Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Archaeology and Anthropology Podcast with Dr Michael Rivera - Modern Myth - Episode 7
671 Plays4 years ago
To welcome in the new year, Tristan speaks to Dr. Michael Rivera, who is the creator of the Archaeology and Anthropology Podcast. We discuss the process leading up to the podcast’s creation, how to think about and plan ahead and be ready to release episodes. Michael explains the purpose of his podcast as well as the benefit of getting a diverse set of voices broadcast to a wide audience.
The Arch and Anth podcast releases 3 times a week, featuring guests from all areas exploring humanity’s history and development. Check out the social media and if you would like to support Michael in his work you can become a Patron through Patreon.
Links
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Archaeology Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast now.
00:00:23
Speaker
The story of the knowledge that we seek, broadening horizons in to me. It's a modern myth from yet at this age of darkness. We will fight for truth at night. In this age of lies, we will rise. Now it's clear, misconception too healthy. They told you what you want to hear.
00:00:53
Speaker
Why can't you see that the truth will set you free? Expose this modern myth with me
Meet Dr. Michael Rivera
00:01:33
Speaker
Hello today I am sitting with Dr. Michael Rivera.
00:01:37
Speaker
who is the producer of the Archaeology and Anthropology podcast. Now, this is quite a recent podcast. This is one of the new ones. It releases three times a week. And it is definitely, definitely one of my favorites. It gets it's on my auto download list. So, Michael, thank you very much for coming to speak to me today. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Getting into Podcasting
00:02:05
Speaker
I just want to start off with kind of understanding what got you into the podcasting game. As I understand it, it wasn't something that you just came up with. It wasn't something that you just had the idea for. It was something you planned. So could you tell me a little bit about the background to what kind of inspired you to think about doing a podcast as opposed to some other form of like public outreach like a blog?
00:02:32
Speaker
Uh, that's a great question. And, uh, a story that I love telling other people about, it's something that I told my family and my friends quite a lot about before, uh, before the first episode went out. Um, I first conceived of this back in, in the summer of 2017. And so that's quite a long time ago, right? And I remember that summer I was talking to a lot of schools.
00:02:59
Speaker
a lot of public audiences about archaeology and anthropology. And what I noticed was that, you know, I was spending about an hour's time lecturing, or I was maybe doing a workshop with some skeletons in front of me for two hours with the class of 20 kids. And I was always, I just felt that there was something itching at me that, you know, I could only speak to.
00:03:25
Speaker
these 20 kids or this public audience of 100 people at a time. And I always thought, is there a way for me to reach even more people by investing the same amount of time?
Choosing Podcasting Over Other Mediums
00:03:39
Speaker
Is there another medium that I can use to do this? Because there are only a select few of us, archaeologists and anthropologists, who already have the audience and who can sell out
00:03:53
Speaker
an entire theater, maybe at the Royal Science, I forgot what it's called now, at the Royal Society or at the British Museum. But for a lot of us who are very passionate about outreach, I really wanted a different way of doing outreach that could feature more of us and not already people with a profile. So that was really what the motivation was because at the time I was
00:04:22
Speaker
listening to a lot of other podcasts, not about what we do, but about, you know, television and movies about comedy. Um, I listened to a lot of radio for, for all my life actually, because I, I just enjoy the, the medium that that is the podcasting medium where you get to learn about things.
00:04:41
Speaker
you get to be challenged on your views, depending on the host or depending on who hosts get as guests sharing their ideas. And it's also just entertainment and a way to have something in the background going while you're
00:04:56
Speaker
running data analysis, which a lot of scientists have to do, or when you're, you know, on your commute on your way to work or when you're at the gym working out.
Starting a Podcast: Challenges and Preparations
00:05:05
Speaker
Right. So I just thought, you know, why not merge this enjoyment that I have a podcast with my outreach goals and put the two together.
00:05:17
Speaker
So what was special about podcasts in particular? Was it just the radio stuff or I mean, did you ever consider maybe taking doing videos on YouTube instead? Yeah, I did consider other forms. And when I was a teenager, you know, back in those days when you had a blogger site,
00:05:38
Speaker
Some people still do, of course, or you had Myspace, you had Zanga, all of these things or the distant past now where I was a teenager and I always spent a lot of my time online and I would blog about my life or something funny that happened to me that day. If you search in the right way, you might be able to dig out some of those things and I find them really embarrassing now, of course.
