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[thearchaeologiststeacup]

Paper two of my PhD is now out in hard copy!This second project looked in detail at the microscopic traces of use observed on bone and antler harpoon heads. It was published in the online @exarc.1 (society of experimental archeology) journal in full earlier this year, and was chosen to have an abridged version published in the annual paper version. . The aim of this project followed on from the results of my first paper (more details on that in a previous post). While doing my microwear analysis, I noticed that the archeological Tuniit harpoon heads (c. 800BC-1300AD) had little to no traces of use. This contrasted with my analysis of the needles, which showed amazing usewear traces (and will consequently be the subject of my biggest and fourth paper). I therefore decided to conduct some experiments to determine exactly how much usewear is created when using harpoon heads. . In order to do this, I created replica harpoon heads with the help of my co-author - prehistoric technology expert Diederik Pomstra - and used them to harpoon a seal carcass. (The seal was sourced from an animal that had died of natural causes at a sanctuary in the northern Netherlands, and also donated the bones that I used to create the replica harpoon heads). I then analysed these replica harpoon heads to see what kind of usewear had been created by my actions, and indeed the results showed that very little to no traces of use had been formed. This then correlates with my observations of the archaeological collection. . For full details of my methods and analysis, check out the open access article on the EXARC website. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here! . #Archaeology #archaeologist #PhD #phdlife #experimentalarchaeology #microwearanalysis #academicsofinstagram #archaeologylife #exarc #publication #scicomm #bone #antler #harpoonheads #tuniit #paleoinuit #phdarticle #journalarticle #theleveragedphd #openaccess https://www.instagram.com/p/CUcWSErKt9N/?utm_medium=tumblr