An intensive MIT summer course teaches students to hone their archaeological research skills through hands-on exploration, including making petrographic thin sections, and mineral analysis of ceramics.
Jennifer Meanwell carefully placed a pottery sherd — or broken fragment of ceramic — under the circular, diamond-coated blade of a benchtop saw. "Cutting the sample is the first big step," says Meanwell, a lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. She was leading a lab in making thin sections of pottery for petrographic analysis, a method used to examine ceramics and determine their composition, structure, and origins. "You want a slice that's thin enough to work with but thick enough to maintain its structure through the rest of the process." The lab was part of a summer intensive course at MIT for PhD students and early-career researchers in ceramic petrography, a specialized skill in archaeology. The course focuses on using optical microscopy to characterize pottery from ancient civilizations, revealing information about manufacturing techniques and provenance. Twelve students from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia participated in the three-week course in June to develop advanced skills, enriching students' understanding of ancient ceramics and their broader historical and cultural contexts. It included morning seminars in mineralogy and archaeological theory and hands-on laboratories to identify and characterize materials, understand how they were manufactured, and infer what they were most likely used for. Meanwell and Senior Technical Instructor William Gilstrap taught the group how to examine pottery samples collected from around the world — Greece, Mexico, and the Middle East — using polarized light microscopes to examine the materials. "Polarized light will transmit through a mineral at 30 microns in a predictable manner — it interacts with its structure, and the optical properties help us identify which mineral types they are," says Gilstrap. By determining the minerals, researchers can link them to the geological landscape they came from. "This helps us know more about how people interacted with their…