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The Cowboys of Science - Spencer Pelton - Ep01
1.1k Plays7 years ago
On this first episode, these three cowboys of science host our first guest - Dr. Spencer Pelton PhD, RPA. Arguably, THE cowboy of science.
Spencer is one of the most talented, accomplished, and brilliant archaeologists in the country. The dude has over a dozen publications and literally just got his PhD last year.
Anyone that knows Spencer will tell you that he’s one of the most enjoyable people to be around and was a mentor to a lot of us during our time at Wyoming.
Spencer’s research varies from lithic technology, hunter-gatherer ecology, to human evolution, and his dissertation focused on hominid thermal regulation.
The list of his accomplishments would fill this page, so we’ll let his smooth, Johnny Cash-like drawl tell you his life story! We’re super excited.
Links:
You can find Spencer on Twitter: @docpelton
You can find out about Spencer's current/past research at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Spencer_Pelton
Contact the Hosts:
Email us at alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com.
Find us at instagram @alifeinruinspodcast
Facebook: facebook.com/alifeinruinspodcast
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to today's show. Can I restart that?
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome to episode one of a Life in Ruined podcast. Today, we three cowboys of science will be hosting our first guest, Dr. Spencer Pelton, PhD, RPA, arguably the cowboy of science. Spencer is one of the most talented, accomplished and brilliant archeologists in the country. The dude has over a dozen publications and literally got his PhD last year. Anyone that knows Spencer will tell you that he's one of the most enjoyable people to be around and was a mentor to a lot of us during our time at the University of Wyoming.
Research Focus and Career Beginnings
00:00:49
Speaker
Spencer's research varies from lithic technology, hunter-gatherer ecology, to human evolution, and his dissertation focused on hominid thermal regulation.
00:01:12
Speaker
Welcome to today's show. I'm Carlton Gover. I'm being joined today by David Ian Howe and Connor Yonan. And today's guest is Dr. Spencer Pelton. Dr. Pelton is currently the Senior Archaeologist for TransCon Environmental Incorporated, and is currently running several field research positions, such as a field director for the Powers II Paleo-Indian Ochre Mine, and re-investigations of the Sister Seal Paleo-Indian site. Thank you for joining us today, Spencer. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Really flattered that you asked me to come on.
00:01:41
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, you're our first guest. Yeah, it's a great honor. Thanks, guys. Of course. So like just going into what we wanted to talk about today with you, Dr. Pelton, we just had a couple of quick questions just to get our guests acquainted with your background. So what got you into archaeology? I mean, I mean, that's that's a pretty basic question.
00:02:02
Speaker
I think I started the way a lot of people do is walk in plow fields in Tennessee. My dad looking for flakes, something that's completely out of bounds for me these days. Back when I was, you know, five, six years old, it was just good fun on these big rivers in Tennessee doing that.
00:02:20
Speaker
I always like digging in the dirt, always like old stuff. And I kind of lost it for a while. But then once I got to college, I realized that you could actually do it for a living. So I kind of came back around to it and have stuck with it ever since.
00:02:35
Speaker
Cool. Awesome. And you've been around the sciences the majority of your life through your dad, right? Correct. My dad's a retired wildlife biologist. He worked for the University of Tennessee pretty much his entire career. And he's really into black bears, but does also have some bear research projects and projects on other species throughout the world. So yeah, I grew up doing some den work with his project.
00:03:05
Speaker
dens and immobilizing. And that's not like in your house, right? No, no, this is primarily in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park close to where I'm from in East Tennessee. I grew up around the sciences and having a pretty strong appreciation for the sciences. My uncle is also a biologist and my grandfather is an engineer. So all that kind of combined to really instill a pretty healthy respect for the sciences from a pretty early age.
00:03:34
Speaker
I can imagine. I remember when I first got to the University of Wyoming, which is where all of us, the hosts, met you, one of the first memories I have, I believe it was another PhD student at the University of Wyoming that showed me a very adorable photo of you with a couple black bear cubs when you were younger. And what magazine or publication was that in?
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, I had my 15 minutes of fame pretty early in life. I guess it's coming back around now with this podcast though, huh? But yeah, I was in National Geographic World Magazine when I was 11 years old. I made the cover. I didn't make the main cover. That distinction belonged to a sea turtle, if I recall. But I didn't get a little bubble in the bottom right corner. And there's a whole article about it.
00:04:24
Speaker
my life with bears, I think it was called. Sea turtles get all the glory, dude. I know. The damn sea turtles. You give them and all, they're just going to steal a show. Absolutely. Oh, sea turtles. So you went to, you did your undergrad at the University of Tennessee, is that correct? No, I got a middle Tennessee state, universally.
00:04:47
Speaker
So yeah, I didn't have a whole lot of choice of my undergrad, I guess, coming out of it. I didn't want to go all the way to Memphis and I wanted to get a little further away than Knoxville. So I picked the geographic center of Tennessee.
Education Journey and Early Career
00:05:00
Speaker
But you went to Murfreesboro. Right. Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Yeah. It was the one that was free and just far enough away from home that felt like I was actually going somewhere.
00:05:16
Speaker
That's where I ended up. Had a good time there and actually has a really, really strong anthropology department. Did you do any fieldwork when you were there as part of your undergrad experience? I didn't really do a whole lot of fieldwork through the university at that time. My first fieldwork experience was with the Park Service and that was done as part of a Student Conservation Association internship that I actually did so that I could get credit
00:05:50
Speaker
that internship that I got credit for that. What was your favorite part about Murfreesboro? I'm kind of hung up on it. Uh, my favorite part going into it wasn't, it wasn't severely anymore.
