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The Dirt Podcast with Dr. Anna Goldfield - Ep 109
487 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, Carlton interviews Dr. Anna Goldfield from The Dirt Podcast to talk about Dr. Goldfield's inspiration in becoming a zooarchaeologist, how the The Dirt Podcast started, and the importance of experimental archaeology. This a fun and interested one on one conversation between two seasoned podcast hosts. Definitely check out The Dirt Podcast if you haven't already!
If you have left a review of the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, please email us at alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com so we can get shipping information to send you a sticker.
If you are listening to this episode on the "Archaeology Podcast Network All Shows Feed," please consider subscribing to the "A Life in Ruins Podcast" channel to support our show. Listening to and downloading our episodes on the A Life in Ruins channel helps our podcast grow. So please, subscribe to the A Life in Ruins Podcast, hosted by the Archaeology Podcast Network, on whichever platform you are using to listen to us on the "All Shows Feed." Support our show by following our channel.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/109
Links
- The Dirt Podcast Website
- The Dirt Podcast on the APN
- "ÖMG: Ötzi the Iceman!" episode 154 of The Dirt
- “Fun-a with Fauna” episode 59 of The Dirt
Literature Recommendations
- The Archaeology of Animal Bones by Terry O’Connor
- Introduction to Zooarchaeology by Diane Gifford-Gonzales
Guest Contact
- Thedirtpod.com (all socials feed there)
- Twitter: @AnnaGoldfield and @dirtpodcast
- Instagram: @puppydigs and @thedirtpod
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- Website: www.alifeinruins.com
- Ruins on APN: https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/ruins
- Store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/alifeinruins/shop
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 109
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 109 of a life ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living life and ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. David will not be joining us today and Connor will make it for the second and third segments. But for this week's episode, we are joined by Dr. Anna Goldfield from the APN's flagship show, the dirt
APN's Flagship Show and Aspirations
00:00:31
Speaker
podcast. Anna, thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you doing this evening?
00:00:35
Speaker
I'm doing very well and feeling very flattered that you called the APN's flagship show. Gosh, yeah, no, I'm doing great. Thank you for having me.
00:00:44
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, at all of our monthly meetings for the APN and we go through monthly episode downloads, it's always the dirt in the, if not tens of thousands, then Bruins is down there with like 5,000 a month. So it's always the dirt is what we aspire to be one day. If we ever get our act together, we're hoping to get to your guys's level of listenership. And also your guys's content is just phenomenal. What you guys are able to cover.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. It is really fun to get to talk about something new every week, or at least as close to every week as we can manage with our day dobs. Absolutely. So we really wanted to get you and we will have Amber on later
Dr. Anna Goldfield's Journey to Archaeology
00:01:28
Speaker
on.
00:01:28
Speaker
just really kind of have our listeners get to know you guys, which you guys both propelled into anthropology and what led to the dirt. So, I mean, just kind of kicking us off, what first got you interested in anthropology to begin with? I mean, I think it was history.
00:01:44
Speaker
first that I really got interested in. I've always been really into the past and really curious about how people lived and how it was different from how I lived and how the world was different and how technologies were different. The stuff, like the actual physical stuff, the development of technologies and
00:02:05
Speaker
the creation of art and the actual physical remnants of the past have always really interested me. But I didn't really realize that for a long time. As a kid, I was super into the Middle Ages. I still am. I'm still into castles and swords and sort of the very sort of pop-culturified Middle Ages. I even and I've said this on the dirt and I will continue to say it because I deserve to be roasted for this, but I had a medieval castle themed bat mitzvah.
00:02:35
Speaker
And in context and in retrospect, the medieval period for Jews was a rough time in Europe. And so the irony is not lost on me. But when I went to undergrad, I started as a classics major. I really, really loved
00:02:53
Speaker
the Greek and Latin classes that I was fortunate enough to take in high school. And I went to Bryn Mawr College, which is a small liberal arts women's college just outside of Philadelphia. And I started in the classics program. And I was like, I'm going to do Latin and Greek and learn about the ancient world. And then about a semester and a half in, I realized that
00:03:18
Speaker
While the languages were really interesting, what I was really, really captivated by was the lives of people. And this was also because I had also taken an archaeology class. I took sort of intro to archaeology 101 or 100, whatever it was. And I realized like, oh,
00:03:35
Speaker
Okay, the languages interested me because it was kind of a lens into the lives and I didn't have access to, as a high school student, I didn't have access to archaeology or anthropology classes. I was doing Greek and Latin, but not learning the wider context of the ancient world in which those languages were spoken. And so that sort of propelled me into archaeology. And I've really spent my career as an archaeologist for a really long time
00:04:03
Speaker
not knowing what I was doing and sort of blundering into the right place by accident. And so when I finished my undergraduate degree, it's a degree in classical and Near Eastern archaeology, which essentially for me was an art history degree because I didn't take the opportunity to do fieldwork.
