These examples are representative of CMRAE's research programs and facilities. They indicate the Center's breadth and its focus. We invite you to learn more about our activities.
The Center's principal teaching facility, the Graduate Laboratory, is located at MIT. It is the site where formal classes are held in the examination and analysis of archaeological and ethnographic materials: for example, ceramics, rocks, metal and metallic ores, bone pollen, phytoliths, and other plant parts, and soils. The laboratory is designed as an assembly of complementary facilities: a preparation lab, an examination lab, a photomicrography documentation lab, a materials reference-and-standards collection unit, and a darkroom. Each facility is outfitted with equipment and instruments necessary for the microscopic examination, analysis, and documentation of the broad range of materials common to archaeological investigation. The Graduate Laboratory is also used by students and post-doctoral fellows from all the consortium institutions for doctoral dissertation and post-doctoral research.
Archaeological materials research is carried out by graduate students and faculty at all the CMRAE consortium institutions. The strength and vitality of the Center come from the uncommon concentration of these lively research groups at CMRAE university and museum laboratories. These individuals, laboratories, and collections, comprise a network of research resources unique to the archaeological community in this country.There is little overlap or redundancy in the specialties and facilities that have developed at each CMRAE institution, contributing to the true complementarity of resources and breadth of state-of-the-art research facilities. In general, all these laboratories are available to CMRAE faculty and graduate students. Some charge user fees, others are accessible by appointment. The Center's mandate is to facilitate and maintain an open architecture research student environment. Thus a graduate student matriculated at one university can work with one or more professors at any of the other member institutions. There is complete freedom of access for students, and it is the students who form bonds among the faculty.
CMRAE materials research pioneers in two broad areas: ancient environments and ecologies, including site formation and paleodiets; and material culture, or artifact analysis.
At the Center for Archaeological Materials (CAM) at MIT, for example, investigators concentrate on the materials processing technologies that transform natural materials into cultural objects. this work aims to identify the criteria people have used in selecting certain specific properties of materials for the design and production of objects. The CAM metallurgy and ceramics engineering laboratories explore the structure-property relations of ancient materials in facilities ranging from light microscopy to finite element analysis simulation modeling. The foundries, forge, and glass working laboratories in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering enable CAM faculty and students to carry out experimental reconstructions of ancient and pre-industrial production sequences.Artifact analysis, for the dual purpose of preventive conservation and history of production technology, is similarly at the core of the activities of the Department of Objects Conservation and Scientific Research, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to its materials analytical capability, which includes infrared microspectrometry, the BMFA research laboratories house one of the nation's largest and most varied, catalogued collections of artifact samples, studied and for study. The department's archive of x-radiographs made of objects and paintings is another major analytical collections resource. The Strauss Center for Conservation at the Harvard University Art Museums curates the well known Forbes Collection of Pigments and Artists' Materials, an historically rich body of reference materials. Both these conservation laboratories broaden the range of artifacts and artifact materials available to CMRAE for research and teaching purposes. They enable strong ties between the educational and cultural institutions that comprise the Center.
Research concerned with reconstructing palaeoenvironments and palaeodiets is undertaken at several CMRAE institutions: Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, with controlled environment growth chambers, has supported fundamental research on the domestication of cultigens in the ancient Americas, and on the use of phytoliths as species identifiers for ancient plants. Vegetation histories of human impact on vegetation is the subject of ongoing investigation at the palynology and fine resolution palynology laboratories at Boston and Harvard Universities. These facilities are equipped to handle ice and lake sediment cores, with full processing of pollen inclusions. All CMRAE research in palaeoethnobotany is supported by extensive specialized collections at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as well as the resources of Harvard's Gray Herbaria.The Center's zooarchaeology laboratory is located at Harvard University where it draws on the rich faunal collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Major research programs in the identification of palaeodiets through the isotopic analysis of ancient human and animal bones are also underway at Harvard. Measurement of the light stable isotope ratios of sulfur, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen present in archaeological bone is carried out via gas source mass spectrometry. Fractionation of these isotopes in physical and biochemical processes is determined in Harvard's bone chemistry laboratory.
The Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University conducts primary research in the application of a wide variety of imaging and prospecting techniques to environmental studies in archaeology. Digital image processing, near surface geophysical prospecting, Ground Positioning Systems (GPS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and spatial statistical analysis are among these techniques. The combination of hardware and software at this special facility provides a powerful and diverse environment for image processing and geographic information system work.
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