Extremely timely development!  Check out this new video of our hyrax midden hunting trip from last February, shot by Mike McGlue and edited by Darion Carden!

Annalee, Joy, and Sarah are in Muscat, Oman getting things ready for Oct/Nov fieldwork in Dhofar with the ASOM team! Today we visited Dr. Darach Lupton at the Oman Botanic Garden for a fantastic morning of discussions of plants and southern Arabian vegetation as well as a short tour of their beautiful nursery. (Photo:  Annalee Sekulic)

ASOM undergraduate researcher Annalee Sekulic presented her work on the plant macrofossils found in hyrax middens from Dhofar, Oman on Tuesday at OSU’s Denman Undergraduate Research Forum.  She has been working since last summer sorting through fecal pellets and identifying seeds and plant fragments.  Despite a few important unknown plant types that she is working on identifying, her poster looks at vegetation change over the last 1500 years and suggests that ground cover used to be much denser out in the wadi compared to today.  Her poster was without a doubt the slickest looking one there (totally unbiased assessment 😉 ) and she did a great job of sharing what she has been working on with other faculty and students.

Annalee (center) in front of her Denman Research Forum poster with ASOM graduate students Abby Buffington (left) and Anna Berlekamp (right).

Talking hyrax poop to fellow students.

A few members of the ASOM team (Sarah Ivory, Daniel Peart, Kyle Riordan, Aly Mehri) recently spent the month in Dhofar searching for more fossil hyrax middens in the eastern Nejd desert.  It was an intense few weeks of climbing up and down mountains and other misc. adventures, but our group was great and we had a lot of fun.

Aly, Daniel, and Kyle during lunch in the desert.

We also had the opportunity to think about and study the modern environment around the sites where we are finding middens thanks to numerous visitors over the course of our stay.  First, Mike McGlue (U. Kentucky) joined us in order to help us better understand the geological context of the caves where hyraxes live as well as the gradients in weathering observed across the desert.

Sarah and Mike hamming it up in the wadi.

Next, the Oman Botanic Garden (Andrew Anderson, Saif al Hatmi, Nasser al Rashidi, and Fathi al Hasani) spent a week with us, doing botanical surveys and collecting plant specimens.  Finally, we were very lucky to spend a day with Aly Achmed al Kathiry from the Ministry of Heritage and Culture in an area in the west of Dhofar.  His familiarity with the desert and hyrax habitats has always led us to wonderful discoveries.  We collected almost 50 new middens which have already arrived back in the US for analysis!

Saif, Nasser, and Fathi collecting plants.

The ASOM project  has two new members working with PhD student Abby Buffington in the Archaeobotany Lab at OSU.  Kyle Riordan is a master’s student and Drew Arbogast is a returning undergraduate researcher who will be working on plant phytolith samples from termite mounds near excavated sites in Dhofar.  Plant phytoliths are microscopic plant fossils which we hope will help us get a better sense of vegetation change at the site following occupation.

Kyle hard at work microscoping.

Kyle (left) and Drew (right) work on identifying plant phytoliths.

Great news!  Project postdoc Sarah Ivory will be starting a new tenure track job as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State University in Fall 2018.  Sarah chose to defer and start next year in order to continue the work she began for ASOM, in particular, with upcoming fieldwork in Oman looking for more hyrax middens.  She is, however, recruiting potential students for next fall who would be interested in graduate work in paleoclimate, paleoecology, and vegetation dynamics.

Her faculty profile is here.

Find out more about her larger research program here.

Just before the start of summer, I (Sarah Ivory) went to Flagstaff to work with Scott Anderson and Ken Cole to sample and process the hyrax middens that we collected in Oman the early spring.  Our goal was to extract pollen and plant remains to be identified back at Ohio State as well as to get samples to send for radiocarbon dating and isotope analysis.  Sounds simple enough, but given that the middens are fossilized chunks of poop encased in urine, it actually is more of an experience to process them than one might expect.  First we cut them open, which produced a surprising amount of dust with a surprisingly strong odor.  Then we disaggregated the midden chunks in buckets of water in order to reconstitute  the urine to be used to extract pollen.  Also exceptionally smelly.

Splitting middens with a tile saw

Me (Sarah Ivory) all kitted up in my respirator and safety glasses to avoid inhaling poop dust.

With the pollen and plant remains extracted, this summer I spent quite a bit of time at the microscope.  Annalee, who started working with us back in July, has been cruising through the bags of plant remains, sorting seeds and pellets.  Initial results are beginning to come in, and when included with the results from middens collected 20 years ago in Yemen, we are starting to get a better picture of the regional change in vegetation over the last 5000 years, particularly the decline in tree cover in the last millennium.

Craig Stevens, an undergrad from American University, was with us all summer in the lab at Ohio State.  Craig was here as part of an undergraduate research experience and did an awesome job working on sorting and identifying woods from ASOM archaeological sites collected in March 2017.  It was a pleasure to have Craig around for the 10 weeks of his program and were really sad to see him leave.  At the end of his program, he participated in a symposium sponsored by the university where he gave an oral and a poster presentation on his research results.   I wish we could have put a video of the talk on here, because he nailed it, but instead here is a pdf of his poster!

Craig spending his summer at the microscope

We are currently looking for two funded PhD students to take up work related to the ASOM project starting in Fall 2018 in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State University.  Please see our Opportunities page to learn more!

Come and learn with us about socioecological systems and paleoclimate in Oman!

We have a new ASOM member!  Annalee Sekulic is an undergrad in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State and has started to work on sorting and identifying plant fragments from hyrax middens collected in February 2017.  Despite the prospect of sifting through ancient dung, Annalee seems excited about joining the group and has already discovered interesting things in the middens, like an louse egg on a hyrax hair!  For more info on Annalee, see Our Team.