2018 Digging in the Necropolis of Sanisera & Drawing

Program Description

The Sanisera Archaeology Institute for International Field Schools offers an annual archaeology dig on the island of Menorca, off the coast of Spain. This course is for students interested in bioanthropology, osteology who come from all over the world. It covers advanced and essential techniques used in an archaeological laboratory, such as technical drawing and photo-taking. The skills that students will learn can be externalized to complete studies, publications, or reports from the pieces found on any site. This program is divided in two main parts: Digging roman graves and Tools and laboratory techniques used with archaeological material.

Death in Rome has been studied in Sanisera since we started digging the first necropolis in 2008. So far we have excavated 90 tombs belonging to a Roman cemetery which could have been related to a basilica in the Roman city if Sanisera, which dates from the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The Osteology corpus in this necropolis includes more than 232 individuals.

In the second part the students will practice the techniques that are used in an archaeological laboratory so that they can register the main objects found on a site with the highest quality. The development of those techniques will help us to obtain drawings, photographs and digital archives that will be extremely useful for the elaboration of publications, reports or further studies.

Highlights

Photography techniques used on little objects like coins, jewels and ceramicswith decoration and epigraphy.
Drawing and photographing with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop
Drawing and vector handling of the archaeological material with Adobe Illustrator

Learning how to identify age, sex and height of buried individuals.
Relative dating based on the classification of archaeological artifacts discovered in stratigraphic sequence.

What`s Included

In the Fieldwork

How to dig and which archaeological techniques are used.
Use and handling of the tools that are used during the excavation process.
Basic principles of stratigraphy.
Basic procedures for collecting C14 samples.
In the Laboratory

Cleaning, inventory and cataloging of recovered human bones during the excavation process.
Basics of the methods used in human osteological analysis, including skeletal anatomy, paleodemography and paleopathology.

Learn how to draw ceramic according with the standards (piece orientation, diameter edge estimation, representation of the decoration and several views generation).
Objects drawing exercises (glass, lithics, coins, bone needl