Geosciences rock first open day

Fossils, meteors and Mars absorbed top Johannesburg matrics last week in an open day that Wits Geosciences hopes will draw more students to study Geology. “Geoscience companies are banging down my door saying ‘where are your graduates?’” said Senior lecturer Dr Susan Webb. The Exploring Earth open day, held during the university break, was a first for the School of Geosciences. The School recognised a need to expose high school students to earth science before they applied for university, and to attract top performing students. Around 50 students were invited from the top 25 feeder schools in Johannesburg and were split into teams to compete in the five challenges of the day. The first challenge was to match the microscopic image of a rock to its life-sized partner. The wide-eyed students were free to interact with the rocks and minerals, the microscope samples and the machine itself.

“It’s good fun, this,” said Cameron Dry (above right) from St John’s College, who wanted to be a fighter pilot before a vocational training session convinced him otherwise. “I love science. I just never thought I could have a career in it.” On the library lawns, the students used a mallet to hit a metal plate in the geoscience equivalent of a carnival Strongman game.

“The hammer was really heavy,” said Jeppe Girls’ pupil Athena Tsai. A computer collected information about the hit for the students to use in calculating the thickness of the soil below. Next, the students used Google Earth to explore the surface of this planet, and Mars, before sitting down to a free lunch in the Bleloch Geological Museum.

Prof Lew Ashwal headed up the meteorite challenge with an array of space rocks worth around R500 000. He told them meteorites were important because “they’re cool” and “they’re worth a f**k lot of money”. He said people often phoned him, thinking they had found a meteorite. But “nine times out of ten it’s a ‘meteowrong’”.

The last challenge was for pupils to reconstruct a skeleton from loose fossils after briefly studying a complete version.

“Judging by the students’ reactions [today] was a success,” said PhD candidate and associate lecturer Grant Bybee, who had manned the microscope challenge. The winning team members each received a mineral box worth about R300.

Photos: Anina Minnaar

Published on Vuvuzela online, 15 April 2012

Viking bling and pirating

Prof. Neil Price from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland presented Viking Pirates: The creation of a maritime identity at the Wits Origins centre on Tuesday, 6 March 2012. His work challenges common stereotypes by drawing parallels between the archaeology of pirates and that of Vikings.

Although almost everyone has heard of them, Price said researchers “still cannot agree on exactly who, and what, they were”. He referred to one description of the Viking age as “the golden-age of the pig-farmer”, and another that described Vikings as the misunderstood pioneers of European trade.

He showed an image of Pirates of the Caribbean’s Captain Jack Sparrow and explained how archaeological evidence had painted the Viking appearance and lifestyle as similar to that of classical Pirates.

Vikings probably looked something like Captain Jack Sparrow.

Vikings wore eye make-up, decorated their skin and even filed their teeth to create grooves for colouring. “Vikings with stripy teeth” were young and had all died of injuries, which shows they were doing something dangerous, he said.

Price also compared the modern day concept of “bling” to the way the Vikings decorated themselves. He said they had worn much jewellery, and that their clothes and weapons were ornately decorated with precious metals.

There is no evidence that Vikings had worn the horned helmets that identify them today. Price did however say that there had been some helmets with something more like boar tusks protruding from the sides.

“Allow the Vikings to be themselves…and not what we imagine them to be”, he stressed at the end of the presentation.

Price is a professor of Archaeology and has published 60 papers and 6 books, including The Viking Way. He has been coming to South Africa for 13 years and has also done work on Zulu battlefields. He has been an honorary Senior Research Fellow at Wits’ Rock Art Research Institute since 2006.