The Adventures have begun!

Hey everyone, this is Julie!

So summer has been AMAZING so far! Finals week was insane for me, but this summer has definitely made up for it! After spending only a week at home, I went to Cozumel, Mexico with a bunch of Oxfordians for scuba diving. Several former Oxford students, a current Oxford student, and the scuba diving instructors and swim coach from Oxford all were part of our group. We did more than 15 dives on the trip and most of us got higher certifications, it was incredible! We even got to do a wreck dive where we penetrated the ship and got to see the engine room and even the bathroom (seeing toilets underwater is a little surreal!). The diving there was insane, the water was perfectly clear, you could see straight to the bottom from the boat which in some places was more than 80 feet deep, and it looked no deeper than 3 feet! I'll post some pictures some of the other students took at the end of the post, but some of the girls literally took THOUSANDS of pictures .... sooo I can only post a few! :x

After a week in Cozumel, I went back home to Chicago for another week before heading back down to Atlanta. Currently I'm doing research at Emory's Atlanta Campus with Dr. Armelagos as part of the SURE (Summer Undergraduate Research Experience) program. SURE offers pairing students with mentors in labs (or, such as in my case, students who have already found a mentor to work with, submitting a research proposal for a project to work on developed by the student and mentor) to work full time over the summer and recieve a stipend and housing for the summer. At the end of the project, we all have to present posters on our research. I'm working in the Anthropology bone lab with human ribs from the Kulubnarti site in Africa. These bones are over 2000 years old and I will be making thin sections of them in order to look for tetracycline labeling under a UV microscope. What's really cool about this project is that tetracycline is an antibiotic, which had not been discovered until more than 1500 years after when these people had lived. The antibiotic then must have been part of their diet and so if labeling is found, it shows that tetracyline had been ingested, and then we can try and determine how the antibiotic got into their diets and how it effected their culture (since it would have affected death rates and sperm count, so that in turn would influence the culture, such as the age of marriage). I really REALLY enjoy learning about how biology and culture influence each other, and I find it fascinating how you can learn about these through ancient bones!

On Tuesday however, I am leaving to go back to Jordan for 4 weeks! Last summer I went to Jordan with Oxford Professor, Dr. Aaron Stutz, to look for excavation sites, and this summer I will be returning with him and a small team to do test excavations! We are going to do basically a mini archaeological dig at what appears to be a middle and upper Paleolithic site to see if it is indeed an archaeological site on which it would be worth doing a full excavation. I am so excited it has even been hard for me to sleep sometimes just thinking about it! Once that trip is over however, I will be back here at Emory to finish out my SURE project for the rest of the summer. I really hope we find something incredible while in Jordan. Keep your fingers crossed and wish me dead people and enough water for showers!

- Julie

Pictures taken by former Oxford Students Collette McLeroy and Lillian Fineman, and current Oxford Student Meredith 'Mimi' Hacking.