00:04:23
Speaker
at that time. I went and studied abroad, but that didn't include fieldwork. And really, no aspect of sort of the practical parts of archaeology were ever dealt with. I didn't really learn how excavations work. I didn't learn what a total station was. I didn't know how... To some extent, I learned how artifacts are studied and cataloged and illustrated, and that was a big part of
00:04:47
Speaker
My interest was illustrating artifacts, which is something that I still do. But I really don't think I got an archaeology education until graduate school. And so for grad school, I went to Boston University because I applied to three programs, and that's the one that I got into.
Fieldwork at La Faracy and Archaeological Training
00:05:07
Speaker
and sort of simplified things for me. After undergrad, I mean, I took two years off after undergrad to sort of experience living in the real world and have a real job. Hated that. And so I went back to school.
00:05:22
Speaker
I worked at the front desk of a dorm at Drexel University, which is in Philly. So I lived in West Philly and I was the person who like swiped entrance cards at the security desk in front of the dorm. But I also, I wasn't security. I was like the kind of liaison between facilities and like student resources and security. So it was not
00:05:50
Speaker
intellectually challenging at all. It wasn't a great fit for me. It was a job and it paid the rent. It allowed me to do fun things on the weekends, but I was not happy. And so I really wanted to go back to school and I really wanted to pursue archaeology. And so I went to Boston University intending
00:06:13
Speaker
to kind of get into, and because I had experience in sort of the classical Near Eastern world, I wanted to kind of continue that, but specifically look at, I think at the time it was sort of the development of technologies and specifically like how different technologies working with different materials spread to different places.
00:06:31
Speaker
And somewhere along the way, I realized again that that wasn't the thing, and I found my way to zoarchaeology. So I really found my way to zoarch, the analysis of faunal remains from archaeological sites.
00:06:46
Speaker
in the field. So in my first year of graduate school, I met Dr. Paul Goldberg, who is a professor. He's currently, I think he's now a professor emeritus at Boston University, but he basically invented micromorphology, which is like the study of site formation processes on a very, very small scale, the scale of
00:07:08
Speaker
really the scale of grains of sand. Micro morphology, essentially how you study that is that you take sections from a site, you encase them in plaster, you remove them, so you get a chunk of the profile of a site, you impregnate it with resin, and then you can cut it up and take thin sections of it.
00:07:28
Speaker
which you can then look at under a microscope and you can get a very, very, very fine resolution view of all the layers of sediment, much more than you can just see with the naked eye. You can see whether there's layers of ash and whether there is, whether silt has blown in or whether clay has washed in due to water movement. So it's a really incredible way of getting at things that have happened at the site.
00:07:52
Speaker
over millennia. And he was working at the site of La Faracy in France. It's in the southwest Dordogne region of France. And he said, why don't you come along for the summer, do some fieldwork, you need the experience. And I had taken high school French
00:08:08
Speaker
That was my only other non-English language, so that seemed like a reasonable idea. And it also wasn't... I have very protective parents, and it wasn't a part of the world that would make them excessively nervous. So France seemed like
00:08:25
Speaker
a way to go. And so, I ended up participating in field seasons at La Ferrissey for the next six years. And I got the chance to work with Dr. Harold Dibble, who is, he passed away a few years ago, but he was a phenomenal sort of force in the study of lithic technology and the paleolithic in Europe. So, I worked on his team for several years. And
00:08:48
Speaker
over the course of that, realized that I was really, really interested in how ancient people ate, supported themselves, how they subsisted. Right, right. I should mention, Leféricie is a Neanderthal site. It's a really well-known, well-established Neanderthal site that was first excavated in the 20s, and then the world war has gotten the way, and then it was excavated again.
00:09:11
Speaker
in the, I want to say 60s and 70s, and then again in the 2000s. And so I was a part of those last excavations and the intent of those excavations was to sort out the stratigraphy, the context of the previous excavations because they were disconnected and the site reports kind of didn't match up. So they were trying to sort of
00:09:35
Speaker
contextualize everything and figure out what the whole story of lepharisee was. So there were no longer any Neanderthals there, no remains there, at least that we found, but there had been several skeletons found during the first excavations.
Specializing in Zoarchaeology and Neanderthals
00:09:49
Speaker
So at lepharisee, I met Dr. Theresa Steele, who was the zoarchaeologist on site. I expressed interest in learning zoarchaeology because I realized that that was
00:10:00
Speaker
the simplest way for me to get at patterns of behavior related to food. Because those are the things, if you're talking about a site that's, you know, 60,000 or more years old, animal bones are the things that preserve best out of all the possible sort of food materials.
00:10:17
Speaker
There are other things that preserve. It's just that was the thing I could see and touch and learn directly about. And so that was what I got really, really interested in. And so I started thinking about zoarchaeology and decided to do my dissertation on Neanderthal subsistence as it related to both the use of fire for cooking and the extinction of Neanderthals once Homo sapiens moved into Western Europe.
