News
Karen Stewart wins CNEHA student paper competition
EAL lab member Karen Stewart won the student paper competition at the annual meeting of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology this past weekend for her paper "Small But Not Forgotten? Plant Remains from CRM Excavations of Historical Sites." Congratulations, Karen!
Owen Lannon (CAS ’24) hired at NOSAMS
Owen Lannon (CAS '24) has started a new position at the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility (NOSAMS) at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Falmouth, MA. Owen's work involves processing organic carbon samples for their radiocarbon AMS. Congratulations, Owen, on the new job!
High school student Claire Mukigi completes GROW internship in EALab
Claire Mukigi, a rising senior at Natick High School, joined the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory as part of the BU Greater Boston Area Research Opportunities For Young Women (GROW) program, an internship that places high school students from the Boston area in BU labs for the summer, sponsored by the CAS Office of STEM Outreach & Diversity. Over the 6-week fellowship, Claire worked with PhD student Nicole Hultquist on NSF-funded research into stable isotopes at the site of Gordion, Turkey. Claire presented her research with a poster and an elevator pitch at the culminating GROW workshop, now displayed on the GROW webpage here. Thank you, Claire, for your contribution to our research, and best of luck with your college applications!
Welcome Anne Johnakin!
A new member of the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory is joining us this fall, Anne Johnakin, a PhD student in Anthropology. Anne comes to BU with an MSc in Archaeological Sciences from the University of Oxford and a BA in Anthropology from Dartmouth. Anne's prior work has included microbotanical and stable isotope analyses, as well as experimental archaeology. Welcome Anne!
Marston publishes new article on “finding fields”
Marston and collaborator Dr. Petra Vaiglova (Australian National University) have authored an article in the latest issue of the Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association. This special issue, titled "Finding Fields: The Archaeology of Agricultural Landscapes", addresses methods for locating fields using archaeological methods. Marston and Vaiglova combine archaeobotanical and stable isotope analyses to illustrate how fields can be located from on-site archaeological remains in their article, "Mapping land use with integrated environmental archaeological datasets". Check out the article here!
Kovacik receives New Mexico research funding
Peter Kovacik received a research grant from the Friends of Coronado & Jemez Historic Sites, located in New Mexico. This award will support additional radiocarbon dating as part of Peter's doctoral research into Spanish colonial land-use strategies in the Albuquerque Basin of New Mexico. Congratulations, Peter!
Hultquist co-author on PNAS article
Nicole Hultquist is a co-author on the recently published article "Tracing sources of atmospheric methane using clumped isotopes" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). In this article, Nicole and her colleagues used novel isotopic methods on rare isotopic forms of methane to understand better the sources of origin of atmospheric methane. Congratulations, Nicole!
Kovacik receives NSF DDRIG award
Peter Kovacik received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Research Grant from the Archaeology Program of the US National Science Foundation. This award, titled "Effect of Colonial Policy on Land Use", provides funds to permit Peter to engage in archaeobotanical research into Spanish colonial land-use strategies in the Albuquerque Basin of New Mexico, and how land-use practices differed between idealized models put forth by Spanish administrators and on-the-ground implementation by Spanish and Indigenous communities in the region. Congratulations, Peter!
Zhang’s Egyptian charcoal research featured in BU media
The UROP research of Angela Zhang (CAS '24) is featured in an article by BU's research publication, The Brink. Read the article, titled "Secrets of Ancient Egyptian Nile Valley Settlements Found in Forgotten Treasure," here. Congratulations Angela on the exciting research and wonderful article!
EA Lab alumna Forste and Marston publish article
Environmental Archaeology Lab alumna Kathleen M. Forste (GRS '21) and John M. Marston are co-authors on a new article, "Cultivating the Hills and the Sands: A Comparative Archaeobotanical Investigation of Early Islamic Agriculture in Palestine", in Environmental Archaeology. In this article, Forste et al. integrate archaeobotanical assemblages from a range of settlements across Early Islamic (c. 636–1099 CE) Palestine to argue that the production and consumption of plant resources were affected more by a settlement’s socioeconomic function than by its environmental setting. Read the article here.