Women in Science Day - Sarah
Saturday February 11th is the International Day of Women & Girls in Science. To mark it, we decided to reach out to women involved with Andover Trees who have a scientific or STEM background, and ask them to write something about their experiences. We’ll post a piece on here each day for the rest of this week.
Sarah Kennie, ATU Admin Officer & youth group leader: Student archaeologist
I’ve been studying part-time for a BA in Archaeology for the last 6 years and am currently working on my dissertation. I became interested in archaeology when I started volunteering at Stonehenge and helped to build the recreated Neolithic houses there. I then joined a local archaeological society and, long story short, decided I wanted to study it. I took an access course and then got into the University of Winchester.
A lot of science is involved with modern archaeology and many of the modules I’ve taken have been science-based. In human bioarchaeology we work with human remains - learning bone identification, how to age and sex bones, pathology, trauma. Geoarchaeology looks at the geology of an archaeological site to help us understand its history, formation, and the environment surrounding that site. Geomatics is where we use equipment on archaeological sites to help us with geophysical surveying, e.g. ground penetrating radar and resistivity. There are also elements of maths.
For my dissertation I’m focusing on sedimentology, which comes under geoarchaeology. It uses scientific techniques to analyse sediment in order to ascertain its composition and how it has been laid down – which can tell you all sorts of things about the environment or climate or human occupation. There are tests that look at grain size, which can show whether sediment has been windblown or transported by rivers… loads of stuff! Magnetic susceptibility can tell us whether the sediment has been exposed to high burning temperatures, which could indicate hearths, especially in prehistoric sites where there is no other physical evidence of human occupation. We can also look at the chemical content of sediment, by doing this you can identify human occupation markers, for example a rise of certain chemicals especially within a cave site can indicate human occupation. Phosphates can indicate human occupation but can also show animal activity – the cave I’m studying for my dissertation was once used by a cave bear!
Environmental archaeology looks back over past climates. Knowing about and understanding the past helps us prepare for the future. By analysing the tree-rings of timber found on a site (known as dendrochronology), and speleothems (stalagmites and stalactites), we can look at past levels of rainfall and how it’s affected an area, and get an idea of how habitats and biodiversity have changed over tens of thousands of years. For Palaeolithic archaeology we have to look at environmental things because there are so little material remains left. Looking at past environments helps give us an idea of how humans might have lived in the past, and where. It helps us identify extinction patterns too, at Winchester we look at megafauna extinction and analyse the data to get an idea about whether it was driven by climate change or humans. Humans have been driving animals to extinction for thousands of years and we're doing the same thing still, but climate can also be a factor – looking at the environmental data just gives you another set to look at.
Science, technology, engineering, and maths comes into most things, even if you wouldn’t think it at first. Archaeology isn’t just about doing the physical excavations (though you do need to be willing to do that, and it's hard work!). If you’re not sure what to study, consider archaeology. It's both academic and practical, has elements of a range of subjects across the arts, humanities, and sciences, and you gain lots of transferable skills that can be applied to many different careers in a variety of industries - use of IT, communication, research, data analysis, report writing, patience, accuracy, problem solving, creativity, team work and leadership, and more. Also, it’s just fascinating!