The SSHRC Insight and Insight Development grants funded the project from 2020 to 2026. The research is being conducted in the heartland of the Zulu Kingdom in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

From the beginning of this project, it has been a global collaboration involving KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research Institute, the eMcakweni Community Trust, and researchers and cultural heritage practitioners from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa.

“It’s rare that everyone involved in this project can come together in one place like this. It’s intriguing to work on this together and find what we are finding.” 

Kent Fowler focuses on the economic links between commoners and kings, using geochemical, isotopic, and genetic methods to investigate herding practices, domestic equipment production, metal tools and weapons, and dating ceramics.

Before heading out to South Africa, Kent broke down the project focus into three goals:

• Identify unknown settlements 
• Understand lifestyles outside king’s capitals 
• Understand agriculture in local ecologies 

After returning home in early July, Kent and his team of students are now working on analyzing their findings as they continue this project for the coming years.

To learn more about this Archaeology Project, visit our website. 

He does this and other work at ancient archaeological sites located in modern Israel. While many of these cities were likely destroyed by fire in a battle, they are still packed with clues of how everyday people lived—and ate—in typical neighbourhoods almost 5,000 years ago.

As May is Jewish Heritage Month, UM Today wanted to share the work and insights of Greenfield, and so we took a page from his book and dug up an old story from our past. Below is an article originally published in UM’s publication TeachingLife back in 2016 and it tells about Greenfield’s work in Israel, his views on history, and his own (fascinating) personal history. Here it is with some new updates, including this one: in May 2024 he was awarded membership in the Academia Europea, a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences.

The Making of an Archeologist

He was born into and grew up within the orthodox Jewish world until he was 12 years old. In his early years, he moved a lot across the USA. With a Jewish rabbi and U.S air force chaplain for a father and an artist, filmmaker and educator for a mother, young Haskel Greenfield lived in five cities by age six—from San Antonio to Pittsburgh—before arriving in New York’s Greenwich Village as a teen after his parent’s divorce.

In his apartment, you’d find his mom Rita Fecher (by then a single parent), his two brothers, five monkeys, and a collection of pythons and snakes (including boa constrictors). Fecher shared with her kids the neighbourhood’s avant-garde art, music and theatre scene of the 1960s and 70s. Famous actors and musicians regularly passed through their home. By the time Greenfield was 15, he was fetching drinks for Janis Joplin and other stars backstage at concerts. From a childhood peppered with eclectic characters—army brats, his orthodox Jewish grandparents, famous folks like Doors frontman Jim Morrison—grew a curiosity about who we are and where we come from.

For the past 45 years, Greenfield has been exploring subjects ranging from the beginnings of humans in Europe and the Americas to the earliest farming cultures and civilizations in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He helps us better understand the development of societies from the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages of thousands of years ago and champions the relevance of ancient cultures in modern times. Greenfield insists: We need to know where we come from in order to know where we’re going.

For many years (2011-2017), he led the University of Manitoba’s archaeological excavations of the Early Bronze Age layers at the famous site of Tell es-Safi/Gath in Israel (in partnership with Prof. Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University). An international team of more than 100 professors and students was uncovering architecture and artefacts—animal bones, plant remains and pottery shards—that allowed them to piece together what life was like for the early Canaanite residents. In a later period (Iron Age), this site is believed to be the hometown of the famous Philistine giant, Goliath. He has also worked on material from many other famous biblical sites, including Jericho, Beth Shemesh, and Shiloh in his Near Eastern and Biblical Archaeology Laboratory (NEBAL) in St. Paul’s College. The site of el-Hammam in Jordan is now being investigated as forming the foundation for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

His lab is full of animal bones. As a zooarchaeologist, he is most interested in the relationship between animal remains and the people in archaeological sites. By figuring out what people are eating, it is possible to reconstruct the ancient food economy and ecology of the region and sites. He can tell where the animals are bone, were raised, how they were raised, and where they ended up. He can tell if they were sacrificed for ritual purposes, or simply eaten as normal foods. For example, at Tell es-Safi/Gath, buried beneath the floors of houses from 4,700 years ago in the Early Bronze Age, people sacrificed and buried early domestic donkeys as part of urban renewal – to sanctify and protect their homes.