00:10:48
Speaker
Indeed, I did. That is what I did my dissertation on. That's me. That's my whole trajectory. That's a lot. For those micro sections of site strata, how many, like a regular, let's say like a 20 centimeter deep, just something super shallow, how many thin sections are we talking about with just something like that?
00:11:09
Speaker
So what happens first is that the team sort of looks at it and tries to determine how many layers overall they think are present. And then often the thin sections will be taken based on specific areas that they want to look into. So especially the margins between layers, then they want to make sure that in fact
00:11:32
Speaker
there is a change in the sediment or there's not just like a tiny layer of something else hiding that the naked eye can't see. But yeah, it can be dozens. It can be, I'm sure that some sites have hundreds. I guess it really just depends on the depth
Should Neanderthals be Classified as Homo sapiens?
00:11:46
Speaker
of the section. But yeah, Paul Goldberg's pretty incredible because he essentially invented this sub-discipline.
00:11:53
Speaker
his name is just on every kind of seminal paper for every major site. So it was great to get the chance to work with him. And the man makes a mean apple cobbler. All right. That's a fun fact. I'll take that. He's just, he's a great guy. I'm always amazed by geoarchaeologists. Like truly what they're able to do with dirt is like, I think it's witchcraft. Like I don't, I don't get it, but it's just so cool for them to
00:12:18
Speaker
be able to look at strata and sediments and soils the way they do and like reconstruct a site's history. And taking that to like the microscopic level. It really brings tons of depth. Yeah. If you want to talk to a micro stratigraphic guy on your show, I have a friend and colleague who does that. Oh, absolutely. That'd be fascinating.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I can remind me and I will give you his contact. Yeah, absolutely. And then, man, it's always been a dream of mine to be able to work on the Intertel site, like going to Europe to work on something like that. I totally looked out. I do realize what an absolute privilege that was.
00:13:01
Speaker
When you were getting your diss, like your doctorate, because you're not, you know, very old, I think we're around the same age. Yeah, see, like not at all. Were those ideas of Neanderthals being like brutish and like, quote unquote, primitive, still pervasive by the time you're writing your diss? Yeah.
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah. Cause I would, I would, you know, mention to my parents something that I was working on and my dad would crack a joke about, you know, a Neanderthal being a dumb dumb and I would get, you know, probably unreasonably mad, but I was like, come on, I don't, I don't go to your job and make fun of what you do. Sure. But, um, yeah.
00:13:38
Speaker
No, I do think and I think it's definitely changing, but I think it is taking a lot of time to sort of for the understandably relatively obscure world of research into Neanderthals to sort of filter through to everyone. But I do think that that Neanderthal Renaissance is picking up speed. It seems to be it seems that I see more and more news stories and more and more
00:14:02
Speaker
just sort of features about Neanderthals were much more complex than we ever thought. Obviously, the media tends to sensationalize things. To some extent, I'm not mad about that, but a lot of times that it causes people to take research out of context. That is sort of where the other part of my career comes in.
00:14:26
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, are you in the camp that neanderthals are like homo sapiens neanderthalensis or like firmly like homo neanderthalensis? I think that that's kind of, I think it's, for me personally, it's an issue of sort of biological semantics. Like if it's really important to someone to distinguish that neanderthals and homo sapiens were
00:14:50
Speaker
different in some way. If they want to make that taxonomic distinction, that's fine. That's great. If they want to connect Neanderthals to Homo sapiens by saying Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis, that's also fine because clearly it's murky. It's very wobbly because we know that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred because modern humans living today, some portions of the population still have some Neanderthal DNA, a very small percentage, but it's in there, which means that
00:15:18
Speaker
you know, sex had to happen. That's the only way DNA gets in there. And so we know that they were at least biologically compatible enough to do that, which means that by the biological or sort of the broadest biological definition of species, Neanderthals and humans were closely related enough to be kind of, if not the same species, then maybe like a sub species. I don't know. It gets, it gets really
00:15:45
Speaker
But I just tend to call them both different flavors of human because I like to think of them, like when you say human, it implies a lot of things. The word human is a very loaded word. It comes with connotations of intelligence, with sophistication in terms of like technology and culture, with sort of innovation, but also with
00:16:07
Speaker
humanity, right? Giving someone the quality, the aspect of humanity and seeing a kinship between two people or two, you know, two species. And so to call Neanderthals human, I think gives them that humanity that we're seeing more and more that they had from evidence in the archaeological record. So that's when I get asked that question, I tend to get very flustered because of like a
00:16:34
Speaker
I don't know because do you want me to be a biologist about it or do you want me to be like an anthropologist about it? So I try to answer both at the same time and end up just sort of getting myself into a funk. But yeah, that's my answer is that they are both humans. Fair enough. That's a great answer. I like that answer a lot.
