throughout their careers: gridding (dividing the site into a measured grid system using a fixed reference point for three-dimensional mapping); hand excavation (the precise removal of soil to expose fragile artifacts); recording and documentation; sieving all excavated soil to recover small artifacts; conservation techniques; and more.
Paleoanthropological Research Project in Ethiopia’s Afar region — one of the world’s most important archaeological landscapes. For decades, he’s worked alongside co-director Sileshi Semaw, a senior researcher at the National Research Center for Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. It’s been a fruitful collaboration.
December. Karen Baab, a paleoanthropologist at Midwestern University in Arizona and the first author on the article, virtually reconstructed the face of early Homo erectus using a 1.5-million- to 1.6-million-year-old fossil, called DAN5, found at the site in 2000. Rogers has also co-authored papers in the Proceedings of the
From left: Natalina Portillo Corrales and Billy Ridgeway sift soil looking for artifacts; Michael Rogers, professor of anthropology; a quartz fragment found at the West Rock Nature Center is a remnant of ancient toolmaking
Artifacts found at the site date from the Late Archaic period, between 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, left behind by those drawn to the beautiful area. The location — close to water and a historic game trail — made it an attractive spot for ancient communities. But one resource was scarce: highquality stone such as chert or flint used to make tools. Quartz, however, was found in abundance. It isn’t easy to work with — the students try their hand at toolmaking early in the course — but thousands of years ago experienced flint knappers used antlers or stones to create tools. “Ninety-nine percent of what we find are quartz fragments from toolmaking,” says Rogers. “If we are lucky, we also find a finished projectile point — an arrowhead or atlatl dart.”
Master of Discovery ROGERS IS INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED FOR HIS WORK
as co-director of the Gona 34 | Southern ALUMNI MAGAZINE
The DAN5 cranium discovered in Ethiopia MICHAEL ROGERS PHOTO
The Gona Project has yielded fossils of hominins (humans and our extinct ancestors who walked upright on two feet) dating back more than 6.3 million years as well as stone tools spanning the last 2.6 million years. Most recently, Rogers and his colleagues contributed to research that shed light on the face of early Homo erectus, the first hominin species to disperse from Africa. Their findings were published in Nature Communications in
National Academy of Sciences and Science Advances on a variety of topics, among them, the discovery of DAN5, the smallest Homa erectus cranium excavated in Africa, which was found with a mix of stone tool technologies. Rogers has conducted fieldwork in East Africa since 1990 and worked specifically at the Gona Project since 1999. He began bringing promising undergraduates to the expedition in 2007; to date, some 25 Southern