00:06:07
Speaker
because they're just the ramblings of a teenager. But I did consider other media. I really admired podcasters in particular. I listened to a lot of podcasts that I just thought were really well done.
00:06:26
Speaker
In the UK, we have a program called QI, quite interesting, where, you know, Stephen Fry or at the moment, Sandy Torxvig hosts. And you know, it's all about trivia, right? And so this was one of my favorite podcasts. And the, the, the assistants who would do research for the show, for this trivia show, they hosted their own podcast called No Such Thing as a Fish.
00:06:50
Speaker
And that was one of the key things that I really liked about it, where they were sharing really nerdy information, a lot of knowledge, a lot of research had gone into it, and they were sharing it in this humorous, personal, comedic way that I really admired. And I just thought that this was the one that I wanted to experiment with. Blogging I used to do. I actually have plans to restart one.
00:07:20
Speaker
very soon, but it was just something exciting. I think that podcasting, especially in the sciences or the humanities and the arts, it's still something that's not really popular as a way of doing outreach and in a way that excited me because it is so new. Blogging has been around for a long time and many people do that. I wanted to try something different and challenge myself.
Launching the First Episode
00:07:47
Speaker
Well, Michael, you have to count yourself lucky that you aren't like me who has a podcast since they were 16, because that is even in some ways worse, in my opinion, to hear how one sounded when that one was that age. So that's that's definitely I definitely understand where you're coming from with the old old material content.
00:08:12
Speaker
Sorry, what specifically did you do to kind of prepare yourself for what would become the Ark and Anth podcast? Was it always that name? Was it always that idea? Did you have any other ideas? I remember when the first thing that I did was I bought a book that was called Podcasting for Dummies.
00:08:40
Speaker
Uh, in it, it ran through everything that you need to know, basically, because even though I was a, uh, I was a PhD student at the time and really highly trained in this specific field of study, I had no idea what I was doing in terms of podcasting. So from podcasting for dummies, I learned a lot about, um, the equipment that you would need. And it's not just physical hardware that you need, but a lot of software for audio recording and editing.
00:09:07
Speaker
A lot goes into that process. You need to think about server space that's very important and how much server space you need because the ways that the servers cost is by the megabyte. And so you can only upload a certain amount or
00:09:25
Speaker
There are some plans which allow you to upload unlimited amounts of minutes, but those would be more pricey. And so there's a lot of logistics and a lot of different steps to the process that I found that you had to worry about. So when I was looking at, especially the programs that I would need, the hardware, like the microphones and the mixer that I would need, the server costs, those were the things that I knew they cost money.
00:09:54
Speaker
that really worried me at first. So I realized where I was going to at university. At the University of Cambridge, they had a public engagement office and they have been really fantastic support during this whole process. They had
Funding and Naming the Podcast
00:10:10
Speaker
a starter grant for anyone who wanted to do a outreach project. So other projects that they funded in my department at least, I know that in the previous year,
00:10:23
Speaker
the year before I got my funding, they were funding a board game, a board game based on ancient civilizations created by two archaeologists in my department. And so, you know, they were already sort of interested in supporting our department's outreach goals, and I applied, and I was really fortunate to get a good sum of money from them to help buy all this stuff and help set me up.
00:10:53
Speaker
The next stage was to think about the name as you as you mentioned and you know when I wrote the application, I thought I would I thought the title might actually something different. I thought it would be the signs of bones and but you know I thought about it a little bit more.
00:11:10
Speaker
And when I was an undergraduate student, it was a lot different from my PhD training because when you're an undergraduate student, you're exposed to almost all the areas of archaeology that there can be. So not just working with skeletons and not just osteoarchaeology, but also looking at pottery and looking at other kinds of bioarchaeology like using stable isotopes and using, you know, radiocarbon dating methods.
00:11:38
Speaker
And in anthropology, there's not just the biological aspect, even though that's very broad, of course. It's not just bones, but genes, the other primates that are really closely related to us. We look at their behavior and their biology quite a lot. And there's, of course, there's social anthropology and linguistic anthropology, medical anthropology. And I just thought I would widen it up. And so I came up with the name of simply the Arkan anthropocast.