In his own words

• As a kid, I found it stressful [to move a lot]. You make friends, then lose them. Some people respond by pining away for their lost worlds, so to speak. Our frequent moves helped build part of my character and gave me the ability to be flexible and happy wherever I live.
• My mom would take me and my two younger brothers, even as children, to rock concerts and avant-garde theatre performances. Sometimes, we would hang out until three in the morning at places like Max’s Kansas City in Manhattan. We would all go to the performances put on that evening, then we would party late into the night. Finally, she would have to go to work, as an art teacher in New York City high schools, and we would drag ourselves off to school. Can you imagine what state we were in? How will I ever explain this to my children who have grown up in middle-class Winnipeg?
• We as children had access to worlds that included many famous people, such as Janice Joplin. At 15, I was bartending backstage, serving her drinks. We would see Grace Slick or Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and many others—but I was a child moving through those worlds. I was like background noise to them. It was a great, exotic, exciting and vibrant time but it took a terrific toll on people. Many that I knew from that generation died of AIDS or drugs overdoses. At times, I feel like a survivor, with all the questions that come with it.
• We had five monkeys—two squirrel, two capuchins and one spider. Filthy animals, they are. My two brothers and I would sleep on a loft bed that was built over their cage. If we did not keep it clean, it stunk to high heaven. And we also had a number of snakes, such as boa constrictors and pythons, and of course we were raising rats in the basement of the apartment complex to feed them. You can imagine the fright when one day we came home and found that the snakes had escaped. My mother found one in the bathtub as she was sitting on the toilet. I never saw her run so fast. The upstairs neighbour had a heart attack when she found one of our missing snakes in her bed. Our life was never boring.
• My mother brought the family to Woodstock in 1969. We didn’t have to wait to get into the event; we went in with musician groups. We had a Hell’s Angel motorcycle escort, going down the back lane. We drove in my mother’s VW Beetle that was painted in psychedelic colours with naked women. The large headlights were their breasts. The police used to regularly pull us over to search for drugs. Needless to say, they never found any.
• My earliest memories are living on US Air Force bases as my father was the Rabbi chaplain for the Strategic Air Command. It was really special being the son of an officer in the U.S. air force. You get treated very differently. You get taken everywhere, get taken to see airplanes—I remember being brought on fighter jets, as a small child.
• In those days, at the height of the Cold War, they would put a chaplain often on B-52 squadrons if they were going to the Soviet border. My father had to learn to parachute at 10,000 feet. It was understood that if the squadron had the go-ahead to penetrate Soviet airspace, a chaplain should go with the squadron because it was expected that nobody would come back. He was there for the men. There was a wonderful part of [having a chaplain for a dad] and also terrifying because you understood that he was at the forefront of what could be a nuclear war.
• The religious, Jewish world—we grew up in that world—where there is timelessness and the lessons of antiquities, the patriarchs and matriarchs, Moses and King David, and the Bible and the people of the Bible and their messages still transmit down to modern times. You have a sense that antiquity and the ancient world is real, it’s tangible, it’s relevant. It’s not ancient history. It is part of the present. Our ancestors are real people and they are talking to you from the past and if you open your ears and open your eyes, the messages they transmit, you can absorb and are still relevant today.
• In the first year of university, I didn’t have a plan. I was going into business at that point. I was poor; I had been working since I was 14 and was out of the family home by 16. Since then, I was living on my own. I needed to make a living. I thought business—math—would be good, but I hated it. I took an ancient history course as a lark and just fell in love with it. I decided that’s what I wanted to do. The professor was magnificent (Tom Logan, an Egyptologist). He understood it wasn’t just about dry texts, it wasn’t about just reading ancient manuscripts, but going to the field and making exciting discoveries and finding ancient artefacts—the entire package of excitement and of discovery.
• The best way to define archaeology is the study of ancient peoples and cultures through their material remains or their garbage—the destroyed remnants of their house or stuff they’ve thrown out. We’re trying to define and understand ancient behaviours from those tiny things that are left over. Imagine what it would be like reconstructing your behaviour at home from the garbage that you throw out.
• My mom said that as a child I was always digging up my backyard. I hoped to find dinosaur bones. She never discouraged me. She said that if you follow your dreams, you will be happiest. I try to do the same thing with my children (Rachael, Channah, Noah and Boaz). My wife (U of W zooarchaeologist Tina Jongsma-Greenfield) and I would bring them along on our excavations [to places like] Serbia, Bosnia, South Africa and Israel.
• My colleagues, and my youngest son Boaz, helped find the Philistine gateway of ancient Gath (Tell es-Safi/Gath) [in 2015]—this is the gate that Goliath walked out of. He would have walked out of this gate, turned right, walked up the valley and about 10 kilometres in the valley to where David and Goliath did their famous battle. My other son (Noah) participated in the excavation of the largest intact Philistine temple and altar at the site in 2012.
• I’m excited about what I’m studying. And I bring that excitement into the classroom, but I’m not trying to be a teacher—they’re for grade schools, high schools. I’m a professor; I do my research all the time. Being a professor is a 24-hour-a-day lifestyle, not a job. I try to bring that sense of dedication and enthusiasm into the classroom and use it to provide knowledge and the excitement of learning to my students. Part of being a professor is that I have to be an effective teacher as well, but if I just had to be a teacher, I would end up as a boring, bitter person looking forward to retirement. Instead, I remain active professionally with no intention of retiring soon and am deeply involved with new field projects. Archaeology lets me enjoy both being in the classroom and out in the sun, and sometimes rain.

