Honing in on bones
“Oh, cool!” Cambridge third grader Cosmo Cao said as he peered through a microscope’s eyepieces. “I see lots of holes!” Cao wore a fascinated smile as he examined a piece of bone, even though he didn’t really need a scope to see one. Bones were strewn all around him. Cao and his Cambridge elementary school classmates spent part of last Thursday morning working with bones and surrounded by skeletons of fish, birds, and mammals in the Zooarchaeology Laboratory in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The lab, on the Peabody’s third floor, specializes in identifying bones from archaeological dig sites, which can tell researchers not just what animals were present, but also provide clues about the broader environment and how humans might have used an area. Though the lab is normally busy with Harvard students and researchers, it opens its doors each winter break to Cambridge schoolchildren, this year hosting 125 children from...