"I always wanted to uncover a human body," said Fayelee Conley, a Wright State graduate student, of her archaeological aspirations.
In the summer of 2012, Conley went on an archaeology trip as a student volunteer for the Gabii Project, an international archaeology campaign headed by Nicola Terrenato, a professor of classical archaeology as the University of Michigan. The project began in 2007 to excavate and study the ancient city of Gabii, some 11 miles outside of Rome, Italy. Gabii was inhabited from the 10th century B.C.E. until the second or third century A.D., according to the project's website.
Conley found out about the project while working for an archaeology professor during her undergraduate studies at Berea College, where she double-majored in history and art history and took a minor in Spanish.
Conley and about 25 other student volunteers worked from June to August, carefully scraping, digging and recording their activities.
"Sometimes we had to clear off a 10- to 20-foot area just scraping, little scrapes. You couldn't dig deep," Conley said. "That was basically to clear off the top layer where we were."
After the top layer was clear, Conley said, the volunteers loaded buckets of dirt into wheelbarrows and carted it to another area.
"You were covered in dirt the entire time," Conley said. "Even when you took a shower, you still had dirt on you."
Then came the excavating.
"First you had to take pictures, flag off an area," Conley explained. The volunteers were assigned to stratographic (SU) units, which they excavated four or five inches at a time, using pickaxes and moving excavated soil as they went.
"After a week or two, we each got to have an SU unit to ourselves, where we totally took charge of it and didn't have a supervisor watching us all the time," Conley said.
Conley said her first SU unit was located where the corner of a house used to stand.
"What really got interesting was when I got to move to a fire pit," Conley said. "We had to save a lot of the dirt and ash because we also did a lot of soil samples."
Conley said she used an apparatus made out of "a trash can, [and] a pump kind of like a shower head that pushed air up through the bottom of the trash can." The soil was poured into a net, which separated out things like charcoal or grains. "Basically," Conley said, "cleaning dirt."
"From that we could tell what they were eating and what they were using in their fire pits and food," Conley said.
Conley said her supervisors wanted the volunteers to excavate the fire pit even more. "We had... ground-penetrating radar, and they must have seen something."
Conley said she and another volunteer dug around five feet down, trying to reach the rock bed beneath the soil.
"I was scraping at the side with my trowel and I hit something hard and I thought, 'That's the rock bed,'" Conley said. "Usually when you hit rock bed, it's when you're going straight down. I kept scraping, and it was going in a straight line. That's not something that naturally happens."
What Conley found was actually the site of an infant burial.
"The people thousands of years ago had cut into the rock bed to bury the baby," Conley said. "And it was really a significant find because it dated back to a century earlier than the other things we had been finding... It had grave goods around it, I think four or five jars that were placed around him, and he also had a bronze necklace."
Conley was given the opportunity to name the infant that was found in her unit.
"I named him Alfonzo, so we could call him 'Alfie,'" Conley said.
Conley explained that the infant was from the archaic period, between 600 to 480 B.C.E. and the style of his burial was very different from that of the nearby Romans.
"So at Gabii, finding this infant burial--and there were two other infant burials, too--this shows that they were trying to move away from Roman practices," Conley said.