00:12:08
Speaker
I worried at the time that people wouldn't immediately recognize it. Maybe they might think, is that architecture and something else that we don't understand? But I just tried to make it as clear as possible. The design of my logo, for example, makes it very clear what it could be about. Looks like there is a human skull on it with a good double helix of a DNA strand running through it, a trowel.
00:12:35
Speaker
is on my logo. And so I just wanted to make it very clear what I was doing. And then for about almost a year and a half, I was just simply preparing what I was going to record.
00:12:51
Speaker
I think you've definitely highlighted all the things that if somebody came to me to ask about how to make a podcast, it was definitely those are the kind of things I think someone ought to consider. I think it's really important that I think when it comes to podcast, people don't recognise or realise how much effort and hard work really does go in.
00:13:13
Speaker
If I take you back to those first kind of episode planning days, was there any kind of goal that you had
Showcasing Anthropology's Breadth
00:13:23
Speaker
set for your first podcast episode? Was there anything that you felt like you had to kind of have in it? And how did your first episode then end up going?
00:13:36
Speaker
That's a really great question. I love thinking back to this time because, you know, I was about to embark on something that I knew would fundamentally change my life, right. It's, as you say, it's a really big undertaking. It's a big
00:13:51
Speaker
uh, chunk of my time, uh, something that I think about, uh, you know, this project is something I think about every single day of my life. And I knew that going forward, I would continue to think about it for so long as the, as the podcast, uh, was, was active. And so there was a lot of pressure, uh, mostly just for myself, you know, my, my partner and my, my family and friends, they were all supportive of this, this idea, but, you know, I was scared that, um,
00:14:20
Speaker
that it wouldn't be received well, that I wouldn't do justice to the field because I was worried that maybe I hadn't learned enough sound editing skills, interview skills. I couldn't make a compelling show.
00:14:39
Speaker
But just like many other things in academia that I had prepared for, preparing to go to conferences or preparing to write up very long scientific reports, I knew that all it took was just preparation. And I thought very carefully about what format I wanted to use and what my message would want to be with the podcast. So I wanted to, with the podcast,
00:15:05
Speaker
show the breadth of our discipline, first of all. I wanted to hopefully share with general audiences what makes our scholarship so interesting, maybe have an educational aspect about the theoretical and scientific concepts that ground all of our ideas.
00:15:26
Speaker
And I also wanted to show the personal journeys taken to become anthropologists as well. That was a very important aspect to me because I just think that it helps people, especially in outreach, to hear people's story. When you bombard people with facts,
00:15:47
Speaker
It doesn't translate as well. People are not as receptive to new information when it just comes across like you're bombarding people with a lot of information. And so I decided that what I would do is not host the show myself. I would interview experts much like you do. And I would have a different voice coming on the show
00:16:12
Speaker
Uh, every, every episode and through that as well. Um, I've, I've very carefully selected who my podcast guests would be. And in the very beginning, I knew that the first episode had to be someone where I knew that I could guarantee I would have good rapport with.
00:16:30
Speaker
I, uh, who was a good speaker who had interesting research, not just, um, you know, in, in one aspect, but, you know, was doing a very interdisciplinary work. And so I interviewed my, uh, one of my best friends in biological anthropology, my friend,
Improving After the First Recording
00:16:46
Speaker
Dr. Sarah Louise de Croza.
00:16:48
Speaker
At the moment, she is a lecturer at the University of Victoria on the west coast of Canada, and she does really fascinating research about how do girls grow and develop into women, skeletal-y, and especially around their pelvic region, where the pelvis has to be adapted for locomotion and any obstetric childbirth-related needs.
00:17:18
Speaker
And so because that hasn't been looked at in earlier anthropology, but in the last 20 years, this is a burgeoning area of research looking at girls and women's health. And so this is kind of like very interesting because she talked about cultural aspects of childbirth
00:17:38
Speaker
biological aspects of childbirth. And she's a great, great storyteller. She, she even hosts her own YouTube channel, where she and my other friend Michelle, where they host something called humans in five. And, you know, they're basically like five minute videos about anthropology. And and so I knew she would be a good speaker. And we actually did that. How did I feel that it went? Well, I
00:18:07
Speaker
I remember that we actually recorded twice, and not a lot of people know that, but I think that both of us, but more so me, were a little bit nervous because we knew it would be episode one.