This new method enables researchers to examine how labour was divided between people 4,700 years ago, enabling us to know who was involved in making pottery in the past, thereby enriching our understanding of humanity’s story.

There is an intimacy to studying ancient fingerprints, Fowler says, one that now seems more potent during a time of forced physical distancing in light of COVID-19.

“These are the fingerprints of 4,700-year-old people! Right there to see. To connect with. It is very intimate. It does freak me out a bit, but I get over it and I just think it would have been nice to meet them,” he says. 

And now he and his team know a lot more about who they would be meeting.

“Knowing age and sex of printmakers allows us to create a demographic profile of ancient populations that does not rely on the study of human remains, or it can complement those studies,” Fowler says. “These profiles can also tell us about how labour was organized, how the craft was learned, and can challenge some long-held assumptions about who was involved in the craft in different societies.” Prints allow us to do more than guess based on historical parallels.

The method he developed can be applied to pottery of any age and to any culture that made objects from clay (vessels, figurines, bricks, seals, tokens, and writing tablets).

One of the studies reported in the paper, “The division of labour and learning pottery-making at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel” focuses on a 100-year timeframe in an urban neighbourhood of a emerging city state in the Levant about 4,700 years ago, a time when the first cities and state societies are emerging in this area.

Fowler and his team report that most fingerprints were made by adult and young males. Children’s prints are in evidence but only occur on handles. And multiple prints of different age and sex on the same vessels suggest they were impressed during the training of young potters.

“Production appears dominated by adult and young males working alone, together, and in cooperation with adult and, or, young females,” he says. “Vessels with prints made exclusively by females of any age are rare.”

This male dominant cooperative labour pattern contrasts with recent studies showing that adult women primarily made Neolithic figurines in Anatolia, and men were exclusively making pottery in the city-states of northern Mesopotamia (Syria).

Such is the life of an archeologist, and Deck [MA/89] is one of two working for Parks Canada at their Winnipeg office, excavating at historic and Indigenous archeological sites.

In anticipation of Canada’s Parks Day on July 21, we’re featuring alumni like Deck who live and work in our nation’s parks, historical sites and special places; alumni who get to call these Canadian treasures their “office”.
 
UM Today caught up with Deck at home in Winnipeg as she prepares for her next excavation in the Northwest Territories.
 
UM TODAY: MOST OF US KNOW WHAT AN ARCHEOLOGIST IS, BUT YOU ALSO SPECIALIZE IN PALEOETHNOBOTANY. CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT THAT IS?
 
DECK: Paleoethnobotany is the study of plant remains, which can enhance our understanding of the material we recover from an archeological site – what season of the year people were there, the types of plant resources they were utilizing and recovering tiny artifacts that we cannot recover during excavation. 
 
For example, from wood charcoal that we find in fire pits we can identify what species of wood is preserved in charcoal and that can tell us people’s cultural selection of wood use, the changes in the environment over time, and all kinds of cool things.
 