00:16:52
Speaker
Awesome. Can I answer it a lot? I can imagine. Well, on that note, we're going to go ahead and wrap up the first segment of episode 109. We'll be right back with Dr. Anna Goldfield. All
Origins and Mission of 'The Dirt Podcast'
00:17:04
Speaker
right. We're back with Dr. Anna Goldfield for episode 109 of a Life Ruins podcast. And we're about to learn about the origins of the dirt podcast and something I've been super fascinated about. We first learned about the dirt.
00:17:16
Speaker
when we were coming up with a life in ruins and we were looking for titles for our podcast. And we came up with a bunch. Yes. Well, I mean, like you guys had a first for a long, longer period of time clearly, but it was like, you know, all the clever ones we could come up with, they were like already taken. And so we were like, Oh, and so that's how we first learned of the dirt and how I started listening to you and Amber was when we were doing the preliminary stuff for ruins, like what's the archeology content out there. And yours was already a podcast that like out of all the ones that we listened to,
00:17:46
Speaker
yours was the one that I personally connected with the most. Like I liked that banter and the way that you guys run episodes. And so like, I listened to a lot of you guys as inspiration for how do we run ruins. So how did you first get into podcasting?
00:18:01
Speaker
I think to go all the way, all the way back to sort of acquiring the skill set is my history with music. So I play a couple of different instruments and in high school as my senior project, I recorded an album of original songs. They're very goofy, very embarrassing now. So I learned how to record, how to edit in, I think it was Pro Tools at the time. Time out, were they archeology themed?
00:18:28
Speaker
No, no, no, not at all. No, this was still high school. It was just like, no, my feelings. Okay. Have you heard of Hangover Trench Naps, the stupid archeology album that I made for my public archeology class? Oh my God. No. It is super embarrassing, super bad, but me and David made a banger called Clovis Paradise and it's a parody of a gangster paradise. That's amazing.
00:18:53
Speaker
Anyway, that did me to interrupt and, like, please carry on. No, that's okay. And that has reminded me that I promised Flint Dibble, who is the son of Harold Dibble and we're friends, in real life and on Twitter. But I promised him on Twitter that if I reached 2,000 Twitter followers, I would do some sort of parody or original song about archaeology. So that's a challenge to your listeners. Go find me on Twitter and follow me.
00:19:18
Speaker
I'll do that, I promise. But that meant that I already sort of had the background skills to edit audio stuff. Fast forward to 2017, I had just finished my PhD and I was on the job market, which is a nice way of saying unemployed.
00:19:42
Speaker
I was living in California with my partner and Amber came to visit me just as sort of a... So Amber and I met in undergrad. She was a year behind me. We took a lot of classes together. We worked in the same dining hall together. So we were very close friends in undergrad and we stayed close friends afterwards. And she had come to visit me in California.
00:20:05
Speaker
And during that visit, we sort of joked like, oh, we could start a podcast. And her original idea was that she would make me watch the film 10,000 B.C. and then just sort of I would get angry about it because it's a very bad movie.
00:20:22
Speaker
And then we realized that that wasn't really a sustainable model, but a couple months after that, after kind of that joke was getting kicked around. So I was on the job market. Amber had at that point left her graduate program at Berkeley and was also
00:20:39
Speaker
on the job market. And we were both in this position of like lots of skills, no job, right? We were both like, you know, very intelligent, educated people who really had this drive to learn and to want to learn about the things that excite us, but really nowhere to put that energy and nowhere to put that
00:20:57
Speaker
those skills. And so we actually started talking about, hey, what if we really did start a podcast? And so we did what I imagine that you guys did at first was we looked around at the available content. And we talked a lot about what we wanted people to walk away from our show with, what we wanted the tone of our show to be, what we wanted sort of the mission of our show to be.
00:21:23
Speaker
And the things that we landed on sort of the strongest was, first of all, that there was a lot of archaeology content out there that was very by experts for experts. There was a lot of like really inside baseball stuff that if you were a new listener starting out with no archaeology background or maybe just a real interest in archaeology, you'd done a lot of reading or something like that.
00:21:47
Speaker
even then you wouldn't necessarily feel like you were listening to something that was accessible to you. You were listening to somebody talk about CRM and total stations and using a lot of jargon and not necessarily breaking down some of the bigger concepts that are sort of baked into an archaeological education. So if you have
00:22:09
Speaker
taken archaeology classes, there are some sort of foundational things that you learn. And then from that point on, you don't really have to relearn them. But for somebody coming in fresh, those concepts still need to be broken down. And so that was one of the things that we said, first of all, we want this show to be accessible to someone coming in with no background whatsoever. We want to use storytelling to accomplish a couple of things. One, to engage people. We humans are wired to understand the world through narrative.
