Uncovering History

When you walk into the Experimental Archaeology Lab at Kent State University, you can expect to see some dust, some ancient weapons and to smell an interesting scent permeating throughout the suite. When asked by students from other disciplines in the building, it’s just “burnt popcorn.” For the students in the lab, it’s the bone material that they’re working with as part of a new section of research in an incredibly prolific research lab in Lowry Hall.  

Founded in 2016 by Professor Metin Eren, Ph.D., the Experimental Archaeology Lab is where students and professors can recreate and then reverse engineer ancient technologies to figure out how they work.  

“We can pretty much recreate any artifact from the last 3 million years of human evolution, whether it’s stone or pottery, or metal weapons or bone weapons,” Eren said. “Whatever we want to make, we can recreate it. And then through engineering and physics and sometimes chemistry, we reverse engineer these ancient technologies.”  

There are a wide range of tools and materials available for students and researchers to use, including kilns, a ballistics range and a forge.  

Michelle Bebber, Ph.D., assistant professor and co-director of the lab, added that they can always help students find something to build or make. “Whatever their interest might be, we can figure out an experiment for them to do, and they can start getting their hands dirty. We have all basically the raw materials they need and tools they need to make, and then we have the ability to test it,” Bebber said.  

Why would they need to recreate ancient tools? How does that help students understand the past better than reading about it?  

“Once we figure out how all these tools work, we can build models of how technology evolved over the last 3 million years. And that’s really exciting, too, because technology in the past is the ancestor of technology today,” Eren said.  

Experimental archaeology has old roots, but the scientific, quantitative and evolutionary approach pioneered at Kent State is new, and Eren and Bebber stress the importance of the students getting their hands dirty and doing experiments to test their theories.

“We approach the past not just in sort of a documentary fashion, which is normally what archaeology is. You dig something up, you describe it, you write about it and move on. We are really trying to understand how culture, or technology in the past, changed over time, and how it functions, and why do people make these decisions. By using this very carefully controlled scientific method, we can actually get into the motivations behind ancient people’s behavior, which I think is really interesting,” Bebber explained.  

A Melting Pot of Academia

The lab attracts students from diverse and interdisciplinary backgrounds, often coming from fields that aren’t science based. Bebber has an undergraduate degree in art and said she often meets art students who are interested in the things they’re making but don’t think they’d be good at science.  

“We get them learning about science, and maybe that sparks an interest and stimulates them to do things they thought maybe they couldn’t do,” Bebber said.  

Eren said the lab is “the ultimate melting pot of academia,” because not only do they have students from varied backgrounds, but they also co-author papers with faculty from biology, geology, materials science, engineering and aeronautics.  

“We put a lot of value, a tremendous amount of value, on what we consider academic fields that a lot of folks don’t consider academic fields. We’ve had students who were professional woodworkers or tattoo artists, and a lot of folks wouldn’t consider that as part of the academy, but those skills directly transfer to the recreation of artifacts that then we test. We can bring in what folks wouldn’t consider traditional academic things into the realm of science and demonstrate the value in a way that those students then feel like they’re contributing in a way that they didn’t before,” Eren said.  

Bebber said that there is a lot of similarity between art and science in ways people might not consider.  

“Science is a creative process. People think working in a lab or doing chemical equations, that’s science. But coming up with testable ideas and being able to develop a research design that’s going to answer that question, you have to be creative. You have to have novel ways of thinking outside of the box to answer some of those questions,” Bebber said.  

The Importance of Northeast Ohio

People might not realize it, but Northeast Ohio is important to Stone Age archaeology. As Eren explained it, since glaciers were sitting on top of Ohio, it made Ohio a demographic blank slate because hunger-gatherers couldn’t live on top of a glacier. When the glaciers receded 14,000-15,000 years ago and people moved to the Northeast Ohio landscape, researchers can know for certain that those were colonizing humans.  

“We can’t say that in other places in the world,” Metin explained. “When those glaciers moved out and we found those first archaeological sites, we knew for certain that we were dealing with Stone Age colonizers. And this process of Stone Age colonization is vital for understanding human evolution because our species, Homo sapiens, moved out of Africa over 200,000 years ago and colonized the world. So, to understand how our species did something that no other primate species did, we need to study that process right here in Northeast Ohio.”

Studying archaeology in Northeast Ohio has long been a passion for Eren. He knew he wanted to be an archaeologist in his teenage years, seeing it as a way to pursue his passion for both science and history. His mom saw an advertisement in The Plain Dealer newspaper about the Cleveland Museum of Natural History having a field school, which is an excavation for students. She encouraged him to contact the museum, so he did. Usually, the students on these digs would be college students, but as a high school student, he still reached out and eventually met Brian Redmond, Ph.D., the curator from the museum.  

“I think he was a little skeptical having a high school student who had never done archaeology before join his dig, but he let me. And by the end of the excavation, I was even more in love with archaeology than I had been before, and my career just kind of took off from then,” Eren said.  

From there, he kept his relationship with Redmond and the museum, working there for a summer internship while he was in college. “To get paid for what I love to do, it was a dream come true. And I spent the whole summer in the laboratories, and it just reinforced everything that I loved about science and history. And doing it in my hometown, you can’t beat that.”