I did my honours thesis on charcoal analysis, and that’s actually why I came to the U of M for my masters. At the time, there were only two professors in Canada who did paleoethnobotany, and only one doing charcoal – Dr. Tom Shay. I was his last graduate student. I was so fortunate to have him as an advisor; he was incredibly supportive and I learned a lot from him.

Deck photographing wooden artifacts from the 18th century at Prince of Wales Fort.

 WHAT’S BEEN YOUR MOST REMARKABLE FIND?
 
There’s too many to mention! Everything from a burnt maize cob to a scraper with fish residue that was more than 5,000 years old. I have had such wonderful opportunities. What I’m interested in is not a “goody” but discovering what life was like hundreds, thousands of years ago. 
 
A lot of people think of treasure when they think of archeology, and some people really like finding a fancy ceremonial piece. But I get excited about butchered bone and what it means. For me, it’s all about the stories that go around it. What did people do every day? What was their technology like? How did they interact with other groups of people?
 
When I was at Prince of Wales Fort, we found these barrels that had a rectangular hole cut into the side and a little nail at the top. We couldn’t figure out why somebody would do that.
 
Then I read the book that James Isham – Governor of Prince of Wales Fort – wrote in 1743 called Observations on Hudsons Bay. In his book he draws a vermin trap. They had trouble in the winter with foxes getting into their stores to eat their food. So they would put three barrels in a circle and cut a hole in the middle where they mounted a pistol. Then, a string was tied to the trigger which hooked on to a nail at the top of the barrel and also went to the bait in the middle of the circle. When the fox took the bait it got shot from three directions.
 
To see the drawing and then actually find one of these things discarded in the ramparts was pretty cool.  Oh, there’s so many cool things we’ve discovered at Prince of Wales Fort. 

YOU’VE BEEN IN THE FIELD FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS. WHAT’S THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION YOU HEAR ABOUT ARCHEOLOGY?
 
That we dig for dinosaurs.
 
My brother also said to me years ago: “You have the most selfish job. You get to go on these adventures and recover this stuff and then it sits in a building and no one gets to see it.” That’s kind of true, but I’ve tried my entire life not do that and really share what we find. It’s everybody’s.
 
I feel it’s really important to work with Elders, the Knowledge-Holders, from the communities that are connected to the places that we go. We can excavate artifacts and we can do the Western Science analysis of that material but to really put it into context and understand what life was about, you have to work with Elders. A lot of times the artifacts will bring back stories and you get a more meaningful connection. That’s what I find exciting: to make it all relevant.

Consulting with Elder Elijah Panipakoocho at Sirmilik National Park.

CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT SOME OF THE STORIES YOU’VE HEARD?
 
A couple of years ago I got to work in Sirmilik National Park, which is in the high arctic on the Northwest Passage.  Elder Elijah Panipakoocho from Pond Inlet was with us, and I got to spend a week working with him recording traditional knowledge stories and cultural features on the landscape. Who doesn’t like to talk to their grandparents and hear stories about the past? It was like that with him.  
 
We were excavating a traditional Inuit sod house and he had lived in one until he was 14. All we have is the foundation of these sod houses and he would map the outline and go: “Well, here’s a meat cooler, and a porch. This guy had two wives, there are two sleeping platforms.”
 
He shared amazing stories about how sod houses were constructed, the types of activities he did as a child, and the medicinal uses of plants and animals. There is a little layer beneath a seal’s skin before the muscle that would be used as Band-Aids and medicine. My God, I learnt so much from that man! This was a known archeological site and there were so many things that people hadn’t identified which he did – these rock features were puppy enclosures, this change in vegetation on the land was a blubber storage area.
 
It really drives home the fact that we need to work with people. He brought to life the landscape, features and artifacts with his stories and taught me more than I could have ever hoped to learn through archeological investigation alone.
 
IT SEEMS LIKE YOU’RE ALWAYS LEARNING NEW THINGS AND VISITING NEW PLACES. IS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR JOB THAT YOU FIND CHALLENGING?
 
It’s hard work and very labour-intensive when you’re excavating soil. I did a trail survey last year where we were walking 12 kilometers for multiple days plus doing our work and it was really hot.
 