00:06:03
Speaker
But I think Murfreesboro has a surprisingly good music scene. And that was really probably my favorite part about it. It has a really strong recording industry program there that kind of sends a lot of people to Nashville. And that's actually what I started doing at Middleton
00:06:23
Speaker
as a recording industry major. Oh, wow. Well, for those of you who are new to us and don't know Spencer, Spencer's actually a really talented musician, has a wonderful voice, plays guitar really well. So yeah, that makes sense. That's why you went to school for that. Thanks, David. It ends up having a, you know, there's a lot of great musicians get attracted to this little town that is pretty unremarkable in most ways, but you end up having a lot of really great bands and a pretty good music scene in that town.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, and you're like 20 minutes down the road from Nashville. So what happened once you graduated? What was your goal in life? I feel like we all have different experiences with what happens after your undergraduate degree.
00:07:10
Speaker
So, you know, what, what, where did your, uh, where did your path go? No, that's a good question. So I, I had fostered this relationship with the park service over two different seasons, uh, working for them during my undergrad first season. Like I said, I was an intern second season. They brought me back as a seasonal GS five art tech. Uh, so I graduated in, uh, in a December of oh eight, I basically spent the next
00:07:38
Speaker
four months just drinking a lot of beer and playing pool and trying to find a job and I got pretty good at both and eventually the BLM called me back I think in late April of 2009 and I just I don't know if you guys have put in for these jobs before but a lot of the
00:08:01
Speaker
The BLM jobs are just work for the BLM in nine Western states. And you just kind of put your name in a hat and you just get a callback one day. And it ended up being this this BLM field office with Eagle Lake field office in Susanville, California.
00:08:19
Speaker
I interviewed for that in late April and then picked up in early May and moved out to Northern California. I spent the next four years working for them during the summers. Really, when I came out of my undergrad, I was pretty dead set on a career with the federal government.
00:08:38
Speaker
as a federal archaeologist and I kind of wanted to make my way up through the ranks and maybe take on some resource management tasks or something like that. So at that point, a career in archaeology was mainly focused on the federal sector. And you had told me at one point that you had gone out there for the area you were working as one of the more beautiful areas of California you'd experienced, right?
00:09:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's certainly not the part of California you think of when you get all excited about moving to California, because it's not searching in wine country. It's very much like high desert. It's kind of where the Great Basin meets the Sierras, meets the Cascades. It's this really, really gorgeous remote location. Still the most rural place I've ever lived, including now in Douglas, Wyoming.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, it was a great experience. I learned a lot working out there. I mean, it was my first experience in Western archaeology, which is ultimately what has come to be my passion. So yeah, really valued my time there.
00:09:43
Speaker
I mean, it's super interesting to see here that you're focusing on government jobs out of undergrad. I don't know how many people are like, hmm, I just finished my undergrad. Let's go work for the government, at least in our profession. I kind of was just staring off the edge of a cliff like, what now?
00:10:01
Speaker
Yeah, I had a little bit of a leg up. My mom works for the Park Service and so she really kind of set me up on that path early on. And yeah, I was at least aware that it was like pretty secure sort of job path to go down coming out of my undergrad and something that would be worth pursuing. So what made you choose to go get your master's at Colorado State? Yeah, initially it was
00:10:26
Speaker
I was offered a promotion through the BLM if I got my master's. At Colorado State in particular, I'd had some connections to Colorado, and I started looking at programs there that I could afford. I landed on Colorado State University because I found a couple names there. Jason LaBelle, who ended up being my advisor, had really interested me.
00:10:50
Speaker
I want to say I worked for the BLM for like six months, had a winter off, did nothing basically, worked another summer. And then that fall of 2010, I started my master's there at CSU. And then for the next two or three years of that program, I live this kind of double life, where I drive back to California every summer, work for the BLM. And then I come back and work on my master's work during the school year and just kind of go back and forth like that
00:11:20
Speaker
for a couple, three years. That's quite the transition because if you haven't been to Fort Collins, it's not very small and quiet. It's not the inverse of the rural life. Oh, for sure. It was definitely a double life. Yeah, going back and forth between. I started calling Fort Collins the millennial Shangri-La.
00:11:46
Speaker
from the restaurants and the breweries, the cute downtown. I'm actually there right now in Fort Collins in a hotel. But then, yeah, Susanville's kind of the opposite of that. It's a prison town in the high desert of California with very little amenities to speak of. But it included me. I liked it. I liked kind of having my foot in both worlds there for a little while. Well, speaking of millennials, isn't that where you met Connor?
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, it is. Connor was, uh, Connor was one of my first employees, I guess. Yeah, for sure. You were also, um, I don't know if you remember this, you were also my TA for, uh, Seibold's class, his geography class. Okay. So I was like, he clearly doesn't remember. Yeah, I was sitting in the back, like a little weirdo. There's a lot of people in those intro classes.
