Equipped with only dining hall spoons, the clothes on their backs, and pure archaeological curiosity, undergraduates at Cambridge’s Newnham College in 1939 were given a crash course in field work when their professor, Dorothy Garrod, led them through the excavation of skeletal remains that had been unearthed on campus as a result of air-raid shelter preparations.
“[The dig was] definitely not up to today’s PPE [personal protective equipment] standards for sure,” Sam Leggett, a current doctoral student in archaeology at Newnham College, wrote in an email to Gizmodo. As rudimentary as the excavation may have been, he said, “I’ve recently been involved with radiocarbon dating these skeletons, and have undertaken stable isotope analysis on their teeth as part of my PhD, so Professor Garrod’s legacy definitely still lives on!”
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