When we go up North, we’re taking helicopters or float planes so we’ll work straight through, sometimes for 10 days. You don’t know when you’re going to have a bad weather day and not be able to get back so there’s just a small window of time to get the project done.
 
But I’m so lucky – it never gets dull or boring; it’s a constant adventure. I get to go to places that I never would if I didn’t do this job, and I get to experience nature and wildlife in a setting that I never would. At Prince of Wales Fort we have to cross the Churchill River. We get in a boat and the beluga whales follow us across. Before we get to work, the site is cleared for polar bears. Grizzly bears, polar bears, black bears … there’s always bears where we’re working.
 
THAT SOUNDS DANGEROUS.
 
I have definitely worked where there have been some scary bear moments. In Churchill, we have bear monitors who work with us. They’re watching us because we work with our heads down. If there’s a bear, we’ll go into a safe place and if they have to, they’ll chase them with quads to keep them away.
 
One of the quirky things when you’re up North is you don’t talk about them, you don’t say “bear”. If you call them, they will come. So people have different funny names for bears: “The Unmentionables”, “The Big Guy”, those kinds of code names.
 
IF YOU COULD LEAVE BEHIND ONE THING FOR AN ARCHEOLOGIST TO FIND 1,000 YEARS FROM NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE?
 
Oh, that’s a tough one. I can’t think of one thing I’d leave behind because I think the technology will be so different. Perhaps they will be looking at DNA signatures of where people were, instead of old journals handwritten on paper. 
 
I’ve seen people do it, though. If we’re revisiting a site that other people have worked at, some archeologists leave a coin with the year on it. I’ve been at a site where an archeologist has left behind a little plastic shovel and pail at the bottom which is kind of funny.
 
JULY 21ST IS CANADA’S PARKS DAY. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO ENCOURAGE CANADIANS TO VISIT OUR NATIONAL PARKS?
 
You don’t have to go far. We have so many national parks and historic sites that it’s easy to find one that’s close to you. Or, if you have the opportunity to travel across provinces, try and integrate a national historic site into your trip because they’re all different – they’ve all been designated for different reasons – and you’ll just get a better appreciation.
 
A lot of the parks I really like, up North, aren’t as accessible. In Manitoba, Riding Mountain National Park is a fabulous place to visit. They have a bison herd there and there’s the lake, lots of trails. The east side of the park is quite different from Wasagaming, the town-site.

It’s rare you get a kick out of a 4,500-year-old donkey.

More astonishing is to find out the animal was deliberately buried under a house floor that ancient people would have walked on every day. Yet there it was — a perfectly arranged collection of bones lying undisturbed since its owners carefully placed it in the ground at the time the pyramids were under construction.

A prehistoric version of covering your ass, and only half a metre deep.

My co-workers — many from the University of Manitoba — and I had begun our third day excavating a neighbourhood in an early city in present-day Israel. As a career journalist who recently retired from newspapers, I’d always wanted to get my hands dirty with an archeological field school by probing the remnants of primitive civilization….

The project, run by St. Paul’s College and the U of M since 2008, was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Sadly, the 2017 season was the last at the site. Tractors have covered the houses with fill. They’ll remain hidden until perhaps another university resumes the excavation a generation from now.

“What we’re doing is incredibly important,” says Greenfield, slight of stature but visibly strong in character, bold and exuberant. “We are making sure that World Heritage Sites are protected, even if only in some cases documented for future generations.”

Greenfield, who is with the Near Eastern Biblical Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Manitoba, spoke recently in St. Paul’s College as part of its lunchtime Conversations Series, describing her archaeological digs in the Middle East where the Islamic State (IS or ISIL or ISIS) is intentionally destroying antiquities in support of its fundamentalist religious views. Her work involves saving the cultural heritage of Iraq and Syria.

“When I was in the Iraqi city of Erbil in 2014, it was just before the nearby city of Mosul was overrun by ISIS,” she notes rather casually. “I was working with my team only about 30 kilometres away from where ISIS was attacking.”

That’s about the width of the city of Winnipeg, between Transcona and Headingley.