00:12:35
Speaker
We had like three TAs or something, right? It was absurd. No, Jason LaBelle ended up handing me a survey of some public lands, or no, some county lands just south of Fort Collins, and we did an archaeology survey out there, and Connor was one of the crew members on that, if I recall. That was a good time, super fun.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, there wasn't a lot there, but it was pretty. Sure. It was pretty. There was a lot of elk out there. Yeah, it was fun. Nice. Actually, just random thought. I was going through, just randomly looking around. Apparently, they found some mammoth remains buried deep when they were doing some of the testing for that reservoir that I had no idea about.
00:13:18
Speaker
You know, I actually heard about that with the paleontologists that worked on that is now doing some subcontracting for the company I work for and he told me about that. So when you came to CSU, did you have an idea for what you were going to do for your masters or do you just kind of come in blank slate hoping
00:13:39
Speaker
No, I had no idea really. I'd say the one skill that kind of set me apart from other folks was that I was really good at GIS. And so I wanted to do something with like a geospatial component to it. Actually, what my minor is my undergrad was in GIS.
00:13:57
Speaker
if I can recommend anything for people's careers in archaeology is that you learn how to use that software because it kind of makes you the most popular guy in the room in some of these like federal offices and CRM firms and stuff if you have a good grasp of that. So yeah, I had very vague sense of it. I was excited and you know, I could talk and had ideas and I think Jason LaBelle really
00:14:21
Speaker
really respected that and was kind enough to bring me on as a student. So yeah, I'd say a combination of having some GIS skills and just having kind of an innate curiosity for the discipline. Some ideas were the two things that I had going for me going into a master's program. But other than that, I was pretty clueless. I had very few research skills. I
00:14:43
Speaker
really didn't know how to use Microsoft Excel at all, which is a pretty valuable thing to know if you're dealing with data of any kind. Oh yeah, I was green. I was really green. And if I can echo anything Spencer says is that the only reason I have a job in CRM right now is because I did a little bit of GIS for my thesis. So learn it. Yeah.
00:15:05
Speaker
Um, so tell us about your master's thesis research. It had something to do with, uh, you know what? It was titled ground stone, lithic technology of Indian peaks, Colorado, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, uh, yeah, there's this weird phenomenon in the front range of Colorado where
00:15:21
Speaker
The Alpine country is just full of archaeological sites and that was really unknown to me before I came to Colorado. The most impressive of those archaeological sites are these big game drives, which I ended up researching them as well. I have a paper on that with Jason Lavelle. But there's also this weird thing where there's there's ground stone tools everywhere, things that you use to
00:15:42
Speaker
process clients trying plants up. And the Alpine Tundra is not really the type of place that you associate with really rich floral resources. And so I got really intrigued by the presence of these tools all throughout the front range. I think 40% of the sites have ground stone up there, which is a really large number and some sites have a ton of it on there. So I wrote a thesis trying to explain why one might
00:16:11
Speaker
carry these ground stone tools up from the front range, these alpine sites. That's the other thing, all the ground stone tools that they're carried at least 20 kilometers uphill to get to these sites. Sounds like a rocky predicament. I think like most people, they kind of like cringe when they go back and look at their master's thesis and I do the same, but one thing I can't say about it is
00:16:34
Speaker
I was able to ask some questions and kind of throw some hypotheses out and try to use data to answer those. And I feel proud that I kind of got to that point of scientific inquiry by the time I wrote my master's thesis, as opposed to just more of kind of a descriptive master's thesis where you dig a few shovel tests and describe what came out of them.
00:16:59
Speaker
Gotcha. Well, do you have any advice for people thinking about starting their masters or thinking about graduate school in general?
Grad School Advice and PhD Experience
00:17:07
Speaker
Always have it paid for by somebody else. There's no there's no point going into debt. I'd say if you.
00:17:15
Speaker
If you're just going into a graduate program because you don't know what else to do, don't do it. Especially if you've got to take out student loans to finance it. I'm pretty pragmatic about a lot of this stuff, so that's really my first piece of advice. As far as which programs to get into or what skills you need to foster before you go into one, it's kind of conditional upon
00:17:39
Speaker
your own interests and where you want to go with your career. I would certainly say that learning how to read critically and quickly and skim academic literature and really digest it quickly is probably the most valuable skill that you're going to need when you go into a graduate program, as well as some basic understanding of description
00:17:59
Speaker
statistics and excel and how to use PowerPoint. All the basic stuff that you kind of pick up as you go along but if you have some of those skills going into it then it definitely gives you a leg up. No deep philosophical insights into it though other than like don't do it unless you have to. I mean it's no use kind of spinning your wheels, paying more student loans than you already do.
00:18:23
Speaker
and ending up with something that you don't really know what to do with. So if it's not gonna advance your career at all, then I wouldn't suggest doing it. Well, sounds good. Well, on that little nugget of information, we're gonna go ahead and take our first break. We're gonna be back in a moment to continue our conversation with Dr. Pelton, talk about his doctoral research and some of our experiences with him at the University of Wyoming. Cool.