00:22:38
Speaker
We construct our own narratives. We're the protagonists of those narratives. And we understand other people's lives through narrative. And so to engage people, storytelling is sort of the best way to do that for us. And also to really kind of reintroduce people into the past. Because a lot of times, I think, when people consider the past, they think of static images or moments or
00:23:06
Speaker
or eras, these things that seem very kind of distant and almost clinical. But these were, you know, any people living in the past were real people with lives and thoughts and emotions and the same kinds of fears or experiences that we might have. They felt excitement, they felt grief, they felt
00:23:30
Speaker
happiness, they felt all these human emotions. And we wanted to emphasize that that was a part of life in the past as well. Just put humans back into the past. And so we planned for about three months and then recorded the first three episodes of The Dirt and released them on July 1st, 2018. And so there was a lot of research into the actual practical aspects of this. There's a lot of Googling.
00:23:59
Speaker
of like how to import
00:24:02
Speaker
sound as MP3, you know, like all the little things. There's a lot of almost breaking down into hysterics because something wasn't working and then it turned out like the thing wasn't plugged in the right, you know, it was like a lot of, a lot of that kind of stuff. But once we had all of those little issues ironed out, we recorded our first three episodes. The sound is really bad. Like if you go listen to the dirt, by all means, listen to the first three episodes, but know that we were recording with tiny little dinky mics and
00:24:30
Speaker
we didn't really know what we were doing yet. We didn't have the flow of the showdown yet. Right. And I think we tell our audience, go back and listen to the first five by all means. But those same things, we didn't know what we were doing. We were too much having fanboy moments over the people we had on.
00:24:47
Speaker
rather than engaging with them in a serious manner over the content. And the first episode was one of our favorite, at the time, PhD candidates at Wyoming. And we're like, do you remember when you first met us, Spencer? And it was just like, there was no point to that episode. We love you. It's like, oh, dude, please tell us. We really want your attention. And it's just like, oh, God, it's just so cringy when you listen to those original episodes. And we tell folks all the time, like. Yeah. Sure, listen to them, but know that it gets better.
00:25:15
Speaker
Yeah. Listen to maybe episode 20 or something. Sure. Listen to the first one and then move on maybe a page or two, and then once we figure our mojo. Yeah. If you want to hear an episode that sounds like we're yelling down an elementary school hallway, absolutely. Episodes one through five, those are for you. But then we got real microphones and figured our stuff out. But yeah, one of the things is
00:25:39
Speaker
that as, and we're not as much of an interview based show as A Life in Ruins. We do have occasional guests on, but we are still learning how to be better interviewers. So it's, it's been really cool to see how you guys have evolved as, as interviewers and how kind of your technique has changed. And, and usually like you've, you've found your hit your stride. It's really awesome. Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Joining the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:26:01
Speaker
But yeah, so we started the show and really kind of depended on our own social networks to get it out there. As a podcast, getting it onto the Apple Podcasts app and stuff isn't actually that difficult. Any dum-dum with a microphone can do that.
00:26:20
Speaker
Yes we got out there and we started out with a list of like one of the first things that we did as we were planning was to brainstorm topics and so we ended up having an initial list of fifty or so topics that we just.
00:26:36
Speaker
We're like, these are things that sound cool. It was a mix of things that we were already knowledgeable about, things that interested us, news stories we had seen recently, things that we were super interested in as kids, recommendations from other archaeology friends, things like that. And so we had a list of episodes and we
00:26:55
Speaker
being still unemployed, we had lots of time to produce those episodes. And so that is what we did. And it was a slow, kind of a slow burn, but it really started to take off. And then it especially took off after we joined the Archaeology Podcast Network, because there was already sort of a big old audience built into that.
00:27:16
Speaker
So what was that push to get you guys on the APN? Because you guys were solo. And you guys are also, I believe, the only podcast on the APN that still edits their own show. So you're still doing that. I'm very, I have a little bit of a control issue.
00:27:32
Speaker
But I really like, I mean, yes, editing is quite a bit of work, especially now that I do actually have a nine to five job. But I really like being the one that builds the story. Because at this point, Amber and I have been doing this for so long and we're so kind of in sync. And also we've known each other for more than 15 years now. And so we're so kind of accustomed to each other that I'm able to
00:27:57
Speaker
piece together the story and the flow of the episode the way that I know that we both kind of want it to go. And I am not sure that anyone else would be able to do that. That said, I have a lot of respect for the APN and all of the production stuff that happens there. I just am really reluctant to relinquish editorial control. And that's more of a me problem.
00:28:19
Speaker
But I actually honestly don't remember where I first heard about the APN. It must have been like maybe someone listened to our show and said, hey, why aren't you on the archaeology podcast network? But I do remember that I met Chris, Chris Webster, the producer, the CEO of APN.
