Best of CASE District V Award
 

Institution: Kent State University

Title of entry: Uncovering History

About this entry: For the second edition of our newly relaunched online magazine, we wanted to focus on one of our most prolific professors, Metin Eren, professor of archaeology and Director of the Experimental Archaeology Lab at Kent State. The work the professors and students do at the lab is so interesting and visual – they recreate artifacts from the last 3 million years of human existence and use them to conduct experiments to learn more about early humans and how they lived. We did this story in partnership with The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, as both professors featured in the story also work through the museum, showcasing the partnership these two great institutions have had for decades. The audience for the story was alumni and the subjects were particularly interested in donors. It also went to the entire on-campus community, and to NPR's Ideastream Public Media as a collaboration with them. This was written in-house by the editor through multiple tours of the lab, sit-down interviews with Metin Eren and Michelle Bebbers, co-director of the lab, and a video shoot and interview at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. We wanted to show off the lab and its visuals as much as possible and did so through moving images of several of the tools and processes they use in the lab. We also included photography of a class in the field and a video shoot from the museum.