Week 4 Lab Data Group 6: Ritual

This week, my group took data on the burning process of a beef femur and an oxtail, the cooking process of goat liver, heart, and kidney, and the process of building three model ash altars.

Burning the Femur and Oxtail

We measured the length and weight of the femur and tail before burning, as well as the weight of the femur pieces we recovered after the fire was doused. The femur was burned for a total of 1 hour and 3 minutes.

	Length (inches)	Weight before burning (grams)	Weight of recovered bones after burning (grams)
Femur	14	2350	1241.71
Tail	17	1750

Our pyre was made of three layers, each having three pieces of wood. 9 minutes after the pyre was lit, enough of the wood had caught so we put the tail and femur on the pyre together.

Time elapsed on pyre (min:sec)	Condition of the tail	Condition of the femur	Other notes
2:40	Not yet beginning to curl.	Beginning to get scorched and blackened.	Fat from the meat dripping down into the logs.
6:04	Beginning to curl very slowly.		The pyre smells good.
10:00-12:12	Wind blowing away from the end of the tail causing the curl to be decreased/slower, so we rotated it 180 degrees. This was very difficult, so it took a few minutes.		The pyre feels very hot to stand near.
15:12	Curling slows.	Very blackened.	The pyre is holding up very well and has not collapsed.
20:58	Has curled almost 90 degrees upwards. (Fig 1)
23:43	Curled into a loose “C” shape. (Fig 2)	Some parts turning white.
26:40	Curled into a tighter “C” shape. (Fig 3)
28:00	Fell off when the logs collapse, and had to be put back on the fire.	Broke in half. Some parts also continuing to turn white.	Part of the pyre collapsed.
33:52	Curled fully in on itself, with the two ends of the tail touching each other. (Fig 4)
40:10	Curled, blackened, and burned all the way into a shriveled spiral shape after around 40 minutes. (Fig 5)

Cooking the Splanchna

We cooked pieces of goat liver, heart, and kidney on a spit over the pyre.

Our spit needed to be hand-held over the fire, which was very difficult because of how hot the fire was. We were not able to cook all of the meat at once, so we only measured the temperature over time of the heart pieces (at the furthest end of the spit).

Time elapsed (min)	Temperature of heart pieces (°F)
8	90
12	91-109
15	140
19	140-165

Some of our group members ate the cooked heart pieces, and reported that they tasted charred and were chewy, but overall good.

Ash Altars

We made three ash altars.

Altar 1

Ingredients:

• approximately 0.75 cup of fresh ash from the burned pyres, ground roughly by hand using the bottom of a glass bottle
• 0.25 cup wine
• 0.5 cup water
• 0.625 cup bone ash

The mixture was a little too liquidy and hard to form.

Altar 2

Ingredients:

• 2.25 cup fireplace ash that been left outside, rained on for a period of time
• 2.25 cup bone ash
• 1.25 cup wine

The mixture was again little too liquidy and hard to form, but better than 1.

Altar 3

Ingredients:

• 1.0625 cup bone ash
• 1 cup fireplace ash that been left outside, rained on for a period of time
• 0.75 cup water

The mixture was much easier to form than the previous 2. It was easiest to mix it by hand (sort of like shortbread cookie dough), and had a plasticky elastic feeling. It was much easier to get this altar taller than the previous two.