00:28:42
Speaker
I met him at the conference, the annual meeting of the, what is it, Society for California Archaeology, because I had gone to promote the dirt. And that was kind of a fiasco on its own for other reasons. But I had gone to promote the dirt by myself because Amber at that time was living in West Virginia. And so, yeah, so I had gone to promote the dirt. And I guess it was just like in the
00:29:12
Speaker
exhibitors hall I was walking around and Chris was there promoting the APN and so we got to talking and he offered you know he said if you ever want to join the network you know here are the benefits and he gave me a card and I went and talked it over with Amber and we decided that
00:29:32
Speaker
It would be a good idea because for one thing, again, there was already this large audience built in, but then also it would mean that we would not have to host our own audio. And that was an aspect of the show that at the time, before we had a Patreon that supported the show,
00:29:52
Speaker
was pretty costly. We hosted stuff on SoundCloud. And so reducing that cost, having the APN automatically push episodes out to all these platforms that we weren't necessarily on before and getting us out to a whole new audience of listeners were really big perks. But also, we wanted to join the cast of podcasts on the APN.
00:30:16
Speaker
Felt like a good fit. Fair enough. Well, what are, do you have any favorite episodes that you guys recorded? Cause how many episodes do you guys have now? We are currently on episode one eighty nine eight getting really close to 200.
00:30:31
Speaker
either 189 or 88 just came out. I should know this, but yes. So I have favorite episodes for different reasons. There are episodes that I'm extremely proud of for sort of intellectual reasons or because of their content. And then there are episodes that I really like because they're funny and dumb. And so episode number 42 is always one that I recommend. It is about
00:30:57
Speaker
Well, it is inspired by the news story that came out right around the time that we wrote the episode about the exhumation of American Revolutionary War soldier Kazimir Pulaski, who was apparently a hero of the Revolutionary War. He was killed in battle, and he may have been intersex, and so his remains were exhumed
00:31:23
Speaker
not for the reason of proving that he was or wasn't intersex. It was something else. I think they wanted to move the remains or they were...
00:31:30
Speaker
changing the monument where he was buried, something like that. Again, this was episode 42, and that's like 140 episodes ago. But the media coverage, just like the regular media, not even like the archaeology journal coverage of this, was not great. The way that it was treated, the definition of intersex often wasn't used correctly, or it was like, was this man really a woman? That's not what intersex means.
00:32:00
Speaker
I know. Or we did an episode talking about that, that issue, but then also kind of breaking down how archaeologists like specifically osteologists can tell the difference between biologically male and female and also like what intersex is and how that might present archaeologically and how it is not a foolproof science. Like sexing a skeleton is not foolproof. There are indicators that show that an individual is more likely to have been male or female.
00:32:30
Speaker
but that's not a sure thing. And also, we can't know, unless we are told through material objects or through writing, how an individual identifies. People's thoughts and feelings don't fossilize. So we're left with the skeleton, and that is only helpful up to a point. So we use that episode to dissect that issue, no pun intended, and really
00:32:56
Speaker
bring to light some other kind of related stories that had to do with sexuality and gender expression and identity and things like that. So that's an episode that I'm very proud of for its content. An episode that I am just very fond of because it's so silly is our Fish People episode. And that came about as, again, much like the Dirt Podcast itself, came up as a joke that stuck.
00:33:26
Speaker
Amber and I were having a production meeting and we were brainstorming episode topics. I was trying to remember the name of a site that was really interesting to me because of these particular statues that look like anthropomorphized fish. That was what I thought. What I said was, what about that site with the fish people?
00:33:47
Speaker
And obviously Amber didn't know what I was talking about. Cause that's a really silly thing to say. And I tried to describe it and then I looked up the site. It's, it's Dolny Vestinica, I think in Croatia, Serbia, Czech Republic. Oh no. So she just wrote fish people in the editorial document and then was like, well, I guess we're doing it. And it ended up being a really fun episode. Like we really did talk about that site with the statues of just, they, if you look them up, they just look like, I don't know if you combined.
00:34:17
Speaker
a man with like a haddock. It's just like these very mournful expressions, very like sort of fishy little mouths. They're just like going, oh no. Very funny. But it ended up being a cool episode. And then my favorite part was I got sort of musically inspired. And at the end, just as a little bonus Easter egg, I made a track of just like a fully harmonized chorus, little song about fish people, just as a little, little fun Easter egg for the listener. And so
00:34:47
Speaker
I don't know if proud is the word I'd use for that one, but I'm just very fond of that episode because it was so much fun. And we've also, you know, we've done other episodes that I've really enjoyed. One that I liked was we did an episode on Ötzi, the Ice Man, because, you know, it took us a long time to get there because it's a subject that's
00:35:10
Speaker
sort of been endlessly covered. But it was a really fun episode to do nonetheless, and I think we still did a reasonably good job of keeping it archaeological. But also, it's like the coldest of cold cases, the 5,000-year-old, sorry, 7,000-year-old,
00:35:25
Speaker
I love how in the episode title, because it's like, Oh my God, it was great. So, and just for our audience, episode one, one sevens fish people and episode four is, Oh my God. Of course. That's what I'm here for. You're here to relax and just chat. Oh, this is, I don't have to edit this one. This is so good.