00:18:45
Speaker
And welcome back to episode one of a Life in Ruins podcast. We're about to continue our conversation with Dr. Spencer Pelton. And for this segment, Dr. Pelton, we just want to kind of talk to you about your experiences as a doctoral student at the University of Wyoming and just kind of talk about experiences personally that we have with you. Connor met you originally at CSU, Colorado State University, and me and David met you at the University of Wyoming. So why did you choose Wyoming
00:19:15
Speaker
to begin with. It's a great program. That's a pretty simple answer, but I also kind of fell in love with the Plains and Rocky Mountains when I was down at Colorado State working with Jason LaBelle. And so I knew I wanted to do something, some archaeology in the Plains and Rocky Mountains and continue doing research in that region. And, you know, when he comes down to it,
00:19:35
Speaker
you start looking at programs, there's not a whole lot of choices there. There's CU, maybe University of New Mexico, something in Utah or Montana, but I ultimately decided Wyoming because I thought the faculty did really interesting research and I'd met them before and really enjoyed being around them. And I'm talking about Bob Kelly, Todd Servile, Marcel Kornfeld, Mary Lou Larson, all the folks that are there at Wyoming that do plains and Rocky Mountains archeology. I should also,
00:20:05
Speaker
pass by George Risen being still around the department. He's still in there as much as possible. So all those things together, it made it a pretty logical choice in my mind. And so I went up and visited with Todd in the fall of 2012, I guess. And one thing led to another and I spent the next five years there. Gotcha. And this is an absolutely pertinent question, but do you have a Bob Kelly impression?
00:20:37
Speaker
Carlton, can you turn the music down, please? I guess that's it. I don't know. I've never tried that one before, but something like that. Oh my gosh, fair enough. So you started, when did you start your doctorate program at Wyoming? Was it directly after following your completion of your master's?
00:20:57
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I finished my master's the first semester I was at Wyoming. So there was no break between my master's program and the PhD program. I was feverishly finishing my master's thesis for submission that fall semester on top of being completely overwhelmed with starting a PhD.
00:21:21
Speaker
It was a stressful time. Fall of 2013 was, my hair got pretty long, beard got pretty thick. I think that's what I met you and I remember it being like wicked long and I was like, what? I guess that leads to the next question. What was your first impression of each of us when you met us at Wyoming? And I know for a fact, you remember the first time you met me, which was at the Buckhorn, if you remember correctly.
00:21:48
Speaker
My first impression of each of you, I already knew Connor, so I knew he was just a very polite, industrious young man. And I was very happy to have him in Wyoming coming up from Colorado State. David, I don't quite remember the night you're talking about it. I'm assuming there is... Oh, it's when my mom picked me up from the bar.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah, David was visiting the department to come and we took him out to the Buckhorn. I don't know what you thought about the Buckhorn, but it's kind of like the bar you take people that are new to Laramie. It's the epitome of what you think of as like a Wyoming cowboy bar. And then David's mommy had to come take him off because he was traveling out to his college visit. That was pretty funny. She had a free flight, so I went with her.
00:22:39
Speaker
Carlton, I don't know what I thought of you. You're a mix of thoughtfulness and kind of douchebaggery is often confounding to people. I think I warmed up to you pretty quickly though, and yeah, I ended up really liking all you guys.
00:22:58
Speaker
I met, so at Plains this past, at Plains conference in San Antonio this past year, I met Cody, I don't know his last name. I think so. And after making like kind of a joke about his firearm incident involving his finger, he's like, yeah, I've heard about you. And I was like, from who? He's like, Oh, yeah, Spencer's told me a lot about you. And I was like, Oh yeah, what does Spencer said? He's like,
00:23:23
Speaker
Well, Spencer says that you're really thoughtful and have some great ideas, but you're a frat boy. I think I'm pretty sure I said that exactly how you stated it.
00:23:39
Speaker
Not gonna lie, that was my first impression too. I kind of have that effect. So I'm trying to think, I only spent one session in the field with you during Bob's, the first Om Rock Shelter pre-session with all the graduate students. Yeah. Connor and David, did you guys have any experiences with Spencer in the field? I know Connor, you worked with them on a survey, but like anything specific to Wyoming?
00:24:08
Speaker
Um, me, Spencer and Craig, was it Randy and Eric, all we went on the, the big horn excavations that first year. Yeah. We tested some rock shelters up there. Yeah. I was with me and you had like a just straight day of bonding in a cave. That was fun. That was really nice. Yeah. It was a good time. That was such a serene setting too. That cave was just so beautiful. I want to go film there right now. I really wish I'd had a camera when I was there. Yeah.
00:24:34
Speaker
Was that the same place that involved Dr. Robinson's Bluetooth debacle? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
00:24:43
Speaker
And he was like, or Spencer was like, please, can I just like sync the Bluetooth? And he's like, well, no, it's not Eric's voice at all. But he was like, you're going to mess up the contacts on this Jen's number or Jess's number. And you were like, that's fine. Just let me sync it. And then Spencer reaches over over the seat to go touch the Bluetooth and Eric almost like whips the car over on a mountaintop.
00:25:06
Speaker
Yeah, sorry, Eric. I found that button to push and had to keep going all the way. I loved every second of it.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, that was a, I remember the end of that project being a bit of a debacle as well, because the last day, the road was frozen. Yeah. But then it thought throughout the day and it was almost impossible to get out of that, that place. We had to get a bond to get out of there, I think, right? Yeah, that was, that was a bit of it. And then we forgot the backfill plastic and it was just like five things that are real. But yeah, it ended up being all right. It was, that was a fun, that was a fun project. Definitely fun week.
