September in Cambridge | come to the Archaeology labs & library with me!

Take my hand and hold it tight. Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Rosie and I am an archaeological science research assistant here at the University of Cambridge. I work in the Macdonald Institute for Archaeological Research and it is 9.30am. It was not 9.30am. I mean it might have been, but we'll never know. Because that in fact says 2.30am and it still says 2.30am. You have joined me backing up our lab equipment this morning, which sounds dull, but it is also very important. It is one of the most important things we have to do so we don't lose our data. So I'm doing the XR refs at the moment. This is an XR ref. There's plenty of videos on my channel about these so just have a search through if you're interested. In short, they produce x-rays out of this little window at the front here and those x-rays excite the elements in an object and it reads that excitation and can tell you the chemical composition of the surface of an object. So very useful in a project like mine, this one reverse action, where we're looking at how people made and used objects in the past. And I'm not going to speak any more to the camera because I realise the fume cupboard is really loud and the last time I made a video in the lab the sound quality was terrible because of this and I'm currently waiting on a microphone. It should be delivered today or tomorrow and then I can actually clip it to myself and you won't hear all this background noise which will be 10 times better. But for now, I'll just get on with my work and then film things, voiceover things, and join you in a few hours. 🎵 Music 🎵 Back up to dawn and I'm now on a little, very brief, lunchtime walk because I have a meeting on a Monday at a 1, at a 1, at 1pm and then another one like 2, 2.30. So I've got to get back to that. I just really wanted to come out for a walk because it is an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous day. The skies are blue. It's meant to be raining. So I've got to make the most of it. Ugh, Cambridge in the sun is just amazing. Now this is St Catherine's College. It's absolutely sunny. Oh, but the clouds behind are looking a little bit rainy. And I've only got like 15 minutes so let's keep this whistle stop talk going. There's Kings. Okay, it's time to head back. Okay, that's been two meetings done and now I'm going to the library to write. And I'm going to the archaeology library specifically, which is just there. This is actually the library up here, above those archways. I'm hoping it'll still be fairly quiet because the students haven't come back yet. So I went to the Haddon Library, that's the archaeology and anthropology library, for about two and a half hours to work on an article I'm writing on Moisca stone matrices. These are really ornately carved lithic objects used by the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia to produce loss wax cast metallurgy. And what I'm writing up are the results of analysis done at the Museo de la Hora in Bogota a few years ago. I'm so close to finishing out, I just need to translate it into Spanish and then tweak some of the figures and a few of the sentences. But other than that, it's almost ready to go. Right, I am going back to the office because I got too cold. I'm not gonna lie. It's literally like a two second walk but I didn't want to get wet again. I'm already cold. I'm hoping the office will be warmer. It is already 4.30 though so it's almost time to go home. Happy Tuesday! A local coffee company, Doe and Fawn, actually sent me some of their coffee beans to try. So I started the day with a taste test. These are their Peruvian beans and we also got sent Brazilian, which I'm not gonna lie, I definitely preferred. I think they tasted more similar to Colombian and I am a Colombian coffee bean girlie through and through. That's my favourite. Still, what a lovely way to start the day. They were delicious and I was really excited to try. Hello, good morning, happy Tuesday. It is another beautiful morning and therefore it's probably going to be hideous this afternoon but I'll take it. I'm basically at the minute just trying to get my article written so that's why it's kind of like cosy study vibes because I need it finished by the end of September and it is now September the 2nd. I'm mad. So this morning I'm going to be working from the office and this afternoon I'm going to take you to my favourite cafe and we're going to work there. So what did I do? A bit of writing, a bit of figure making, figure tweaking and then also I wrote a blog post for the website, updated some of the records we had on there and also went on our Zotero and tried to sort a few folders. Zotero is the reference manager that we use for this project so we have a shared team Zotero and we can all upload to it and have different folders for different themes. I really like it, I think it's great. Then I walked to the cafe through Darling College because it was a beautiful day and that is a beautiful road. Something else I did this morning which I do on a rolling basis was get a list of publications out of Cambridge Archaeological Science up to date so that we have a record of what's been published from the department, the different instruments and labs that they've used, who's been involved and then I take the front cover of each article, print them out and stick them on the wall so that we also have a physical representation of the work that we've done. However, the printer wasn't working today so I'm gonna have to come back to that later. What I was working on in the cafe was my discussion section so mainly trying to interact with the anthropological literature and I was actually really enjoying doing this part of the research. The main articles that I was reading for this, if you're interested, were by Liz de Moret and Cathy Coston and they both have