Metin Eren, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of archaeology at Kent State University, reached out to Brian Redmond, Ph.D., then curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and asked if he could join him for a dig. That would seem like a natural partnership, except for the fact that Eren was only a teenager at the time and had no archaeology experience.
Still, Redmond took him on and a relationship was formed that spanned decades and has extended the longstanding partnership between the Museum and Kent State as two of the top cultural institutions in Northeast Ohio.
As Eren explained, anthropologists come to Northeast Ohio to study the fossils of ancient humans. At Paleo Crossing, a Stone Age site in Wadsworth, Ohio, the late Barbara Barrish, a Kent State graduate student at the time and employee of the museum, led and directed the excavations in the early 1990s.
“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.
Metin Eren and The Cleveland Museum of Natural History
‘We Can't Say That in Other Places in the World’
Ohio is an important area for archeology because it is one of the few places in the world where researchers can study Stone Age colonization of humans. Because of the glaciers that sat on the region, researchers were able to determine that when the glaciers receded about 14,000 to 15,000 years ago, the earliest humans moving onto the Northeast Ohio landscape were colonizer humans.
“The partnership that we have in research between Kent State and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History has led to breakthroughs on human evolution and how our species colonized the planet. It is very hard to study the behaviors of these colonizing hunter-gatherers, but we can in Ohio, and we do it because of this collaboration between the museum and Kent State,” Eren explained.
Beyond the exchange of ideas, there is an economic impact to the research that’s being done in the region. “When we win a big grant from the National Science Foundation, that trickles down to local businesses and economies, because we have to pay for materials. We pay for technicians for our equipment. So, it's a way for science to generate the local economy and small businesses,” Eren said.
Helping the Next Generation of Scientists
Students gain a lot of benefit from the relationship between Kent State and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. From real-world practical experience with research to access to ancient artifacts, students can also go on to internships at the museum or to author research papers by working with the two institutions. This access to publishing their own research has led the Kent State Experimental Archaeology Lab, which Eren co-directs, to a 100% success rate with students going on to pursue graduate-level work. The lab is the world's premier lab of its kind; Eren stressed there isn't another one like this anywhere in the world.
“You come from Kent State and you drive the 35 minutes up to Cleveland to come to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. You're going to see things that you've never seen before. You're going to have research experiences that you've never had before. And then what you do is you take those experiences back to Kent State, you can look at your own research in a brand-new way. You look at your classes in a brand-new way. You actually get to see science in action at a place like the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in a way that you might not in your big lecture hall of students,” Eren said.
“I think experiencing professional science, both in the laboratories at Kent State and in the laboratories at the Cleveland Museum, is just a really powerful equation for the next generation of scientists.”
Learn more about Metin Eren's research and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History collaboration.