00:25:42
Speaker
For sure. Spencer, you and I had worked together on the Moriah Ranch project. One of the things I remember is that we were going around surveying and I think we got into a rainstorm and ended up hiding in
00:26:01
Speaker
a little rock shelter kind of thing. And then, you know, eventually at the end of the day, we all decided we were going back. And one of the students we're with just takes off, just goes like, you guys know Zach Garhart, right? Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, he just went and we thought we had lost him.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah, that was, I had just come off of like, you know, working the CRM project where, you know, safety was drilled into your head every day and losing people in your crew is like a big no-no in most contexts. And that was, I was kind of freaked out about that, but yeah, it turned out all right. He's a Wyoming boy. I should have known that he could find his way off a mountain well enough. He was just like five steps and he was gone.
00:26:50
Speaker
Dude, Zach Garhart is like a Wyoming Sasquatch from currency working under him at the UW field school was just like an enlightening experience. Wyoming Sasquatch. That's its own breed, for sure. Some species. Homo sapiens, Garhartensis. Yeah, that's good. I think I'm out.
00:27:20
Speaker
Spencer, what kind of led you, back going to your dissertation research, what kind of inspired you to choose your dissertation topic or take the route you did and write about what you did? A couple things, I guess. I knew I wanted to do something, some big idea stuff for my dissertation, kind of big scale stuff.
00:27:44
Speaker
Just because that's in my mind, that's your opportunity to do something like that. It's supposed to be the time that you write a big picture thing. You have five to 10 years to think about it and write about it. So there's not a whole lot of other opportunities besides a PhD program that you can sit down and write a big idea kind of study. The study, by the way, is about thermal regulation. So about the impact of temperature on the archaeological record via human behavior.
00:28:12
Speaker
And the other reason was I kind of gotten into some human behavioral ecology ideas through Bob Kelly's work coming into the program. Wait, Bob Kelly does human behavioral ecology? Yeah, right. There's a lot of talk about kind of what people eat in human behavioral ecology, but there's not a whole lot of talk about the other thing that you need for survival, which is keeping warm when it's cold and keeping cool when it's warm. So I thought that developing some theory about
00:28:42
Speaker
about that topic would be a really useful contribution to HBE studies. I think you had told me at one point that you were going to write that dissertation in the form of a book for hikers. Is that right? That was one of the dead ends. It's a super relevant topic for anybody that kind of lives outdoors today.
00:29:07
Speaker
I had a fleeting idea to get Patagonia or some outdoor company involved and kind of try to make some sort of meaningful contribution to how they produce their garments and thermoregulation technologies. But yeah, that never went anywhere. Ultimately, you just have to kind of finish the thing and those big ideas maybe come later.
00:29:30
Speaker
I remember I went to your dissertation defense and because part of that, your dissertation was like human global dispersal and how people moved, like got out of Africa, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then you basically ended it was just like, yeah, it's easy for people to move around the equator because it's easy to be naked and homeless.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of my tongue-in-cheek way of putting it when I give public talks about it, but it's kind of true. There's certain places in the world that you can be naked and homeless with very little problems and other places where it's very much not possible and a whole lot of variation in between. For instance, in the United States of America, it's pretty easy to be naked and homeless in Miami and San Diego.
00:30:15
Speaker
which I'm not saying anything about the cultures of those places, but there's probably more naked and homeless people there than other places in the country because you can do that. But ultimately it has some pretty fundamental implications for global human dispersal about where you have to invest in kind of clothing and shelters and things like that and where you don't have to. And that's the gist of that argument.
00:30:41
Speaker
And you worked with Dr. Todd Suravel on his Doha project? Yes, Dan. You said that fine. Oh, perfect. Just checking. Because it's spelled super interestingly with its silent K in there. Todd pronounces it a little differently, but I'm not going to try to attempt to mimic it. Yeah, fair enough. Were you able to incorporate that research with those reindeer herders into your dissertation?
00:31:08
Speaker
Yeah, I was. That was one of the really fortunate experiences of my PhD, was getting to go with Todd over to Mongolia and live with these semi-nomadic ranger herders for a couple months. Just a very brief synopsis of that project. Todd designed it.
00:31:27
Speaker
brilliant research design, and it's basically about mapping people in mobile campsites. So it's just no archaeology, but you're mapping people instead of trash. So from those data that Todd had been collecting over multiple seasons, multiple years, I was able to make some generalizations about how much time people spent in outside versus inside spaces within mobile camps relative to temperature. So it's pretty intuitive, but the colder it gets out, the less time you spend outside.
00:31:56
Speaker
the less kind of production tasks you do outside, and the more you move those things into homes. I was able, using Todd's data from the Doha Ethno-Archaeology Project, was to really formalize that and come up with some formal parameters around how people do that. So in Todd's program, they do all seasons, right? And you ended up going in the winter, is that correct?
00:32:19
Speaker
It was really spring. It was early, early spring. So when we went in, there was still a lot of snow on the ground. We got snowed on for probably the first month we were there every day. It was really cold. It wasn't as cold as when, I think, when Todd and Matt O'Brien went over there in late December, early January, it never got above negative.
00:32:40
Speaker
40 or something like something ridiculous. It was brutally cold in the middle of winter. The spring was a little more tolerable, but it was super snowy. So our trip into their spring camp was pretty harrowing, multiple day journey over this big snowy mountain pass. Yeah, it was fun.
00:32:59
Speaker
Were you skiing behind the reindeer? Is that what I remember? Were you like, no, we were, I was riding reindeer. Uh, we were, we did bring skis with us. And so we, we ended up breaking trail with the skis so that the reindeer had a more solid kind of path to walk on because they kept breaking through the snow and getting mired in the snow. So we ended up breaking trail with skis, but we were all, we were all riding deer.