Mainstream news has carried images and video of ISIS destroying ancient temples and archaeological sites, but Greenfield says these acts are not that unusual in themselves.

“Such destruction is nothing special,” she says. “This is actually quite common during war. The difference is that ISIS is very good at publicizing their destruction and are able to manipulate propaganda effectively.”

Greenfield says ISIS is not just blowing up temples and mosques with bombs, but then going in afterward to jackhammer larger pieces to pebbles, and promote their work on YouTube.

She explains: “They believe that ancient artefacts and religious sites are idolatrous, and want to eliminate the cultural heritage in these areas. Without visible heritage, young people living there are more willing to accept ISIS’ beliefs.”

She argues that we all should care about what is happening because the areas targeted by ISIS are the “cradle of civilization,” often more than 5,000 years old, where literature, social structure and sciences were first developed.

“Destroying everything from cuneiform tablets inscribed with poetry to huge monoliths that have stood for centuries has a massive impact on the historical record,” she says.

Tina Greenfield working in Kurdistan

Greenfield has worked on archaeological sites from the Assyrian Empire and studied material from the ancient city of Ninevah, built about 700 BC and now believed to be the original site of the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” Nearby, in Nimrud, a palace was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. It’s where an archaeologist named Max Malloran did extensive work with his better-known wife, Agatha Christie.

One of the most serious consequences of ISIS’ rampage is its looting of historical sites, often done in conjunction with destruction. She estimates that ISIS may have been making as much as $2 million per day about five years ago through sales of artefacts looted from ancient sites, and the figure is much higher now.

This raises an important and difficult ethical problem among archaeologists.

“Should museums purchase knowingly looted artefacts in order to preserve them?” she asks. “If they don’t purchase them, such items could be lost or further destroyed.”

Greenfield has worked with the U.S. State Department and now the British Museum on projects to document and preserve ancient sites in Kurdistan and Iraq. Her team is using 3D imaging and satellite imaging to excavate and record sites and artefacts in minute details so that they can be preserved for future generations. One of her sites, the Erbil Citadel is a city that had been continuously inhabited since Neolithic times.

And it, too, is close to the ISIS offensive.

Greenfield says, “The good news is that international teams of archaeologists are coming together to train local archaeologists and workers in ways to document and preserve historical sites. Even in Syria, there is a great deal of damage already done, and it’s very difficult to do this kind of work. But we’re doing it.”

Through the course of the year over 1,500 stories were shared with the U of M community and these are some of our favourites.

New research provides further insight into the sexual rituals of peacocks

If you’re a male peacock who’s keen to mate and you happen to be reading this, researchers have discovered that it’s not the length of your tail feathers that matter, but how you use them. Read more.

Blacklisted in Naples, awarded in Vancouver

Before winning the American Musicology Society’s award for best music publication in 2016, Kurt Markstrom had to outsmart a librarian. To an outsider, it would seem rather mundane but when Kurt Markstrom read a casual remark in an 18th-century letter, it eventually led him to get blacklisted from an Italian library, and then 15 years later receive the prestigious Claude V. Palisca Award from the American Musicology Society for best music publication of 2016, which was presented to him in Vancouver this past November. Read more.

When all hell breaks loose in Classics

The Fifth Annual Lecture on Hellenic Civilization explored the mysteries of the latest poem from antiquity’s greatest poet and a hundred years ago, just like today, new Sappho was big news. Read more.

Warrior of Change

He is a man who has lived both genders. A judge who has spent a lifetime feeling judged. It’s taken nearly 40 years, but Kael McKenzie is finally the person he was always meant to be. Read more. 

Insight: Tina Greenfield

Digging up artifacts for 11 hours a day under a scorching Middle Eastern sun is not for the fainthearted, even more so when they work under the threat of ISIS. “Archaeologists are pretty tough characters,” says U of M researcher and alumna Tina Greenfield [BA/92, MA/97]. Read more.

First cruise ship navigating the Northwest Passage

‘The climate is warming up. There is no question.’ A cruise ship has navigated the Northwest Passage. If the significance of that has not sunk in yet, this is one more part of the proof that global warming is real. Read more.

