Lab Group Data: Ritual (Group 1)

Summary:

This week I was the data recorder for our lab group (comprised of Feraidon AbdulRahimzai, Jonah Tannen, Aselya Gullickson, and myself). We worked with an above-ground fire pit, recreating ancient ritual practices. First, we put our oxtail and cow femur-bone on the fire, and then roasted our splanchna (kidney, liver, and heart). In the second part of the lab, we worked on recreating ash altars using different ratios and types of ash, water and wine.

Ritual Lab

We used an above-ground fire pit on Mai Fete and stacked pieces of wood on top in a Jenga-like formation. We stacked 2 logs across, 2 more vertically on top, and then 4 thin layers of wood across that pile. This was because we wanted the most structure for our oxtail and femur bones to burn without falling.

After our bones burned, we roasted our splanchna over the fire using a sword-style roasting stick.

Before roasting our bones/splanchna, we got preliminary weights. *we lost a bit of bone after burning because we didn’t know what was bone and what was ash, so we grabbed what we could*

Meat	Weight in grams	Weight after roasting/burning
Femur Bone	2,653 g	996 g
Oxtail Bone	1,466 g	587 g
Beef Liver	220 g	177 g
Beef Kidney	214 g	211 g
Lamb Heart	270 g	196 g

I was particularly interested in the way that the splanchna roasted, because I had never interacted with organ meat before. My group-mate decided to roast each piece over the fire on the sword-stick, with the kidney the closest (to the fire), then the liver, and farthest away was the heart. It was all placed horizontally over the fire.

I created a graph to track the temperatures of each organ roasting over a period of 20 minutes:

I noticed that the liver (which was the thinnest) was losing the most fat and cooking faster than the heart which already started out with the coldest initial temperature.

We also monitored the time it took our oxtail and femur bone to snap. It took about 25 minutes for the oxtail to curl in on itself and snap, and took the femur bone about 46 minutes. The bones were extremely calcined and flaky.

Ash Altar Lab

We created 5 ash altars from various different combinations of bone ash, wood ash, wine and water.

Recipe 1	Recipe 2	Recipe 3	Recipe 4	Recipe 5
5 cups bone ash	1 cup bone ash	1 cup bone ash	1 cup bone ash
1 cup wood ash	1 cup wood ash		4 cups wood ash	2 cups wood ash
2 cups water	1/2 cup water		1 cup water	1 cup water
1/4 cup wine		1/2 cup wine	1 tbs wine

Recipe 4 was the recipe that we expected to most closely resemble altar ash. We took into account the wine being poured into the fire, and the acidity of rainwater with our tbs of wine (the wine would’ve evaporated quick).

After leaving each altar for 10 minutes, we did a finger test to see which ones were the strongest. Our ranking was #4, #2, #1, #3, #5 (from most to least sturdy).

Final Notes:

We realized that water had to be added gradually to give us the consistency we wanted. We added this water in trickles mimicking the motion of heavy rain. We also realized that wine made the ash more ‘gloopier’ than water, even when we added the wine later in the recipe it still loosened up the ash substantially.