00:33:24
Speaker
I was told that if you put a reindeer with a red nose in front of the rest of them, that they all know where to go. Is that valid? That's an absolute truth, Carlton. They always keep one reindeer with a red nose around. You guys weren't forced to wear them when you were in front, breaking trail. I would have been a little cruel.
00:33:49
Speaker
No, the reindeer are really good in the snow, right? That's what they're meant for. But if you hit the snow, it's just the wrong time. The snow doesn't have a hard enough crust on the top, so they end up breaking through anyways. And yeah, they really struggled on our trip into that camp pretty hard. David, you had something to say?
00:34:07
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah. I was going to ask nothing about, you know, Rudolph for Christmas, but did historic reindeer herders and like the, you know, the tiger, the step, did they, did they use skis to break trail or was it like a different thing back then?
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, they say they say they did. We actually had a pair of wooden skis on our camp. They were really old. Actually, they gave them to Todd because Todd really wanted them. I think he gave him some money for him. But they're super cool wooden skis that they carved out of a side of a tree. And I remember one real funny moment was we were sitting in our house and they had used these skis as kind of planks on the floor of the house they built for us. And one of the Doha teenagers was sitting there kind of hacking at it with a big knife.
00:34:54
Speaker
And Todd was like, stop. Don't do that. And he's like, what? They're trash. They're crappy. They don't work anymore. And Todd was like, they're cultural treasures. I don't know. I don't think it translated exactly into Mongolian, but it was a super funny moment.
00:35:14
Speaker
They're cultural treasures. They are. They're super neat. Probably some of the last handmade wooden skis around in the Taiga. Cool. Well, I guess that'll conclude this section. We can go on to section three or session three. We talk about your high points and low points of your PhD work and what you're doing now. So I guess we'll get back after the break.
00:35:35
Speaker
And welcome back to a Life in Ruins podcast. Still continuing our conversation with Dr. Spencer Pelton. And we're going to conclude this episode by talking with Dr. Pelton about his post-PhD career and just where he's at now. So Dr.
Balancing CRM Work and Academia
00:35:52
Speaker
Pelton, what have you been doing since you got your PhD from the University of Wyoming?
00:35:57
Speaker
Oh, shortly after I got my PhD, I got an email from our department from a company called Transcon Environmental, and they were looking for an archaeologist in Wyoming with a graduate degree that had spent some time doing CRM work, and it sounded a lot like me.
00:36:15
Speaker
But it was fine for the president of the company. I was a little suspicious that it was real because that never happens. Presidents of companies don't just send out emails with their personal numbers to call them. But I'm glad I followed up on it because I did. I interviewed with them last winter of last year. I've been working for Transcon now for just about a year. I started March 8th last year.
00:36:38
Speaker
It's been a great experience. I've been working primarily on a big infrastructure project between Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and Rock Springs, Wyoming, big transmission line called the Gateway West Project. But also, I've been working on some projects throughout the West in Utah, Arizona, we're doing a little bit of stuff in Nevada, as well as a couple other projects in Wyoming. It's been great.
00:37:04
Speaker
I've gotten a whole lot more experience than other aspects of the environmental planning process than I thought I thought I would get. A lot of my days, I'm actually not working on archaeology. I'm working on stuff like raptors and noxious weeds and roads and that kind of stuff. Not every day, but oftentimes my work is focused on other parts of the environmental planning process. I actually have really found myself to enjoy it.
00:37:32
Speaker
and dabbling in other sorts of resources. Now, are you pursuing academic positions at all, or are you pretty firmly happy with your current position with that CRM firm?
00:37:51
Speaker
I'm really happy at Transcon Environmental. I've applied for a couple of academic jobs here and there, but I'm being very selective about it. I'm doing the extremely controversial thing of not applying for every academic job that's advertised every year. I'm only applying to ones that I would genuinely want and want to pursue. It's really not what you're supposed to do in this position, a lot of people will tell you, but ultimately my quality of life and
00:38:19
Speaker
the place I live, the people I'm around, I think better a little bit more to me than that relentless pursuit of an academic position. I'm applying to them here and there, but they don't grow on trees and there's a huge oversaturated applicant pool of PhDs trying to land these positions by people that are more talented than me and also a little more driven to pursue an academic path than me. I'm being pretty selective about once that I put my name in the hat for.
00:38:49
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. I remember when I told you I got into Boulder, you told me to not spend a lot of money on brunch because it racks up quickly. Yeah, that's how I spent $10,000 in Boulder one month. Yeah, and I didn't follow that advice to the very dismay of my bank account when I first got here. Oh, yeah. Gotta have your eggs, Benny, huh? No, I need aggressive amounts of mimosas.
00:39:19
Speaker
So Spencer, you're saying that you're kind of selective about the jobs that you're looking for in academia and probably in CRM as well. Can you walk us through that process of how you kind of figure out what school or what job you want to apply for or not? Yeah, sure. At this point, it comes down to a balance between
00:39:43
Speaker
compensation and personal interest is what it boils down to. In terms of personal interests, I think the academic jobs that I consider going for are ones that have a strong research program, programs that don't require you to have an onerous teaching load.
00:40:07
Speaker
are really the only ones that I've been considering applying for. I love doing research. That's why I continued to do a PhD program, so I'd have a chance to do a lot of awesome archaeological research, and that's what it provided me.