CANDID: Meet Scott Kehler

Scott Kehler makes your pulse slow down. He speaks with a disarmingly calm and confident cadence. Conversing with him is a relaxing pastime more people should engage in, but he’s busy so don’t knock on his office door. He studies nocturnal thunderstorms and he enjoys chasing tornadoes, but he doesn’t show signs of being an adrenaline junkie. He’s a scientist in training after all. And storm chasing, it turns out, is a mostly uneventful affair. Read more.

EMERGING: Meet Viktor Popp

One of two incoming U of M students awarded the prestigious Schulich scholarship Viktor grew up on a farm near Erickson, Man. He trained prized steers and gave them names like Maverick and Goose (after Top Gun characters) and loved exploring the wide-open prairies. Read more.

Professor finds and publishes lost 233-year-old letter condemning slave massacre

233 years ago Granville Sharp argued that black lives matter. But for 233 years the true sentiments of Britain’s leading abolitionist were lost, until a University of Manitoba professor accidentally came across them in the British Library. Read more.

Breaking it Down: The professor who puts the phat in fats

When Michael Eskin wants to make a point about his favourite subject, lectures, overhead projectors and handouts aren’t enough. Like Eminem, Snoop Dogg and Ice-T, the University of Manitoba nutrition chemistry professor breaks into rap. Eskin’s masterpiece? A little ditty called Lipids Get a Real Bad Rap. Read more.

John Page’s Recipe for Good Ramen Calls for a Serving of Science

The physics of ultrasound can be applied to improve noodle quality. Read more.

A true renaissance man

There’s an art print hanging prominently in the office of Frank Hawthorne, tucked away in a back hallway on the fourth floor of the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources. The title is Knight at the Crossroads, painted by Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov in 1878. The original currently hangs in The Hermitage in Moscow, a gallery Hawthorne has visited half a dozen times. Read more.

Happy squirrel appreciation day

January 21 is Squirrel Appreciation Day. Yes, this is really a thing, and UM Today has written about it before – in great depth. So, it’s fair to ask, what more could we possibly say about these mammals? Lots. Read more.

Nine anthropology students from the University of Manitoba have spent the past month digging at a heritage site on the Red River looking to unearth more artifacts that could shed light on the first farmers in the Red River valley.

The project spearheaded by Dr. E. Leigh Syms of the Manitoba Museum, is only the fourth time there has been any archaeological excavating on the banks of the Red River beside the St. Andrews Dam and Lock in Lockport.

The Manitoba Museum reached out to the University of Manitoba to enlist the help of anthropology students. The group will finish working on the five-week excavating project later this week, as course credit towards a field study class. The university runs the field study class every two years and has done field work most recently at Upper Fort Garry and Bonnycastle Park in downtown Winnipeg.

As CTV reports:

A group of nine anthropology students from the University of Manitoba helping with the research have made a number of exciting discoveries during the five-week dig, including fragments of pottery, bone, and tools dating as far back as 1200 A.D.

“They’re finding bits of ceramic, bits of bone fragments,” Robyn Neufeldt, an anthropology professor at the university, told CTV News. “We’ve actually found bone tools and an arrowhead.”

The artifacts will be sent to labs across Canada and the United States for further testing.

“(The site) roughly dates to the time of the Vikings,” said University of Manitoba archeology professor Robert Beardsell — a period known as “the medieval warming period.”

Dr. Tina Greenfield, a research associate and co-director of the Near Eastern and Biblical Archaeology Laboratory at the U of M is part of a contingent of Canadian experts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) visiting Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities from March 21-29. This visit is part of the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP).

Greenfield and her colleagues will have the opportunity to learn about U.S. policy initiatives and programs to strengthen STEM education and career paths among women, particularly in under-served and underrepresented communities. The program is organized by the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

Goliath strode through this gate before David slew him; David himself threw a fit of madness, scratching the same gate, seeking sanctuary from King Saul’s wrath, according to the Bible’s Old Testament.

For decades, a team of archaeologists from all over the world has poked, dug, and peeled back a cap of mud brick, bit by bit, at this site of the ancient city of Gath, halfway between Jerusalem and Ashkelon in central Israel.

The discovery last month of the fortified walls and entrance gate to the Iron Age city, at the time when Goliath lived and David ruled Israel, was big news.

Read the full story from the Winnipeg Free Press.