Good evening! 🙂
I haven’t really wrote about what we have done so far on our project but after reading Dan and Jacob’s entries I can see they have pretty much covered everything.
But in my own words, in week 1 we learnt how to fill out inventory forms correctly when looking over skeletal remains which included noting whether bones were present or absent. This was quite easy to get the hang of after the first skeleton. There were 4 skeletons laid out for us to look at and get to bases with the names of all the bones properly and where they lay in the human structure; so our next task was to lay out a skeleton for ourselves and understand how to differ between left and right bones etc. After getting to grips with the skeletons we started looking into how you work out the stature of the skeleton, by looking at the leg bones (femur & tibia), and how to determine age (using the pubic symphises on the pelvis and teeth if any were present) and to determine sex (using 5 main features on the skull and also the pelvis). Jacob, Dan and I all went to visit St. Katherine’s which is a church converted to a small museum. We went here as a lot of the bones we have in the lab are from St Katherine’s, however, it didn’t prove to be necessary as there wasn’t much information on the actual bones.
Last week was spent mostly doing inventory of all the bones in the lab and deciding which ones needed cleaning and so learnt the cleaning methods, which are quite simple for mud covered bones, being warm water and a toothbrush! But I imagine cleaning densely covered bones is more difficult. The rest of last week was spent doing our own research to prepare for our start doing the microbiology work, such as researching the best sampling method and the best agar to transfer it too along with looking at what types of bacteria are already present on bones and our hands to see if these can cause degradation.
Now comes the exciting stuff and will keep you all up to date at the end of next week!
Have a good week! 🙂