00:35:47
Speaker
I bet. And with that, we'll be right back with Dr. Anna Goldfield. And then we're going to hit up segment three right after these sweet, sweet messages by our producer and co-founder of the APN, Chris Webster.
00:35:59
Speaker
And we're back with episode 109. So for this last segment, we're going to be talking about a little bit of experimental archaeology. And if you've seen the Life in Ruins podcast Insta recently, you've seen, we did a little bit of that. I know one of my favorite things about experimental archaeology is that it's really easy to get people like the public involved. Like we do a lot of that with my intro to archaeology courses. We have like an ancient tech day where we have at-lot throwing. And in this recent experiment, we actually had one of my lifelong friends who flew up from my graduation. I've known him since third grade.
00:36:27
Speaker
And he has no idea what I do, but we actually brought him out with us for the at-lateral experiment. And he was like, this is your job. And I'm like, well, this is part of it. Just we got to throw these spears at a high-speed camera with different weights. And he was just blown away by some of the actual research that we do conduct. And we were trying to explain to him the whole purpose of it. And this wasn't just meaningless. And that's why we have all these people, including professional Neanderthal Donny Dust out there with us throwing darts. Professional Neanderthal.
00:36:57
Speaker
profession. I loved a hundred dust. I don't know if you follow him, but like his just professional caveman. I should. Yeah. He sounds like someone I should know. Absolutely. He was on the show alone. Oh, yeah. Huh? Oh, not. I'm sorry. I was thinking of naked and afraid. Very different. Okay. Same, same concept, but alone more people have clothes.
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's fine. What a strange thing reality TV is. It is.
Experimental Archaeology's Role in Education
00:37:28
Speaker
So what has been your experience with conducting experiments archaeology? And like, you know, off of that, you know, what do you see the intrinsic value of conducting such type of research?
00:37:39
Speaker
So, I mean, I think experimental archaeology is incredibly valuable as long as the research methods are sound, which is, I know, opening a whole other can of worms that I don't really want to dive into just because it brings up a lot of debate and technical stuff. That's not really what I want to talk about.
00:37:58
Speaker
experimental archaeology for a lot of reasons. One, it's really fun. It's really a way to kind of try to connect to the experiences of the past. You're never going to really replicate someone's life in the past. But it's one thing to think about or talk about or statistically analyze the the act of flint knapping, right? Or but it's another thing to see and hear someone creating a tool out of a hunk of rock and to sort of
00:38:28
Speaker
try to learn how to do it and realize how much skill it really does take. There's a lot of these things that people did in the past, subsistence in the past, just living in the past with no metal and no
00:38:43
Speaker
toilets and no, you know, no mass produced items and no supermarkets to go show, you'd have to hunt and gather everything that you needed for your life. And we're so removed from that now. And so for me, experimental archaeology is just so interesting because it's a way to try to access that and to try to
00:39:08
Speaker
find ways to address questions about archaeological materials by experiencing things. And so this is a research project that I never actually ended up doing. And frankly, I'm kind of grateful. But I was so interested in it. I really fell down such a research rabbit hole. But I got really, really interested in meat fermentation. So let me back up.
00:39:34
Speaker
My dissertation, again, was on Neanderthal subsistence and hunting and nutrition.
Neanderthal Nutrition and Survival Techniques
00:39:40
Speaker
So a lot of that was me compiling data and crunching a lot of numbers, which is just really funny because math was the thing I was abysmal at in school.
00:39:50
Speaker
figuring out what Neanderthals' metabolic needs were, just to sort of exist, what they needed in terms of calories and nutrients and all that, compared to Homo sapiens and to kind of plot out using mathematical models, which I collaborated with someone for, I didn't do them, but to plot out these models of how different populations of humans, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals would survive if placed in different circumstances, you know, in competition for resources.
00:40:19
Speaker
So, jumping off of that, I started thinking about nutrition, and I started thinking about the Neanderthals that were living in particularly resource-poor areas or particularly challenging climates, let's say, because Neanderthals lived in Europe for
00:40:38
Speaker
over 250,000 years. So there were a lot of different climate conditions, and obviously it's a huge region. Europe is really big, and so there's lots of different landscapes. And in some of those landscapes, it was really cold for a lot of the time, especially during glacial periods, which would mean that resources might have been pretty scarce. And so I was trying to think about would these populations living, let's say, in winter during a glacial phase in
00:41:06
Speaker
the northernmost reaches of non-glaciated Europe, what would their available nutrition have been like and would they just have been starving all the time? And would they have been malnourished or would there have been a way for them to get some of the nutrients they needed from things that they could access? And so I started researching around and I started to find that
00:41:32
Speaker
There was a specific little pocket of study about fermented meat and meat cashing. Cashing is storing something, whether it's food or resources like tools or weapons.