00:40:23
Speaker
if I'm going to keep doing the academic thing, it really has to be in a research capacity. The other thing that you really have to take into consideration is compensation. And a lot of starting academic jobs are compensated very poorly for the amount of work that you put into it, especially when you start getting into adjunct positions and they kind of like dangle the carrot in front of you with like yearly positions, that kind of stuff. Those kinds of types of routes are just, they're a bit abusive.
00:40:53
Speaker
it. A lot of academic programs in the country are really living off of this system where they're just keeping people around for as long as they want them and then kind of kicking into the curb. We're just living off of adjunct positions and I think that's ultimately a non-sustainable path for higher education and it's not really one that I wish to endorse in any way. Feel the burn 2020.
00:41:21
Speaker
That's a good point, though. It's good to see that side of it, because people are usually constantly told, keep going, get your school, get your degree, apply for jobs, teach. And it's good to see that you're doing well in a job that you like. And I think you and Hallie have a house now and everything. Yeah, it's good to see it. Yeah, it's ultimately, I mean, a lot of people, it's no slight of their path. But a lot of people they want, they have
00:41:49
Speaker
nothing else in their mind but an academic job but there's a lot of ways to make a living in archaeology and a lot of them are extremely satisfying ways to make a living and I dare say maybe a little less anxiety inducing than an academic path even though academia is super fun.
00:42:07
Speaker
super fun career you get the summers off you kind of have a pretty pretty wide breadth of intellectual freedom in most positions ideally but there's other there's a lot of other paths and i've i've found my one for the last year to be really fulfilling and
00:42:22
Speaker
And it set me up to have a pretty stable life. Yeah. Like you said, own a house. So the truck got married. Now we have, you know, time and money to do vacations and do fun stuff. So yeah, it has its perks for sure. I like that aspect a lot. Yeah.
00:42:40
Speaker
Um, I guess, let's see, like, do you, I guess to, to continue on that, do you feel like fulfilled in your career or like, do you feel fulfillment? For sure. Yeah. And I, but like I said earlier, a lot of it comes from being able to pursue some things that have really put me out of my comfort zone and really out of my core skillset. So for instance, doing marketing, uh, to like telecom companies or energy companies or, um,
00:43:06
Speaker
writing proposals for bids. All these are things that I've never really had to do. I think a lot of academics never have to do, but they're extremely valuable job skills and the vast majority of the world.
00:43:22
Speaker
just being able to enter a room and talk to people and try to sell your product to them, basically. That's one thing that I've actually found myself enjoying a lot more than I thought I would when I started with this company. And also, like I said, getting involved with other resources and other aspects of the environmental planning process and seeing how archaeology is one small part of this much larger process has been a really
00:43:50
Speaker
thing for me to deal with. And that's really what keeps me interested in the job, ultimately, I think. I mean, I like doing the archaeology as well, obviously. I don't think many archaeologists that have had a foot in both the academic realm and the CRM realm would tell you that CRM archaeology is
00:44:07
Speaker
quite as exciting as, let's say, digging at Ulm Rock Shelter, you know, at a rock shelter with 11,000 years of prehistory stacked on top of each other with twine and, you know, perishable artifacts and all sorts of cool tools and stuff.
00:44:22
Speaker
So that is just the reality of that. I would suggest if you do go into CRM, it's nice to kind of keep a foot in some other realms of it as well, to keep you engaged and make sure you don't burn out. Because, you know, writing up firecracked rock scatter number 570 is never anybody's ideal way to be engaged with archaeology. Yeah.
00:44:46
Speaker
But you still get to through your current profession. I mean, you're still doing research projects on the side, correct?
00:44:56
Speaker
Yeah, nights and weekends. I'm still pretty engaged with several research projects. And honestly, I wake up some days and think I have more time to do that in the private sector than I would if I was in an academic job with a heavy teaching load. That's probably a little optimistic because no teachers have the summers off.
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah, I've been able to maintain projects at the Sisters Hill Paleo-Indian site, which is a great, now stratified Paleo-Indian site of Buffalo, Wyoming. I've managed to create a pretty interesting marriage of my personal academic projects and the CRM world at the Powers II site, where we've worked out a way for the Wyoming Abandoned Mine Lands program to put some money into stabilizing this Paleo-Indian ochre quarry.
00:45:45
Speaker
And I'd been working on that site for a couple years prior and now we've actually got some state money involved to help stabilize this really remarkable site. So yeah, that's definitely kept my interest in archaeology stimulating in a big way.
00:46:01
Speaker
And at this point, I'm on papers. I'm kind of the guy that comes in and writes the background section or something. And people will ask me to kind of edit stuff and formulate arguments and stuff like that. So I've been able to keep engaged with research in some pretty meaningful ways. Yeah, I mean, I know I saw you over the summer when I was field directing at Hellgap.
00:46:24
Speaker
Um, like the project that you and, uh, dr. Frison are running up powers. And it was just like amazing that you were able to run that. And then.
00:46:32
Speaker
you'd work during the day and then you'd help advise for the site. It was very impressive the way that you were able to do that. That wasn't an ideal setup sitting in my pickup truck with a laptop filling out site forms for a fiber optic project while also trying to keep the total station running. It powers too basically, but yeah, this year will be different because we do. Like I said, we've got a
00:46:57
Speaker
Powers, too, is my day job now in some capacity. We have funding to go out there and do work on it. So I've been able to work out a way to kind of marry the two aspects, the two hats, I guess. My academic hat and my CRM hat. Yeah, fair enough. And maybe when you're done with Powers, you can go over to Hell Gap and help complete the excavation that you had me start this past summer.
