• Question: what experiments do you do?

    Asked by donaayyy1 to Rick, Colin, Charlotte, Becki on 27 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Charlotte Dalton

      Charlotte Dalton answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      I make sugar molecules from simpler chemicals, so I do chemical reactions to turn one chemical into another in a very specific way so I get what sugar I need. later in my phd I will be firing lasers at the sugars to learn more about how they interact with proteins

    • Photo: Rebecca Scott

      Rebecca Scott answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      It all depends on the archaeological material and the question being asked.

      If, for example, someone just wants to know what an object is, then I’ll use something like pXRF (portable X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry) or LA-ICP-MS (Laser Ablation – Inductively Coupled Plasma – Mass Spectrometry) to analyse the chemical composition of the material.

      Sometimes people want to know how something worked or whether something could have worked. So I was once asked whether leather would have been used as armour in the Middle Ages. I tested this by getting pieces of leather and stabbing them using machines that measured force and resistance. I then tried treating the leather (boiling or waxing to harden it) and stabbed it again to compare the results.

      At the moment, I’m trying to find out if the Romans recycled glass. So I have been crushing, mixing and melting different glasses to see what happens. And I’ve managed to make some really weird glasses with cool crystal phases in them…

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