00:18:22
Speaker
In the first take, we were so nervous. We kept flubbing over our lines. We didn't know how to have a natural conversation because we kept thinking, oh, no, we have to hit this point, this point, this point. What if people who are listening have no idea what archaeology and what anthropology is? So we need to start from the beginning and we need to explain it in great detail. And so we worried quite a lot about that.
00:18:52
Speaker
When I was editing the first episode, I felt like I also didn't know how to edit a show. I'd never done it before, even though I'd read quite a lot of blogs and watched a lot of YouTube videos about how to do it, but it was really trying to get over that fear of
00:19:11
Speaker
How do I do this for the first time? And so I realized that we probably needed to record again. We did the second take. The second take was much better and almost perfect, required very little editing. And I was so, so happy that as soon as it went out, a lot of people wanted to share it. I feel like I have been online and very sort of well-connected in my network.
00:19:39
Speaker
for quite a while now for a number of years during my PhD. And a lot of people were craving projects like this. They want people to do outreach, but everybody is so busy and have a lot of other commitments that they just couldn't do it themselves. And I think that I was really just grateful for everybody's support and they were retweeting the first episode, they were sharing it and they were listening to it and giving positive feedback to it. And so I was really happy
00:20:09
Speaker
Um, you know, that I had the time I had fortunately got some money to start it. And, you know, from there, it was, it was three episodes a week.
00:20:18
Speaker
And that's really, really great to hear. I think it's important to get things right and it's important to kind of, I always say, I think some of my first episodes were not to the standard I would now expect them to be. And I think that's the same for everyone. I think
00:20:42
Speaker
There's a lot of self-discovery that you go through making a podcast. I've struggled sometimes to find the niche that my podcast fills because I'm always kind of discovering new ways of editing and new ways that I want to present the information.
Evolution of Guests and Topics
00:20:59
Speaker
And I'm slowly getting to the point where I've realized that I actually do better in one-on-one interviews than I do kind of doing a monologue, even though I can monologue at someone
00:21:11
Speaker
for ours on end. I struggle with it just me and the microphone. I kind of want to ask, so what is one of the big lessons that you've learned about your own style and taste in editing your podcasts and producing them?
00:21:28
Speaker
That's a great question. So at the very beginning, I had a vague idea of who I would want to feature because three episodes a week is quite a lot, is what I was told by a lot of people out there. And I remember that there's another podcast, it's about television, about reality television, in fact.
00:21:52
Speaker
Um, about the show survivor and it sounds really silly, but I borrowed a lot of inspiration from that show. Um, so the, the show is called Rob has a podcast is it's hosted by Rob Cessternino, who was a former survivor contestant. And it sounds really silly. Um, you know, talking about reality TV, but he, he releases about seven or eight episodes a week.
00:22:14
Speaker
Um, and he has lots of different co-hosts and lots of other people who host the show for him in different segments, uh, related to the show. And so that was where my thinking, uh, came from to do three a week, because, uh, I could then feature more people, more voices, and, you know, also cover a lot of different topics in the same week and.
00:22:38
Speaker
You know, I think that as long as people are hearing interesting content, they will show up, they will download the episodes and they will give it a shot no matter what the topic is. Because I think that when you get anthropologists and archaeologists speaking about the thing that they have dedicated so much time to doing, what comes out inherently will be a passion, sort of a very passionate interview about what they care about, right?
00:23:08
Speaker
And.
00:23:10
Speaker
At the very beginning, I interviewed a lot of my friends first, or people that I had good relationships with online, where we had followed each other on Twitter for a while. Of course, this took a year and a half to plan. So I did mention it to a lot of people, from my own students to professors who were visiting Cambridge to give a talk. I would mention it to them. And some of them said, whenever you launch this thing,
00:23:39
Speaker
I want to support you. I want to help you out. If I can be an expert guest, then please have me on the show anytime. I'm happy to do it. And so I'm so, so grateful for the first 10 or 15 guests who showed up.