some very interesting work on craft, indigenous ontologies and on specialisation as well. Good morning, it's Friday. Yeah, I've been a terrible vlogger, sorry. I did not film on Wednesday or Thursday. Wednesday I wasn't feeling great so I just didn't want to be on camera. Thursday, I just forgot. But I did go to a really nice restaurant on Mill Road for lunch and I did film what I ate. Classic. So here's a clip of that. Would recommend. The service was amazing, the food was delicious and it was pretty quick. This morning I have a weekly lab meeting because on Fridays at 10 till 11 we have a meeting with all of the ArXiv labs people. ArXiv labs people? All of the ArXiv people. So people who generally work in the various labs across the department and then I'll be doing some writing and then all afternoon I've got lab Sorry, I was just digging through my bag to try and find my ID. What I have here is a silver standard. You can be in it if you want to. And I need to polish this patina off the surface. So you can see it's not very silver, it's kind of grey. And so I'm using this to polish away the surface. And my colleague Nora has just done an amazing job of the other one. Do you want to be on? This is Nora. Okay PPE. Let's go. So it's very thin so we've just got to hope for the best. Hold on tight really. I might drop it. And I've got gloves on otherwise I would. Oh there we go. Dropped it on the first try. Now this is because these are standards so they need to have the exact chemical composition that is in their certificate for when we analyse them with the XRF which is what I'll be doing after this. But they are corroded so we'll be measuring the patina and not the standard which is not good. Well that's very shiny. Just around the edges. Yes. I need to do the middle. I need new gloves. Welcome to the lab. This is a different lab. This is the Glendaniel lab and here we do our XRF analysis. Today's task is to PXRF standards so standard reference materials. This video is a full explanation of what that is, what that's for, how it works. I normally do these standards so I have one that is iron and steel, one that is bronze, one two that are various alloys of copper and gold. One is a more pure gold, one is a more copper rich gold. They also have silver in them as well. And also three different ceramic standards. These are powdered, they're in sample cups. These ones are all solid in like metal chunks. I'm going to also be analysing these silvers that we just polished. Let's get on with it. Let's not talk about my hair. In that previous clip I've tried to sort it out but basically I'm just having a majorly bad hair day. So what's exciting about having this microphone is that I can just set you up on the side here and I can keep chatting away and you can hear me mumbling to the camera. And what the goal is for this microphone as well is to eventually... eventually... eventually... if... what? To eventually take it into the field and do like historical site walks and I might even tour a college, stuff like that. So I'm going to be setting the XRF up in the field stand which is here and this is a lead cabinet which contains the x-rays inside and just makes the whole process safer because this does have ionising radiation. That's how the technique works but that means it is also ionising to people so we have to take precautions obviously. Come on please. I'm gonna put some gloves on so that I can handle these standards and then we'll get going. Oh I've just realised you can actually hear me now off to get gloves. Isn't that exciting? This is my new toy so I'm gonna play. Oh that's two fingers in one hole. Right so we open this. No we don't. This in here and I can start a cal check and what that does is just make sure that the instrument is feeling well today and then we slot this in here. Then what I do is I just put this standard over the x-ray window which I'll show you. Ta-da! Then we close this in and then I'm gonna put you back over here. Get my safe distance away, check in the camera on here that it's collimated and press go and then we repeat for every standard. We have to change the method though between many of them but that's the gist of what's going on here. I was doing this analysis until I think about half six actually because well I got a bit slow towards the end. It was Friday after all and I also filmed a video, a short on how XRF works at the same time so it took a little bit longer but that's fine. Then I went home, typical Friday evening. Basically did nothing, just watched telly which is nice. Call me boring but I actually love nothing more than having no plans on a Friday evening. Good morning! It is Saturday. I know I don't normally continue my videos on to Saturday but I think I might be going to the driving range and I've never played golf that wasn't crazy golf before so I just thought it'd be quite amusing. I'm at the driving range. I don't know what I'm doing. Right then. This, which one? This one? Oh. Pinky in the back. This feels wrong. I'm gonna quit archaeology and become a pro golfer. I'm gonna quit archaeology and become a pro golfer and this will be my signature shot. Are you ready? This is how I'll win all of the trophies. That was good! Did you see that one? Well, and now we're out balls so we're gonna go home. Considering I couldn't even hit it when we arrived here, I think that's good progress. Hey, it is now the afternoon and we've come on a walk to Anglesey Abbey I'm being laughed at. We're not actually going into Anglesey Abbey, we're just doing one of the free walks towards the mill and then around in the trees and stuff. It's nice, it's really muggy and warm but that is the end of this video. I hope you enjoyed and I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in my next one. If you did enjoy, don't forget to give me a thumbs up and check out the rest of the videos from Cambridge on my playlist. Bye guys!