Millsaps College received a three-year $384,535 grant from the National Science Foundation to support student research in the college’s W.M. Keck Center for Instrumental and Biochemical Comparative Archaeology.
The College will use the grant to purchase additional sophisticated research equipment for the Keck lab which supports pioneering interdisciplinary research teams of faculty and students to address complex archeological questions using modern analytical instrumentation.
New equipment includes laser ablation for the lab’s ICP-mass spectrometer which will allow researchers to “zap” artifacts, with almost no damage, to gather data on their chemical make-up. A portable X-Ray Fluorescence spectrometer will also be purchased to allow researchers to analyze artifacts in the field.
“This grant demonstrates why our pre-med and other science programs are among the best in the country,” said Timothy Ward, dean of sciences and project director for the lab.
“The Keck lab gives our students unparalleled experience in developing laboratory skills that can be used not only in archeological chemistry but also have a direct correlation to medicine,” Ward said.
For example, this fall students in the Keck lab are testing special forms of pottery excavated from the College’s biological reserve in Yucatán, Mexico to determine if the pottery held cocoa. While in the lab, they are also looking for traces of pharmacological agents that would indicate medicines used by the ancient Mayans.
“These NSF grants are designed to support the purchase of large, very expensive instruments and they usually go to major research universities, said Michael Galaty, professor of anthropology. “There is simply no other college in Mississippi, or the nation for that matter, where undergraduate students are trained to use these kinds of high-end instruments."
Undergraduate students at Millsaps have the opportunity to conduct research at either of the College’s archaeological field programs: the 4,500-acre Helen Moyers Biocultural Reserve in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and the Shala Valley Project in northern Albania, where scholars are working to produce a record of the region’s cultural resources. Once back on campus, students work in the Keck lab to identify their artifacts and compare factors affecting social complexity.
“Through our programs we’re able to compare factors affecting social complexity in two different regions, in Old and New World cultures, which reach across the Atlantic,” said George Bey, Millsaps’ Chisholm Foundation Chair in Arts and Sciences and professor of anthropology. “By combining field and laboratory approaches we are able to widen the intellectual scope, and merit, of our research and may be able to provided new solutions to old archaeometric problems.”