00:23:54
Speaker
They were speaking about all kinds of things like, you know, Mexican, you know, Mesoamerican archaeology. They were talking about primates and that the first, you know, primates, when did the first primate evolve from other animals? I've had so many guests talk about all sorts of things, animal bones, human bones, about ceramics, about disease and health in the past, and from all over the world as well.
00:24:23
Speaker
How it's changed since then is I've been very conscious over what exactly I'm going to include in the show and very careful about who I select as guests. There's also, right now, I think as we speak, there are 60 episodes out.
00:24:42
Speaker
There is a broad representation of experts of all sub disciplines within anthropology. And, you know, I keep looking for the gaps. I keep looking at where have I not, you know, addressed a very important area of our field yet. How can I do that?
00:25:01
Speaker
And now we enter the second phase of the podcast. This is how I perceive it. After I recorded 10 or 15 episodes, that's four or five weeks of podcasting. And now we're thinking about, where do we carry this forward now, now that it's beginning to be a well-oiled machine? I started to think about, are there opportunities here to feature guests of all genders?
00:25:31
Speaker
of all nationalities, of all socioeconomic backgrounds and academic stages, of all ethnicities, of all sexualities and other significant axes, right? Because a lot of the time,
00:25:45
Speaker
When we're thinking about who does the science or who does the archaeology or who does the social anthropology, I think that sometimes public perception is that you're probably going to look like Lara Croft or Indiana Jones, or you're going to look like maybe David Attenborough.
00:26:06
Speaker
But the reality is that many people contribute to these fields, and they might not be what you expect. And so I've been very proud to feature so many disabled scholars and women and racialized scholars and other minoritized anthropologists giving them this platform to highlight their research. I really always try to share their academic journeys.
00:26:32
Speaker
I love getting to know what motivates them and how did they grow into the researcher or the practitioner that they currently are.
Importance of Diverse Guests
00:26:45
Speaker
I'm keeping this going, basically, and I'm also looking forward to making some changes actually in the next few weeks and months.
00:26:55
Speaker
That's a really good point that I actually want to stay on a little tiny bit is the breadth and diversity of that of that kind of like roster of speakers because it's something that I think
00:27:08
Speaker
Archaeology has as a broad kind of discipline, it actually has a lot of really amazing passionate people who I think when it comes to traditional forms of media don't get picked because they don't fit what it's expected of in a TV programme of what an archaeologist is.
00:27:30
Speaker
And I think that podcasts provide a really good way of exposing people to the wide range of thoughts. But in particular, I'd like to know more about the motivation that you had to even study archaeology or anthropology. Why did you even
00:27:58
Speaker
come to was your place of research was Cambridge. So why Cambridge and why archaeology? Why the past?
Rivera's Early Interest in Archaeology
00:28:08
Speaker
So I would say like my first exposure to this field came a very long time ago when I was about 13. I grew up in Hong Kong, and I'm a Filipino Chinese person. A lot of people, you know, in Hong Kong, they don't really
00:28:26
Speaker
They're not really aware of history and culture. It's not that it's not there, that the arts and cultural studies are not happening there, but it's really understated in Hong Kong. I loved going to the History Museum. I loved going to, you know, see theater that was, you know, based on historical periods. But the problem was that if you wanted to study these disciplines, you couldn't do it in Hong Kong as much.
00:28:56
Speaker
So there was a lot of social anthropology. There was some archaeology happening in the museums, but these departments were always a little bit underfunded in comparison to other fields like engineering or law or medicine. Right. And so initially I watched a lot of TV. I was sort of, you know, I again, I lived on the Internet and, you know, I was being exposed to some television shows. One of them was Bones and I watched
00:29:27
Speaker
in Bones, this really badass scientist, Temperance Brennan, who would use human remains and tell the stories of people who could no longer tell them, mainly based in forensic cases. But there were a couple of times where she also did archaeological cases. And I just wanted to know whether this was a real thing. And when it came time to applying for universities,
00:29:54
Speaker
I knew I didn't want to stay in Hong Kong. I wanted to live somewhere different. I'm very proud of coming from Hong Kong. But it was just sort of I wanted to explore the world a little bit more. And I remember flipping through the book of subjects that you can do at university. And I remember looking at like, oh, accounting, probably not.
