All In the Field stories

Responding to Congo's epidemic of violence against women

404132862 — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:22:24 -0500

The rape itself was brutal enough, but the woman’s nearly severed hand shocked Susan Bartels.

It was early November and her first day working at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a provincial capital in the eastern Congo on the front lines of an epidemic of violence against women that — as it did in this case — starts with rape and goes on from there.

Foraging for forest frogs

404132862 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:31:20 -0500

In the dark of the Sri Lankan cloud forest, the researchers’ only guides were the headlamps they used to light up the night, illuminating the cold, gray mist that drifted through the trees.

They looked carefully as they walked among the trunks, the beams from their headlamps casting left and right, up and down. They examined rocks and branches, leaf litter and shrubs, tree trunks, and leaves high in the canopy. By and by, they found one, then another — small tree frogs that froze in the light and went suddenly silent.

Forests, reefs, mountaintop illuminate tropical biology

404132862 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:30:43 -0400

Morning came in the middle of the night in the hikers’ hut partway up the side of Borneo’s towering Mount Kinabalu.

At 2 a.m., after just a few hours’ sleep, the Harvard Summer School students slowly roused themselves, creating a chorus of rustling sleeping bags, zippers, and boots on the wooden floor.

They’d been on the go for weeks, traveling across the island to sample its natural wonders, and they’d be on the go for a few weeks more. But where they’d been and where they’d be didn’t matter that morning. It was time to hike. The sun was coming and the peak was still hours away.

Peabody teams will scan other endangered monuments

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:47:31 -0400

By January, the Peabody Museum’s Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program hopes to be in Copán, Honduras, scanning the imposing but fragile hieroglyphic stairway, the longest inscription in the New World.

The stairway, a long, broad stone step that leads up the side of the site’s main acropolis structure, tells the story of Copán’s ancient Maya ruling dynasty and is unlike anything in the Maya world. Marked with glyphs and sculpture, the stair retains an intimidating quality even today to those who stand at its foot and gaze up to where Copán’s rulers once stood. The stairway is the reason UNESCO declared Copán a World Heritage Site in 1980.

Ancient knowledge

705287540 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:11:03 -0500

It is 11 a.m. on a sticky tropical Saturday and Ian Graham is lying on his side in the dried grass before a 1,300-year-old stone building in the Maya city of Yaxchilan in Chiapas, Mexico. Propped on one elbow, Graham is digging at the earth with a stick, scraping the dirt from around a stone.

He scrapes for a few moments, dribbles some water from his water bottle to loosen the hard earth, and then scrapes some more.

Archaeological bookends in Copan Valley

90581724 — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:15:07 -0400

COPAN RUINAS, Honduras - A short drive from the main Maya ruins at Copan, a forested hillside holds a cluster of mounds that Peabody Museum archaeologists believe date from near the end of the great Maya civilization that once dominated the region.

On April 17, 2007, Peabody Museum director and Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology William Fash, along with director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program Barbara Fash and two Harvard graduate students, walked the site with Honduran government officials charged with regulating and overseeing archaeological activity in the Central American nation.

Corpus team overcomes scanning snags

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:31:06 -0400

A multicolored tent made of tarps and rope and tree branches and duct tape rose above Yaxchilan's unique pinkish stalactite stela Monday (April 23). On the last day of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology's expedition to the ancient Maya city of Yaxchilan, team members were doing something at which they had proven themselves adept: improvising. The expedition had already achieved its main goal: testing digital scanning technology that could provide an important new way to preserve fading Maya monuments across Central America. Despite some initial hiccoughs, the technology had proved itself over the weekend, when scans of the large flat Stela 11 were completed.

Harvard researchers head south to preserve ancient inscriptions

705287540 — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:09:39 -0500

Researchers from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are preparing to head into the Central American rain forest to begin an ambitious, multiyear project to scan and digitize fading Maya inscriptions and carvings.

The expedition, by the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program (CMHI), will focus on Yaxchilan, an ancient Maya city on the Usumacinta River, which forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The CMHI’s mission since its formation in 1968 is to record and disseminate information pertaining to all ancient Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions and their associated iconography.

Seeing the forest, from the trees

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:17:48 -0400

It was Valentine’s Day 2000 and Alain Houle was not quite sure what to do. He was alone in a fruit tree and the chimps were coming back.

“I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then settled down to eat.”

After Houle climbed down that day, he returned to the research station in Uganda’s Kibale National Park and met Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, who has studied the park’s chimpanzees since 1987.

Though Houle was in the park studying the diets of monkeys for his doctoral work at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Wrangham expressed interest in Houle’s experience and said that chimpanzees had never been studied at eye-level in the treetops before.

Students search for Thompson Island's hoppers

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:46:41 -0400

Education met hands-on science on Boston Harbor's Thompson Island on Oct. 9, 2006, as roughly 100 Harvard undergraduates fanned out from beach to beach collecting insects to be included in a new database of Harbor Island insect life.

The students, part of biology professors Brian Farrell and Missy Holbrook's OEB 10 class, "Foundations of Biological Diversity," spent a warm and sunny October day combing the island, literally beating the bushes and scooping up all types of insects in nets.

Farrell, who led the excursion, said the trip served several purposes. First, it exposed students studying biological diversity to the most diverse group of animals on the planet.

'Wintering-over' at the South Pole

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:26:25 -0400

They came to the South Pole, enduring months of bitter cold, darkness, and isolation, to peer at the galaxy's center through clear, dry skies. And in December, they - scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) - declared "mission accomplished."

After 11 years, the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory, AST/RO, was dismantled last fall. The 1.7- meter telescope was boxed up for transport and now sits on the snow, awaiting a decision on its next stop.

Gilby blogs from Ugandan forest

50443248 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:52:08 -0400

Ian Gilby was following a chimpanzee through Uganda's Kibale Forest, observing behavior and testing revised data collection methods. Gilby had done his doctoral dissertation on chimpanzees in Tanzania and was studying long-term data about male chimp interactions.

But on this late January morning, it was the elephant that got his attention.

Three weeks in tiny tunnel pay off

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:43:04 -0400

After three weeks in a tiny tunnel 50 feet below an ancient Maya pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, Peabody Museum researcher Bill Saturno finally got to view his prize. Fine lines and dramatic colors emerged from the tunnel's gloom, depicting a story of the gods who created the Maya world.

"It's really like a Mayan book opens up," Saturno said of the mural. "I was awestruck by its state of preservation."

The 30-foot mural depicts the patron god of kings making sacrifices at the four trees that Maya mythology say are holding up the corners of the world. The Maya maize god then emerges and sets up the fifth tree in the center, completing the world's creation.

A star that looks like a planet

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:39 -0400

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered a remarkably small brown dwarf surrounded by a dusty disk. The brown dwarf contains only about eight times the mass of Jupiter, making it one of the smallest known brown dwarfs.

A harvest of dozens of new stars

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:16 -0400

A new infrared image of the reflection nebula NGC 1333, located about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, reveals dozens of stars like the Sun but much younger.

"These newborns are less than a million years old - babies by astronomical standards," said Rob Gutermuth of the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "Our Sun may have formed in a similar environment 4.5 billion years ago."

Most of the visible light from the region's young stars is obscured by the dusty cloud in which they formed.