PhD student establishes unique lab program for students in Southern Africa

For the past two summers, an international cohort of five university students have gathered at the coast of South Africa for seven weeks to analyze animal fossils. 

The training program gives students who normally don’t have laboratory experience the chance to learn about zooarchaeology and faunal analysis from experienced researchers — and they have an anthropology PhD student at Arizona State University to thank.

Patrick Fahey started the program in 2024 while conducting research in South Africa. He used part of his Fulbright Award funding and the Institute of Human Origins Elizabeth H. Harmon Research Endowment to launch the Archaeological Research Training and Faunal Analysis and Cultural Technologies, or ARTIFACT, program. 

Fahey realized archaeology students in the region had ample opportunities for fieldwork experience, but there were fewer opportunities for laboratory experience. 

“A classroom setting is great to learn theory and bigger concepts, but oftentimes you can feel really detached,” said Fahey, an affiliated student at the Institute of Human Origins and PhD candidate at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.  

“Concepts of taphonomy, for example, why does it actually matter? But once you start handling real fossils you see why,” he said. “The only way to learn faunal analysis is by doing it over and over and over again. There’s no secret shortcut. ARTIFACT immerses students in the work, giving them hands-on experience with thousands of fossils and sets them on the right track to becoming expert faunal analysts.”

Participants received travel expenses, accommodations and stipends. Fahey said most people can’t afford to take off work for seven weeks or work for weeks without pay, and he wanted to eliminate as many obstacles as possible so anyone could participate. 

Students from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and the United States have participated, learning about comparative osteology, zooarchaeology and taphonomy. 

“I gained so much from this program, truly more than I ever expected,” said SJ Casillas-Chavez, a participant and anthropology master’s student at the University of Colorado Denver.

“I received daily hands-on training in zooarchaeology, and I was fully immersed in the material through lectures, discussions, readings and even games,” he said. “When I returned home, I began applying the knowledge that I gained in the ARTIFACT program to my master’s thesis research, and for the first time, I felt confident enough in my skills to work towards publication of my findings.”

Once students were trained they started to code and process actual faunal specimens from Pinnacle Point, a designated World Heritage Site located on the southern coast of South Africa. The site consists of a series of caves and rock shelters where modern humans lived 50,000 to 160,000 years ago.

Fahey’s dissertation is about reconstructing the human ecology 100,000 years ago from Pinnacle Point 5-6, a rock shelter at the site. To do this, he’s analyzing over 30,000 animal remains discovered during excavations — and the students on this project were able to help process some of those specimens.

This year, funding for the ARTIFACT project and laboratory space came from a grant to ASU Foundation Professor Curtis Marean from the Hyde Foundation and The Human Origins and Migration Evolution Research Consortium, or HOMER, where he is director.

Marean is a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and Foundation Professor and Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. He has been running the Pinnacle Point site for 25 years and is happy to support this interactive experience for students.

“The ARTIFACT program gave me practical lab skills that directly tie into my academic and career goals,” said Hope Chakanetsa, who recently received her master of philosophy in archaeology from the University of Cape Town.

“I learned how to identify and catalog animal bones, interpret taphonomic processes and think critically about human-animal relationships in archaeological contexts. Just as importantly, I built lasting connections with the ASU team and peers from around the world who are passionate about archaeology.”

Fahey is working on his dissertation, and although preparing to defend and graduate in 2026, he hopes the program continues and is proud of what he started.

“I think archaeology and paleoanthropology in general shows us where we came from,” Fahey said. “Humans’ deep evolutionary past might not seem to have a lot of utility dealing with modern problems like climate change, but really, our ancestors and environments have been interwoven for millions of years, right up to today. This kind of research helps us understand who we are and where we fit in the world. It gives us a sense of our origins.”