Workshop Report: Archaeobotanical Workshop

The first MendTheGap – Archaeobotanical Workshop was held from June 13th to 17th 2016 in Zagreb at the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, by Renata Šoštarić. The workshop targeted students of biology and the main goal was to encourage their interest for interdisciplinary scientific investigations, in this particular case – integrating biology/botany and archaeology.

During the workshop students have briefly familiarized with the MendTheGap project, introduced to the purpose and methodology of the archaeobotanical analyses and their role in archaeological and historical investigations, as well as to the fundamentals of archaeological and archaeobotanical field research and technics. They were trained for field processing and analysing the archaeobotanical samples. They were also introduced to the archaeological site Vela Spila (Korčula) and archaeobotanical findings from the similar prehistorical locality Grapčeva Spilja (Hvar). The idea of this workshop was also to encourage those students to participate in summer school/archaeological excavation and practise the knowledge and skills achieved through the workshop.

Seven students successfully participated in the MendTheGap – Archaeobotanical Workshop and six of them accepted the opportunity to participate in the summer school and archaeological excavation from September 5th to 17th 2016 together with archaeobotanical experts Renata Šoštarić and Sara Mareković. Students have participated in many phases of the field research/training (archaeological excavation at the Vela Spila; processing the samples: flotation, wet-sieving, selecting and sorting different findings from the samples in the field laboratory in Vela Luka) and evening lectures. For the first time students of biology University of Zagreb participate in multidisciplinary archaeological excavation and summer school.