Students study Tunisian bones for archaeological excavation

Olivia Reed ’16 carefully removed a handful of 1,300 year-old human bones from a dusty plastic bag. Sifting through them one by one, she analyzed and identified them. Reed knew the names of some bones almost immediately, but she consulted a nearby skeleton to identify others.

One bone fragment puzzled her, so she asked Igor Bayder ’14 to give his thoughts. “I wonder if it goes with my skull,” said Bayder, who had started assembling a cranium nearby.

Reed and Bayder are among a group of students helping to piece together life from an a Roman-era church in Carthage, Tunisia. Susan Stevens, a Randolph classics professor and the Catherine E. and William E. Thoresen Chair in Humanities, has led the excavation and study of that site since the early 1990s.

Stevens began working on the church because of her interest in burial practices during the time when Christianity grew in the Roman Empire. “It’s one way of looking at a transformation from the ancient period to the medieval period,” she said.

Many of Stevens’ students have gained hands-on experience with archaeology and anthropology while helping study artifacts from the site. Earlier this year, she solicited the assistance of a group of students who help with Randolph’s Natural History Collection.

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Analyzing Tunisian bones is one of several opportunities for students on the Randolph College Natural History Collections team.

Read a Randolph magazine story about a behind-the-scenes tour they got at the Smithsonian earlier this year.

Reed, Bayder, and others are classifying and measuring the bones excavated from the crypt. Their data will help determine the minimum number of people who were buried there, which will help Stevens gauge the size of the community that worshipped there.

“It’s kind of a detective story,” said Stevens.

The students also are looking at the bones for signs of disease and injuries that will reveal what the community’s health was like, Stevens said. For example, Bayder pointed out a bone that had deformed areas that could signal cancer.

The students have enjoyed getting to work with real archeological material that also relates to their other academic interests. “I can basically identify the entire skeleton now,” said Reed, who plans to practice medicine someday.

Next spring, the team will work on extracting DNA from the bones for analysis that would provide further insight into the number of people there.

Emily Patton Smith ’12, Randolph’s Natural History Collections manager, said Stevens’ project is helping students set themselves apart from those they will compete against for jobs or graduate school admissions. “There’s a lot of crossover between the archeological disciplines and the sciences that I think is underutilized,” she said. “It’s something that not every biology major is going to have on their resumes.”

Research Rocks: Randolph student and high school assistants making discoveries in Randolph's geological collection

A Randolph College senior and two E.C. Glass High School students are spending this summer transforming a geological collection with thousands of rocks and minerals.

They are cleaning, sorting, identifying, and labeling items in Randolph’s collection to make them more useful for education and research. Mimansha Joshi ’14, a Randolph student from Nepal, is leading the project.

“If we clean, identify, and archive them, they will be accessible not only for students and professors here, but also for other researchers in the region,” Joshi said.

The College’s collection of rocks and minerals is part of a larger natural history collection that includes bird, mammal, and insect specimens, many of which date to the late 1800s. Students started updating the collection and repairing specimens over the past couple of years, led by Emily Smith ’12, who now serves as a curatorial coordinator for the collection.

There are more than 1,000 pieces in the geological collection. “Some of the specimens are likely very rare, since some are from regions where mining and collecting are now restricted,” Smith said. “It is far too valuable an asset not to be catalogued and stored carefully.”

Galen Shen and Annemarie Taheny, rising juniors at E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, are assisting Joshi in cleaning and organizing the rocks and minerals.

Shen said that with her mother, Karin Warren, and stepfather, Marc Ordower, teaching at Randolph and working with the College’s Summer Research Program nearly every year, she has always wanted to participate. But they always told her she was too young. This year, her mother, the Herzog Family Chair of Environmental Studies, became the faculty sponsor for Joshi’s project and asked Shen if she would like to help.

Shen hopes to someday turn her research toward the skies as an astronomer, but she was happy to have the opportunity to start with researching rocks. “I’ve always had an interest in research in general,” she said.

Shen invited Taheny, a friend of hers, to participate in the project as well. “I’ve never done a research project before, but I’m interested in going into science,” she said.

Shen said this project has helped expand on what they have been learning in school. “We both had earth science, so we know in general about different types of rocks, but this is much more in depth,” she said.

The project began with a mystery this summer: Many of the rocks and minerals in the collection have stickers with numbers written on them, but no one knows what the numbers mean. Joshi believes there must be a list somewhere. The research team has combed the attic of Martin Science Building and the archives of Lipscomb Library without luck yet, but they plan to keep looking. “Our mission is also to find the key to all those labels,” Joshi said. As they organize and identify the rocks, Joshi will enter them into an electronic database for the natural history collection.

Joshi is sharing stories and photos related to the research here on the Randolph College Natural History Collection blog.

Natural history collection work on display in Lipscomb Library

Back in the fall, we told you about students who have been working to expand and document the College’s natural history collection. Now you can see their work, including insect, bird, mammal, and plant specimens that have been preserved for study, in Lipscomb Library.

Emily Patton Smith ’12 and Will Guzman ’15 have installed a display outlining the history of the collection and illustrating the work being done to improve the collection. The display also includes information about Smith’s research on the source of Randolph’s natural history collection, including its connections with famous collectors and the Smithsonian.

Be sure to take a few minutes to stop by the display, in four cases on either side of the circulation desk on the fourth floor of Lipscomb Library, to learn more about the College’s expansive natural history collection.

Students get experience with natural history collection

Our students this semester are getting more opportunities to work hands-on with the Randolph College collection of natural history and zoological artifacts. It is an opportunity to study birds and other animals—including some rare species—up close for scientific or artistic purposes.

Last year, Emily Smith ’12 worked to catalogue the collection, uncovering the history of the artifacts in the collection and determining the correct scientific classification for each. (For more on her work with the collection, see this article in Randolph magazine.)

Several students are working to photograph
the collection to help create the online catalog.

This opened the door to several other opportunities for students to study the collection, and help it grow, too.

Smith helped start a group of students who met occasionally this spring to help prepare new specimens, which had been in freezer storage for years, so they could be added to the collection. The work will continue with several meetings this semester, said Doug Shedd, the Catherine Ehrman Thoresen ’23 and William E. Thoresen Professor of Biology.

This summer, Smith and Shedd won a $1,250 grant from the Virginia Academy of Science to purchase photography equipment and create an online catalog of the collection. Several students have started working to take pictures of each specimen in the collection. Once the catalog is online, Randolph students—as well as researchers at other institutions—could make better use of the information Smith documented.

Smith and Shedd also have started a group that gathers every other week to draw items from the collection. The first meeting was two weeks ago, and the drawing group will meet again on Friday, Sept. 21, to draw again. The group meets in Martin 309 at 2 p.m., and all are welcome to attend.

See More Photos
For more photos of the natural history collection projects, view this photo album on the Randolph College Facebook page.