00:30:21
Speaker
But then it was anthropology and archaeology. And I just thought, oh, wow, this is that thing that I saw in that TV show. It is all about people. I've always been fascinated by people, by living in this very multicultural metropolis, such as Hong Kong, where there's 7-point-something million people there in a very small amount of space. I've always been interested in people.
00:30:47
Speaker
And what motivates them and how are we different or how are we similar? This was the subject for me. I applied to schools in Canada, in Australia, and in the UK. In the end, I went to the University of Kent, in Canterbury. And that's where I did my bachelor's degree. And that was where I was really introduced to all the sub-disciplines within anthropology. And then in the end, I knew that, you know,
00:31:16
Speaker
I really wanted to do research. I got the opportunity in my undergrad to do this research about medieval English remains and telling the stories of people from that time period. And I was just fascinated by it. So I went to Cambridge and did my master's degree there and my PhD degree in many of the similar questions of the older
00:31:42
Speaker
the remains are or the further back in time we go, it gets harder to suss out what people were doing.
00:31:52
Speaker
It really is what drives me. It's almost like it motivates me to want to find out more so that we can find out more about our common history and our common heritage. Where do we all come from and why do we exist the way that we do? Well, we can look back into history and even prehistory to find out those answers.
Social Media's Role in Podcasting
00:32:13
Speaker
So yeah, I would say that that is my origin story, if you will.
00:32:18
Speaker
It's a good one. It's a particularly good origin story. I like it. I know you said you were very active on social media before all of this. I want to contrast that a little bit with my experience, which was the only reason I got active on social media is because I started the podcast because
00:32:38
Speaker
I felt beforehand I couldn't actually talk to anybody about archaeology without having a reason to talk to them. You know, I had my bachelor's and I kind of felt very much, I had no reason, nobody would want to talk to me unless I had something to offer.
00:32:56
Speaker
having done podcasts in the past, that was kind of my my way in. How do you feel about getting to talk to other archaeology and anthropology podcasters? What's it like out there in the podcasting world?
Building Relationships with Other Podcasters
00:33:12
Speaker
Well, that's a great question. I, you know, I had it
00:33:19
Speaker
I talked to some people who were doing podcasting before, so specifically in the realm of what I do, which is working with fossils or modern human remains, I knew that there was some podcasting happening. I know that Ohio State University has a great podcast called A Story of Us. There is another one by two of our friends who host The Dirt.
00:33:43
Speaker
Um, and I really love the dirt podcast. It's really well done. Um, another one hosts about a leaky foundation called origins. It's really good. Um, I, I, I don't know, but I also felt that it was still quite new. And even though there were these, uh, few individuals who were really putting in a lot of effort and getting a lot of outreach done, um,
00:34:06
Speaker
it wasn't something that a lot of academics inside our fields were aware of that was happening in some universities or some institutions. And getting to know some of them now, and now we're beginning to, now I'm I guess more established now than I was when I first began in May. Now we're talking about guesting on each other's shows or
00:34:34
Speaker
just sharing ideas about how we think the medium is going, I think it's really great to talk to other people who have a similar goal and have a similar process in working. There are many ways of doing this, of course, but when it really boils down to it, it's inviting guests, recording them, and then editing the show, and then releasing them, and then advertising them on social media. We go through all the same processes, broadly speaking,
00:35:04
Speaker
It's just good to get advice from people. Um, I remember talking to Anna Goldfield, uh, who hosts, co-host the, the dirt podcast before I even launched it. And, you know, she, she gave me a lot of useful advice about how to get started. And I, I think that, you know, where, where you can find friends who have a similar, uh, view, you have to sort of.
00:35:28
Speaker
hang on to them and keep each other in the loop about how it's going because at the end of the day, we all benefit from more interest in archaeology, podcasting, and we all benefit in terms of if someone is interested in your show, they're more likely to listen to my show and then maybe move on to the origin show or
00:35:51
Speaker
move on to Anthro Dish, this great podcast by my friend Sarah, who talks about food. The more interest that is gained and the more success that each of us as individuals have, we can spread that around as well. It benefits all of us. Actually, I couldn't have put it any way better. This is one of the things about
00:36:17
Speaker
indie podcasts and kind of like podcasts that are kind of meant for like a for public benefit, it benefits everyone to share that information and share that knowledge. I think I have listened started listening to so many podcasts of different varieties just from like somebody being a guest on somebody else's show. And I think it's so important that we do the support
00:36:44
Speaker
And we make the effort to kind of lift each other up because at the end of the day, when I've done research about archaeology podcasts, the main thing is that the field is much bigger than people expect. But that's a product of people feeling quite isolated or a lot of people listen without interacting.
