Class posing in front of mortuary house

Weeks 9&10 Lab Summary: Mortuary House

Astrid Malter, David Bellovin, Ellen Schlick Introduction Over the past week, the class has been working on our final lab: building a mortuary house from natural materials. Although this lab can stand alone as a unit, we would not have been able to accomplish the build without what we had learned in previous weeks. For…

Week 8: Firing Pottery: Straw, Saw Dust, & Bark

Zoe Orlin, Holland Votaw, Zachary McCrary This week in lab, we constructed fire-pit kilns in order to fire pots we had made under the guidance of ceramics professor Kelly Connole the previous week. We had spent the previous week learning about Anglo-Saxon pottery and its chaine operatoire. Specifically, the entire process that must be undertaken…

Lab Summary Week 4: Ritual Fire

John Hoffman, Helen Murphy, and Sam Wege Introduction This week, our lab had two separate but related focuses. We experimentally analyzed the methodology of two rituals: 1. Greek sacrifice of bovine femurs and tails and 2. Anglo-Saxon cremation rites. The goal of the study of Greek sacrifice was to recreate an ancient practice based off…