About ARCHEM
ARCHEM has its roots in the dissertation research of founder and director Dr. Andrew Koh, who received his B.S. in Biophysics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his doctorate from the Art & Archaeology of the Mediterranean World program at the University of Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, Dr. Koh’s training as both an archaeologist and natural scientist creates advantages over more traditional collaborations between individual scholars from these two fields, which can be tenuous at times. Indeed, one of the ultimate goals of ARCHEM is for science-aided archaeology to reach its full potential by contributing positively in areas where traditional methods have failed to adequately resolve problems in material culture and socio-cultural interpretation.
Initial research focused on the East Cretan island site of Mochlos with extensive remains from the Bronze Age and Hellenistic period. To date, using ARCHEM's integrated archaeochemical approach, which always attempts to integrate scientific analysis with socio-cultural interpretation, the spatial and typological functions of a Late Minoan I perfumed oil workshop and Hellenistic wine-press complex have been revealed with the help of gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) and geographic information systems (GIS). This, in turn, has produced further scholarship related to the rural landscape of Mochlos during the Bronze Age (i.e. environmental archaeology) and the production of pharmaceuticals (i.e. ancient pharmacology), two research topics of special interest to Dr. Koh.
By the summer of 2008, the team had grown from the husband and wife team of Andrew Koh and Laura Labriola to include INSTAP-SCEC conservators Michel Roggenbucke, Kathy Hall, and Steffi Chlouveraki and Wayne State University graduate students Tom Harwood and Jennifer Meyer. Central to ARCHEM's success to this day are INSTAP-SCEC's director, Tom Brogan, assistant to the director, Eleanor Huffman, and the INSTAP organization. Research has now spread geographically to over three dozen sites in four countries, and chronologically from the Neolithic to Roman periods, with a smattering of comparative ethnographic samples from the last five centuries, provided by the Museum of Cretan Ethnology. Samples have also been extracted in the spring of 2000 from the Egyptian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, including a Cypriot bilbil from Sedment.