00:37:09
Speaker
And I've found this definitely from my show, sometimes I feel like nobody's listening and sometimes I feel as if I'm making it for just me, which for some episodes I am. But it's one of these things where a lot of your hard work can sometimes, it can sometimes feel like it's not actually
00:37:31
Speaker
It's not you actually not doing anything or making a difference. And this is why I've always tried to recently boost posts. I've always tried to make it effort to like share content and help other people out because.
00:37:44
Speaker
You know, archaeology podcasting has been around since the late 90s. One of the earliest podcasts that I can find a record for is the audio news podcast from archaeological, which is still going. But even tracing even more recently, there's been a number of podcasts that were really popular at the time, but then disappeared. So I'm slowly trying to draw a big, huge collection of podcasts in archaeology and anthropology.
Encouragement to Start Podcasting
00:38:14
Speaker
so as that people have a resource to kind of look at and I'm particularly interested in non-English speaking podcasts as well as English speaking podcasts because I think there's one of the things about podcasts that make them, one of the issues is that a lot of people just think that public outreach needs to be in English to get to the widest audience but that's not always the case. So I think
00:38:39
Speaker
actively there are about 68 archaeology podcasts that are pretty active at the moment, but that's a list I'm constantly trying to add to. Is there anything that you would want to share with somebody who wants to make a podcast, an archaeology podcast? That's a great question. I think that
00:39:03
Speaker
You know, I definitely welcome anyone who wants to do it. There is no sort of limit to the space online in terms of who gets to do this because I think, again, it goes back to this thing where I think that, you know, representation of all the different people that we
00:39:25
Speaker
that we work with, who are our colleagues all around the world, that's really important. And we need to highlight that. There's a lot of discussion nowadays about diversifying and being very inclusive about who gets to practice the archaeology or the anthropology.
00:39:44
Speaker
But I also think that this discussion extends to also diversifying, decolonizing, expanding, who also is public facing in outreach initiatives as well. Because if we're going to do work that is relevant to broader society, then who we put in front?
00:40:07
Speaker
as the public communicators needs to reflect the public that we're speaking to. And so we cannot have only the most senior white dudes talk about what we do. We need everybody to do that. And that's why I really encourage anyone who wants to do
00:40:26
Speaker
podcasting or even blogging or creating YouTube channels to do it. And it will always seem scary. I've given advice to other people who wanted to do podcasts about politics or about law or about chemistry. I've done that for some other people who have come across my podcast. And what I tell them is that it definitely is a learning curve, especially at the beginning. But once you get into the groove of it,
00:40:53
Speaker
And once you start to hear that one person has heard this episode, five people have listened to this episode, 50, 100, 200 people have listened to the episode, it starts to get better and it starts to really feel like you have an impact and that you're having a positive effect on how the public is perceiving your field.
00:41:17
Speaker
I actually think that, you know, a lot of the time I borrow a lot of what I do in podcasting from what I learned in academia, because it's a lot of the same, uh, communication skills, at least from my point of view, I, I worried a lot of the time that, you know, no one would listen to the podcast, but you know, what, what really strikes me is that, uh, it depends on, you know, how you, how you present.
00:41:44
Speaker
your show and how you present your guests, if it's about the people and not about the information that they're sharing, that's important too. But most of all, if people are invested in you and they feel like they have a connection to your project, they have a connection to what other people are doing, a personal connection, they're going to invest their time into it.