00:47:22
Speaker
Our little, uh, our little shovel, skim operation. Yeah. Yeah. The one that revealed, uh, like over 700 artifacts from that little, from that little unit. Yeah. Yeah. The one that I'm presenting at the essays on that at a poster. So you want to know more about that debacle and how I was shot in the back of the head by Dr. Marcel Kornfeld from excavating outside of locality one stop on by.
00:47:48
Speaker
Well, it was worth it. I just I just remember because you're just because Chris Rowe found that point that shouldn't have been there. And you were just like, hey, man, it'd be good science if we got a shovel test in there to see what the soil looks like. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds reasonable. And then 700 artifacts later, you're like, yeah, man, there's definitely something interesting here. I'm going back to powers later and just like, what the fuck?
00:48:15
Speaker
Yeah, it took five years of a PhD to tell you, uh, yes, 700 artifacts out of a little shovel scrape of a cut bank was interesting. That's wild. Got some more secrets, man. Yeah. I've only been there once. It's a really cool site from what I saw. Yeah.
00:48:35
Speaker
Um, so I guess what leads to our next question is like, we're all anthropologists and we went to arguably one of the best, the best anthropology programs in the country. And we might be a little biased, but I mean, we learned for field, we learned from like a couple of the best archeologists that I've ever met. What are your opinions on the field of anthropology and like, what's the future of it in like, you know, American national discourse? You might regret asking this question, David.
00:49:03
Speaker
I regret a lot of things, but let's see. I mean, I think that American political discourse has been heavily influenced at the moment by certain branches of anthropology and not in a hugely positive way. I think that anthropology is largely culpable for creating the acceptance of relativistic thought, which is both a really good thing, but also something that was weaponized by the Trump administration during the last election.
00:49:32
Speaker
and facts are like your opinions, man.
00:49:36
Speaker
And I think that anthropology should take a little bit of the blame for creating such an acceptance of, I guess, relativistic thought and something that's been kind of weaponized. Other than that, though, I mean, ultimately, I think anthropology is usually important for furthering human understanding in the world. And it's something that I still feel really strongly about.
00:50:04
Speaker
In terms of archaeology, particularly, I'm still a little skeptical that we can kind of take lessons from the past and hold them to have any sort of direct relevance to today's problems or the problems of the future. I do think, though, that just really simply, archaeology inspires joy and awe in people. And that's something that should be considered valuable unto itself in my mind.
00:50:30
Speaker
not just new discoveries or new pretty things, but some of the patterns that archaeologists have been able to pull out of the record of how societies form and change through time and collapse. All those things are extremely engaging aspects of our field and things that we should capitalize on to keep justifying our relevance as a discipline in national discourse.
00:50:56
Speaker
Yeah, I guess to ask one more question on that, which I just thought of, you and I and I guess Connor and Carlton also are pretty evolutionary minded people from our schooling.
Anthropology's Impact on Political Discourse
00:51:07
Speaker
What do you think the this might be a deep question, but like you said, archaeology kind of inspires awe in people and like wonder, what do you think that has to do with like, like the human like species, you know? Well, I think that
00:51:23
Speaker
since we're very enthralled by the human past, I would imagine that humans in the human past were also enthralled by their own human past. I think there's something pretty fundamental in the human brain that really, you know, that we obviously have a sense of time and we obviously have had it for a really long time. So I would imagine that
00:51:47
Speaker
upper Paleolithic foragers of northern Eurasia had the same sense of awe about their own past and found things from their ancestors and cave paintings and weird looking stone tools and weird looking bones and also had a comparable sense of awe. So I guess in the largest sense that that sense of joy and awe of the past is probably a pretty universal
00:52:10
Speaker
human trait and something that we can think of as a unifying character of the human nature. Awesome. Yeah, I agree. I think the Venus figurines and the recent Roman graffiti found on Hadrian's wall is a testament to humans perpetuity towards. You care to make a version of that now?
00:52:37
Speaker
Well, thanks Spencer for being on this podcast. From all of us, you know, we really had a lovely time chatting with you. Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Those are good questions. Yeah. Made me think about some stuff I hadn't thought about in a while. So appreciate you guys taking some time to sit down with me. Absolutely. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, I think this is a perfect opportunity for us to kind of show what this podcast is about. We really wanted someone to distinguish that we, you know,
00:53:05
Speaker
and someone that we kind of know pretty well in an academic context on here to just kind of give us. I mean, you've had a really interesting career and definitely, I mean, the amount of publications you've authored and co-authored is just amazing. Yeah. Like the fact that like, yeah, I'm trying. I'm actually, you know, I have my PhD quals due on Monday and I'm doing this instead. So, you know,
00:53:33
Speaker
Well, thanks for taking some time out to do it. That's quite a big sacrifice for making there. I'd get back to the books. I know. I know. All right. Well, thank you, everyone, all of our listeners for this first episode of A Life in Ruins podcast. And thank you, Dr. Pelton, for being our first guest. So with that, we will see you guys all in another episode. Awesome. Thanks.
00:54:06
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer.
00:54:33
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com. You want to try that one more time? Yeah, it sounds like an asshole.