Eren continued his relationship, saying that Redmond really took him under his wing and even published papers with him. He published papers with Cleveland Museum of Natural History staff while he was studying at Harvard University as an undergraduate, which helped him choose his own path for graduate school. He went to Southern Methodist University and by then was traveling all over the world for his work, in China, India, Africa and the Rocky Mountains.  

He ended up working in England for years, focused on Neanderthals and humans’ evolutionary cousins. But then a new opportunity came along.

“To be honest, Northeast Ohio to me is the greatest place on earth. I love it. I got sick of watching the Cavs at three o’clock in the morning, and so I was always looking for a chance to come home, and I was always in touch with the museum. And one of my specialties is the Stone Age people of the lower Great Lakes in Ohio in particular. So, an opportunity to come home and study the Stone Age in my home region – if it ever came up, I was not going to miss that chance. And I was really fortunate in 2015 when a job opened up at Kent State, and I just knew that was my job,” Eren said.  

Keeping the Cleveland Museum of Natural History Connection

When Eren was offered the job at Kent State, it came with something he had been dreaming about for a long time.  

“Kent State amazingly just said, ‘Here you go, build the lab of your dreams.’ And I was able to build what we now call the Kent State Experimental Archaeology Lab. And with our lab, we still continue a really close collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History because the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has just this tremendous collection of artifacts. So when we make replicas of artifacts, we come to the museum to study what the real artifacts look like, and then we recreate them in our lab in Kent. And then usually we destroy them in some way by shooting them or breaking them in a lot of different ways,” Eren said.  

Over the years, Kent State has had a long relationship with the museum, and it continues today with Eren and Bebber both acting as research associates.  

Kent State anthropologists came to the museum to study the fossils of ancient humans. In the early 1990s, Kent State graduate student Barbara Barrish, who was also employed by the museum, led the excavations at the Paleo Crossing site, a Stone Age site in Wadsworth, Ohio.  

“We see students and professionals going back and forth between the institutions just constantly. And I think that exchange of ideas is one of the reasons why both institutions are so successful,” Eren said. “The collaboration that Kent State has with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has led to incredible discoveries. It’s led to a tremendous amount of learning for students.” 

Investing in Students’ Futures

Eren and Bebber both work closely with students in the lab, co-writing papers and doing research together. Eren said that he learned the importance of mentorship from Redmond at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and he tries to pass that on to his students.  

“I like working with the students because they don’t yet realize that what we’re doing now is such a good investment for the future. They don’t realize that publishing a paper as an undergraduate is like investing in Microsoft when Microsoft first started: the dividends come years later, but they’re huge because if you’re publishing as an undergraduate, and you start that tradition of contributing to science, it snowballs. I like setting up our students for the future, them not quite knowing it yet, but we can see that they’re going to go far. That’s cool,” Eren said.  

Bebber said she enjoys working with the students because of their enthusiasm and interesting ideas.  

“The students’ interests, their enthusiasm, their wacky ideas ... and showing them, yeah, we can. We can do that. We might have to modify your ideas a little bit but seeing them grow “is always rewarding,” Bebber said.  

This kind of collaborative work environment with senior researchers is clearly benefiting the students of the lab. There is currently a 100% success rate in getting laboratory student members full tuition waivers and scholarships to the graduate schools of their choice. Students have gone all over the world to continue their study of archaeology, including several current lab members who decided to continue their graduate study within the lab itself.  

“If you’re a Kent State student and you’re coming to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to do research, it’s going to change your life because you’re going to see things that are hundreds, thousands, millions of years old. You’re going to work with the top minds in your field of choice. You’re going to have experiences and see things that you wouldn’t see anywhere else. And then you take those experiences back to Kent State, and you can look at your own research in a brand-new way. You look at your classes in a brand-new way,” Eren said. 

Looking Forward

Eren stressed that the success of the lab is directly correlated to the investment it has received from the university.  

“This is a testament to what happens when a university administration invests in research. And hundreds of papers later, over a million dollars in grant funding later, it’s now the premier experimental archaeology laboratory anywhere in the world,” Eren said. 

But they still spend a lot of time writing grant proposals to consistently bring in funds for the lab to increase their research, time Eren wishes they could invest with the students. They’re working on new research with current students in the lab about bone technology, a whole new avenue for them – and cause for the new aromas of their work.

Eren and Bebber are also excited about a paper they’re finalizing about new theories surrounding technology.  

“We’re closing in on a holistic, general theory of how technology evolves and how technology originated, which is important because technology is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Other animals use tools, but we’ve taken it to such a level that’s different. Archaeology allows us to have this long-term look at technology. We’re working on the entire trajectory of human technology, and we’re closing in on, I think, something big. Theoretically, we’re not there yet. But there are ideas that are starting to come together and percolate, which, when it happens, will be exciting,” Eren said.  

Overall, Eren is proud of the lab and where it’s gotten since its inception in 2016.  

“Northeast Ohio has a long tradition of looking at questions involving human evolution and archaeology, and we feel really proud to carry on that tradition and doing it in a way that hasn’t been done before. Experimental archaeology as we do it at Kent State is still relatively new as a field, and we’ve played a large part in forging it as its own discipline, and we’ve made just tremendous discoveries over the last eight years through this lab. And there’s more exciting stuff that’s coming,” Eren said.