00:42:10
Speaker
is something that I try to tell a lot of people when I was training people in outreach back in Cambridge. There were these master's students and undergrads who wanted to try science communication. And what I would always tell them, it's about storytelling. It's about putting yourself out there. If I were to tell you about, I don't know, dental caries or dental decay on teeth,
00:42:39
Speaker
I could run you through the science of it. I could run you through the anatomy of it and the disease process of it, but it won't be as effective as me telling you, you know,
00:42:49
Speaker
Something that I really wanted to understand was how people lived on the coast in prehistory and what they were eating. And one of those ways was to look at dental decay. I struggled so hard to figure out a way to do this. I personally took out two months to fly to Estonia in the middle of November. It was dark. I was kind of lonely while I was on field work. People want to listen to these stories. And that's why I always try to bring out of my guests.
00:43:17
Speaker
you know, that's what it's really all about, because all of us are trying to reach what makes us human. And so, in a way, it's a little bit scary, but you have to put yourself out there a little bit. And you have to you have to show your humanity a little bit in order for for all of this, you know, humanistic information to be communicated quite well. So that's my biggest advice and has always been my advice to people who want to do podcasting or
00:43:44
Speaker
to do outreach in general is to make it more personal and tell a story. In view of that, I remember speaking to somebody and I kind of bounded around the idea that, you know, podcasts are kind of like oral histories, or they're kind of like, they're segments of information that are, I don't know, I don't like the term on demand, because I think that kind of devalues what podcasts can represent.
00:44:14
Speaker
I think the important thing there that you picked up on was this personal connection. So I'm wondering if you could tell me a bit about, you said, for example, your friends and family are really supportive of the show. Has your partner come on the show ever?
00:44:34
Speaker
Yeah, so, you know, I have had 60 guests and some of them I had never spoken to before. I hadn't even tweeted at them before, but I came across maybe one of their TEDx university
00:44:50
Speaker
presentations and thought it looked good and I sent them an email and the first time I ever spoke to them or even learned what they do was right on the microphone as we aired and then there's a whole spectrum of from that where I interviewed professors that I really admired from afar
00:45:11
Speaker
And then, you know, then it gets closer. I interviewed my friends and colleagues that I had worked with before, people I'd met at conferences. And I've interviewed, like I said before, one of my best friends, Sarah Louise de Croza. I've also interviewed my partner, Massimo, who doesn't do anything that we do. He is an international lawyer. And yeah, like I was just very happy to do it because it's, um,
00:45:38
Speaker
He himself is an academic. He has a PhD himself in international law. He does something very interesting. I don't think that I would be with him or be interested in his work if it wasn't interesting. He helps international courts make decisions and does research for courts. I think that it's really admirable and important work.
00:46:01
Speaker
In anthropology and archaeology, there's very little in the world that doesn't fall in the realm of anthropology. You can pretty much talk about anything as long as humans are involved. I was very proud of that episode. I have had thoughts about, I would love to interview my mom one day. She's an amazing woman.
00:46:24
Speaker
She worked for many years as a teacher and she worked her way up to become the acting principal of a school for disabled children. And I, you know, I've thought about that as well. And so, yeah, I think that there's no limit to who you can interview. But the episode with Massimo was one of my favorite ones.
00:46:52
Speaker
That's really great. So if people do want to listen to your show and follow things that you do online, what's the best way to go and find all that?
00:47:03
Speaker
Uh, yeah, sure. So, um, the Arkananth podcast, you can find at Arkananth pod at all of the social media channels like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and Instagram. Um, and you can also just find the show. If you want to download the episodes or subscribe to the show, you can just go on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you normally find podcasts. Um, if you want to follow me, then I'm on Twitter at Rivera Michael.
00:47:29
Speaker
where I normally tweet about issues that are going on in academia, where I do a lot of outreach as well and talk about the process of, you know, what is it like being a scientist or being an anthropologist? What is my day-to-day life like? I try to demystify that and show people that, you know, there are some good days where, you know, a conference happens and I presented a talk very, you know, what I think is successfully.
00:47:58
Speaker
at least. And there are also bad days where, you know, writing up a paper is not going well. You know, I try to really show people what it's like to be, to do what we do. If you want to follow me on Instagram as well, then I'm at Dr. Michael Rivera. And there I post a little bit more about like my personal life, but there's still a little bit of science and outreach in there as well. Thank you so much again for coming and speaking to me. And all the best.
00:48:30
Speaker
Thank you Tristan for having me on the show, it was a pleasure.