clovis people. He loved it. Once in the lab, he started a project measuring 60 stone points of varying lengths made of obsidian and flint. They ended up testing them on the Instron testing machine which performs tensile, compression, bend, and other mechanical tests on materials.

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Nicholas Gala
During his time at Kent State, Gala led three vastly different research projects. He also got to shoot arrowheads with a bow in the lab which he said was 鈥渁 lot of fun鈥. He also worked on archaeological excavations at the Heckleman Site and the Stow Rock Shelter. He recently received a Distinguished Student Award from the College of Arts and Sciences and was a first author of a peer-reviewed research article published in the journal Archaeometry. For his senior honors thesis he took a survey of modern flintknappers and wanted to document their injuries.

鈥淧eople like to say 鈥榶ou are going to cut yourself while learning to flint knap and even while you are a prominent flintknapper鈥, so we wanted to know how dangerous it actually is,鈥 Gala said. 鈥淲hat is the actual frequency of injuries? What are the most severe injuries that people have? How can we relate that to past people?鈥

He reported that flintknappers usually sustain a minor injury almost every time they do it. However, most of the time, the cuts bleed for a little bit, but they heal up quickly and cleanly. He has started to flint knap himself and says he鈥檚 鈥渟till not quite good enough but has only had a few minor cuts.鈥

When asked 鈥榃hat was the most severe injury reported by other flintknappers?鈥, Gala said: 鈥淪ome people have run a flake across their bone like a wood planer. Somebody has cut down into the periosteum of the bone. Somebody had to have a tourniquet after piercing their ankle with a flake. It鈥檚 crazy.鈥

鈥淪o, imagine that danger, but you鈥檙e Homo Erectus (~200,000 years ago),鈥 Eren said. 鈥淭here are no band aids and no antibiotics, so it would have been a dangerous thing. The fact that Nick explored that is great. I think in some ways early flintknappers may have understood the danger, but if they need to process that carcass to eat, they are going to die one way or another, so at least you鈥檒l risk flintknapping knowing that you can eat this meat, right?鈥

鈥淣ick is mature beyond his years in several ways, including his awesome intellectual capability; his deep passion for archaeology; his advanced maturity in terms of his work ethic; and in terms of his deep respect and decency for his fellow lab members,鈥 Eren said. 鈥淎s an undergraduate, he possessed the leadership and commitment of a Ph.D. candidate.鈥

While attending the University of Tulsa Gala plans to work on lithic technology with Associate Professor of Anthropology Briggs Buchanan, Ph.D., who Eren says is brilliant and arguably the world鈥檚 premiere archaeological statistician. 

Gala received two fellowships to the University of Tulsa to continue his graduate education entirely for free with no TA or RA responsibility.

鈥淪o, essentially, Tulsa is paying Nick for the next couple years to think deep thoughts,鈥 Eren said.

 

 

Grace Conrad
Archaeology sparked Conrad鈥檚 interest at an early age. At only 15-years-old, the Medina (Ohio) area native began volunteering at a variety of dig sites led by Brian Redmond, Ph.D., curator of archaeology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH). Several years later, her familiarity with those dig sites helped her land an internship with him while a student at Kent State.

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Grace Conrad at an archaeological dig site
After visiting Kent State, while still in high school, she met Dr. Eren for the first time and he gave her a tour of his lab. He was impressed with her knowledge and asked her to come to Kent once a week during her final year of high school and assist some of his graduate students with their thesis projects to see if it was something that she would like. She helped Ashley Rutkoski with processing raw clay so she could make pots for an experiment. After that, Conrad was hooked.  

