Summer on the Ohio State campus brought lots of labwork for ASOM memebers, but it also meant an opportunity for the lab members to take a trip to look at some local archeology and monuments!  Unlike the rocky monuments and settlements of the Dhofar desert, Ohio is home to hundreds of monuments in the form of earthworks which give us a window into the ancient past in our own region.  ASOM field project member Tim Everhart is park ranger and archeologist at the Hopewell Culture National Historic Park.  In late July, he gave us a very interesting tour of many of the mounds and other earthworks that dot the verdant landscape around Chillicothe, OH.  In addition to doing fieldwork with us, Tim is currently doing his PhD at the University of Michigan and is excavating previously unstudied ceremonial structures.

Tim Everhart, our fearless park ranger/archaeologist. For more information about Tim, see here.

For more information on the park and the Hopewell, see here.

Abby, Craig, Tim, Joy, and Kevin atop a mound!

If you are interested in paleoclimate and paleovegetion in Oman, ASOM postdoc Sarah Ivory recently published a paper with Anne-Marie Lézine and other collaborators on Holocene vegetation change in Oman.

This paper follows on work that Sarah did analyzing and identifying fossil pollen from marine and estuarine sediment cores from the region before beginning her PhD.

Find the paper here.

In January-March 2017,  a group of ASOM researchers conducted our first field season focused on both collection of hyrax middens as well as the survey and excavation of monuments and settlements in Dhofar, Oman.  The first few weeks were spent arduously coming the wadis that drain into the desert for signs of preserved middens and for Bronze and Iron Age monuments.  Although no hyrax middens had previous been collected from Dhofar, ~30 new middens were collected by the team and sent back the U.S. for paleoecological analysis.  Further, numerous monuments were catalogues and mapped near midden location in the desert.

Anna Berlekamp holds one of our first hyrax middens

Field manager, Wael Abu-azizeh, looks at a monument before excavation

The second half of the field season was devoted to excavation of a large settlement near Jibjat.  Mapping and digging at the site revealed a much larger complex and number of structures than previously assumed.  Termite mounds which were built on top of and into some of the stuctures were also sampled in order to be included in analysis of paleoclimate and paleoecology.

Excavation at settlement near Jibjat

Mapping the settlement with Tim Everhart