Professor creates online database of dung references
By Robin Collum (CUP)
Issue date: 3/17/04 Section: News
|
The Dung File is a bibliography of research about animal and plant remains found in latrines, as well as feces from archaeological and paleoenvironmental sites. It was created by Alwynne Beaudoin, a curator at the museum and a joint faculty member at the University of Alberta.
For a student taking archaeology, paleontology, nutrition, parasitology and other disciplines, such a site could prove highly useful. Thanks to the site, research that could take days to track down is now catalogued in one convenient location.
Beaudoin created the site after a number of her students, working on related research, all had trouble finding information.
“I didn’t have a lot of literature to help them. They were bringing material back from the library, but it was all from really obscure sources, places where you wouldn’t think to look. It took them a lot of searching,” Beaudoin said.
“I thought it would be useful to pull together what they’d done and put it in a bibliography, so future students wouldn’t have to go through the whole process again.”
To ensure top quality, Beaudoin reads every piece of research before she adds it to the Dung File. For most of the references that are on the site, she has appended a summary or recommendation to help the reader in their search.
The references on the site include a paper comparing the latrines from different classes in a 19th-century Michigan town, an analysis of a Roman centurion’s diet in first-century Netherlands, evidence for cannibalism in prehistoric Colorado, and the study of honeybee feces in southeast Asia.
The study of dung and other remains provides a lot of information about ancient organisms and their habits. Knowing exactly what an animal ate explains things scientists could only speculate on if they relied on traditional archaeological evidence. It is particularly helpful when studying extinct species, like the woolly mammoth.
In terms of human study, latrine samples offer invaluable insight into the diet, nutrition, and health of the humans who left it. Archaeobotanists can learn what parasites attacked ancient peoples, and research can also indicate some of their habits. For example, scientists can determine the time of year that an archaeological site was used by examining the amount and type of pollen in the fecal matter left behind by its inhabitants.
Currently, there are approximately 250 references on the site, but Beaudoin says she has at least 200 more waiting to be entered as soon as she has time to read them.
Still, the site regularly gets over 400 hits a month, which surprises its creator, considering its specialized nature.
“Much to my bemusement, I am probably better known for compiling the Dung File than for any of my other research,” said Beaudoin.
View The Dung File at Scirpus.ca/dung/dung.shtml.