鈥淚 loved it!鈥 Conrad said. 鈥淚 have always been interested in archaeology, but this field of experimental archaeology was something really exciting to me because it seemed like the opportunities were endless. I really got a taste for all of it. I even tried some flint knapping. When I went to do my own research, that was a really good base to have at a young age. So, I鈥檓 super grateful for that early time.鈥

鈥淵ou can really get creative in this lab,鈥 Conrad said. 鈥淭here is so much to do, and you can work on whatever your heart desires, as long as you come up with a question. Metin and Michelle were great at guiding me and my lab mates and taking those questions and working with us to design our own experiment and having the resources to see that through. The culture in the lab was great and we all get a long really well.鈥

But, as many experienced, there were setbacks when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

鈥淯nfortunately, Covid happened, so I wasn鈥檛 able to work on as many projects as we had planned, but I still think it was a significant amount,鈥 Conrad said. 鈥淚 wanted to focus on Clovis bone technology, and Metin had a project that he had been wanting to do on this topic.鈥

Conrad began making points made out of bones that would have been similar to the Clovis technology. Eren had a collection of casts to use as a reference and she bought quite a few cow femurs from a local butchery and turned them into projectile points to study.

鈥淲e were starting to figure out how we were going to do it. And then, the pandemic hit and so we had to pump the brakes.鈥

When the pandemic hit, she also had an internship lined up for the semester which was unfortunately canceled.

鈥淚 was really concerned because I wanted to do something in my field,鈥 Conrad said. 鈥淪o, I was talking to Metin and he said 鈥榳e鈥檒l figure out how to do a remote project鈥. I thought it was cool that he was able to figure out how I could still be productive from home and not have to be in the lab. She participated in Kent State鈥檚 Student Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) and measured pictures of points using Adobe software. For this work, she placed first in her category (Anthropology, Geology and Geography) for the SURE program鈥檚 Three Minute Thesis Competition. 

Luckily, in the summer of 2021, she got to do the internship through the CMNH that was canceled the prior year. She worked as a Cleveland Archaeological Society intern and research assistant at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, working at the Heckelman site on a project directed by Redmond.

鈥淚t was kind of a fun, full-circle moment because I got to be all in even though I had already been volunteering there for years,鈥 Conrad said. 鈥淪o, it was six weeks in the field, five days a week, and just a full excavation of a multi-occupational site, so that was really cool.鈥

Museum archaeologists spent five field seasons investigating the artifact-rich Heckelman site in Erie County, Ohio. In conjunction with archaeologists from the University of Toledo and the Firelands Archaeological Research Center in Amherst, field survey and excavations uncovered the remains of a ceremonial center dating to 300 B.C., a small Hopewellian hamlet occupied around A.D. 200, a small Late Woodland village from about A.D. 600, and a stockaded Late Prehistoric settlement occupied at A.D. 1400.

Conrad is now enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at the Ohio State University and is already serving as a field supervisor this summer at an Ohio State site, in Anderson Township, near Cincinnati.

鈥淲e鈥檙e at a site called Turpin, which is a Fort Ancient site, so we鈥檙e looking in two different villages, looking at their houses, and some of the central plaza,鈥 Conrad said. 鈥淚鈥檓 super interested in Ohio archaeology broadly, but the shift from foraging to farming subsistence patterns in the Ohio Valley is very interesting to me as well. The tools these people were using changed based on how they were getting their food around 1300 AD. The site that we鈥檙e working on right now is sort of on the cusp of agriculture.鈥

When asked about advice to future students, Conrad said: 鈥淪tart early. Don鈥檛 be afraid to talk to your professors if you have any interest, whether it is in the archaeology lab or labs in any other department. Faculty, at least at Kent State, are more than happy to have undergrad students come in, even if they are not running their own projects, just to see what lab work looks like. So, seek out those opportunities early. I had opportunities that I never thought were available to me until Metin and Michelle showed me what I am capable of.鈥

 

 

麻豆精选is ranked as an R1 research institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which is the highest recognition that doctoral universities can receive, affirming Kent State鈥檚 place as an elite research institution along with Yale, Harvard and the University of California-Berkeley.

Read more about 麻豆精选鈥檚 Experimental Archaeology Lab and Department of Anthropology

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Media Contacts:
Jim Maxwell, jmaxwel2@kent.edu, 330-672-8028
Dr. Metin I. Eren, meren@kent.edu, 330-672-4363

 

 

POSTED: Friday, July 29, 2022 02:05 PM
UPDATED: Friday, November 22, 2024 07:28 PM
WRITTEN BY:
Jim Maxwell