Event Description

The Cyprus Institute had an inspiring presence at the “Researcher’s Night 2019” event that took place on Friday, September 27th at the Filoxenia Conference Center in Nicosia. The event is held annually to promote the importance of research, technology, and innovation, and takes place at the same time in 371 cities across Europe and beyond, on the last Friday of September. The event is an initiative of the European Commission and organized by the Research and Innovation Foundation, and is dedicated to bringing researchers closer to the public. In this contect the project's team organised the activity “The human skeleton: a window to the past”: “How active were our ancestors? What were their dietary habits like, how healthy were there and how mobile?” All this information could be extracted from the human skeleton, using appropriate research tools. This activity was more popular for an audience aged 5 to 15 years and showed what an osteoarchaeologist’s job looks like from the stage of excavation to the stage of laboratory analysis. In specific, attendees could learn the main principles of an archaeological excavation, by participating in the excavation of selected bone casts. Visitors had the opportunity to determine if a human skeleton belongs to a man or a woman, how old he/she was, how active and whether he/she suffered from any diseases, exactly as a professional osteoarchaeologist does in the lab.