Ant work for Carla Juliani, doctoral student at the National Museum of Prehistory

It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack!

Carla Julianni doctoral student presents her work to us. Marlène Laroche is with her, at National Museum of Prehistory right next to a mountain of boxes from the Lunel Vieil excavations (34). The student’s research focuses on the first human occupations in the Mediterranean. There, at the National Museum of Rehistory, she focused her research on bone fragments, which she studied with extreme care.
She takes measurements of hundreds of splinters that were unearthed on the Lunel Vieil site in the Hérault department. The detail of the dimensions is carried out with a caliper.

Scars studied from every angle

Carla Juliani lists the length, width, thickness of each fragment, but also the cortical thickness (relating to the cortex) which could allow her to know if the traces on the bone fragments are of anthropogenic origin (fact by humans). Two pieces found side by side are reassembled by the student. These two pieces fit together, split into two parts, these two splinters evoke an old fracture. The examination of the cortical surfaces is very important, and gives valuable information, some features suggest the passage of water on the fragments.
A painstaking job, piece by piece, chip by chip, Carla Juliani pursues her research, in search of human traces. Until now, on these fragments she has mainly found traces of animals and in particular those of hyenas. But, among these thousands of fragments, one of them asks him a question, it could contain the human traces so much sought after. To be sure, it will be necessary to push the investigations a little further, and study the details of this scarring using a laser. For now, the doctoral student continues her work of observing each fragment.