00:41:47
Speaker
I'm storing it for later if you're not going to be there. But let's say it's a, it's a hunting camp that you return to every year, but you don't want to carry all your stuff with you. You just want to bring the essentials from camp to camp. You cash things so that other animals or other people won't find your stuff. You come back to it later.
00:42:03
Speaker
And the hypothesis that Neanderthals and maybe even Homo sapiens, just hunter-gatherer groups, were cashing meat in a way that would block out oxygen and cause lactic acid fermentation was something that really kind of caught my interest, especially because of a 2017, I think you might have originally written it in 2015, but the version that I found was
00:42:28
Speaker
published online in 2017, I think. And I can give you the link for this, but it's a paper by John Speth called something like Putrid Meat and Fish in the Paleolithic. It's like a really grabby title. It's like, oh, cool, gross. And he talks about, and John Speth is a great
00:42:45
Speaker
writer of archaeology articles because he writes like a person. He writes not like an academic, but he writes like a really, really good lecturer in a really good archaeology class who's like building this story for you and really getting you into the material. But also it's incredibly well researched. It's a really solid paper. And so he talks about
00:43:08
Speaker
the human body's need for micronutrients and macronutrients, and so that's like vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fat, protein, etc., and the different types of food and alterations of food resources that can provide those things.
00:43:26
Speaker
And he especially talked about the need for vitamin C and the need to avoid overdoing it on protein and vitamin A. So a couple things can happen. If you eat too much protein, so listen up keto people. First of all, talk to a medical doctor before you start the keto diet. Thank you. Okay.
00:43:45
Speaker
If you eat too much protein, and this is almost exclusively protein, you can get sick and die because basically the body is not able to process all of that protein. It is lacking the fats and carbohydrates that it needs in moderation to operate. You can overload your liver and your kidneys with
00:44:07
Speaker
Uric acid? Is that the one? It's a condition called rabbit starvation, and it's named after fur trappers in sort of the 1800s in the Americas who would be trapping rabbits for their fur and eating the rabbits because they were only using the fur. And so they were eating super well. They were full every night, but they were only eating rabbit, and rabbit's sort of a very nothing meat. It's really lean protein.
00:44:30
Speaker
And so they were basically poisoning themselves. They were starving to death while they were just full of food. And so ways to counteract that include eating a lot of fat along with your protein. So if you have a really high protein diet and there's really nothing you can do about it, you can compensate by eating a lot of fat. And that's the case with Arctic diets. So Arctic
00:44:53
Speaker
indigenous populations who eat a lot of, especially during the winter, will eat a lot of sea mammal meat and stuff. They will also consume the fat, the blubber of those animals in large quantities. So that's part of it. The other part is that fermentation
00:45:10
Speaker
does a lot of really cool things that are kind of akin to digestion. And one of the things that it does is it makes, specifically for meat, it makes meat more nutritionally available. So it breaks it down partially in the same way that cooking does, except that cooking destroys vitamins. If cooking breaks down vitamins and fermentation does not. So if you have fermented meat, you can
00:45:34
Speaker
kind of reclaim some of those vitamins and your meat is a little bit more nutritionally valuable than it would be if it was just raw or cooked like fresh meat. So I got really, really interested in this, in this idea of kind of alternative nutrition based on the deliberate
00:45:51
Speaker
alteration of meat and whether Neanderthals might have been doing this and whether it was just sort of a natural byproduct of the act of cashing meat, like of storing it for later, or if this was kind of like a deliberate thing and how would you be able to tell that in the archaeological record. So I had all these plans and I was designing all of this research to do like meat fermentation experiments. And in retrospect, that would have been so gross.
00:46:20
Speaker
it is research that actually I know, I happen to know is being done. So I really look forward to whenever I know that someone's grad student was doing it a few years ago. And so I really hope that they continue to do that. So I don't have to, but I really, I would love to learn more about just sort of
00:46:39
Speaker
people doing different things to the resources they have to make them, to improve them in some way, to make them benefit them more. I mean, that was my sort of ill-advised side trip into a possible experiment. I was going to apply for an NSF grant. I had the grant like 90% written.
00:46:58
Speaker
And then I got a teaching job. And so that sort of went by the wayside. And frankly, I think it turned out for the best because I do have a very sensitive stomach and I think it was probably ill-advised. But I still am very, very fond of experimental archaeology. And my partner, actually, most of her research is based on experimental archaeology, which is why we have a freezer full of cow bones and a shed full of deer bones and a butcher's bone saw.
Envisioning a New Media Project for Archaeology
00:47:27
Speaker
So, I haven't escaped it completely. But, yeah, she studies Neanderthal bone tools and so works with bone and bone surfaces and tries to evaluate them microscopically. But, so I just, for any time period in any place, I think there's so much
00:47:46
Speaker
to be done with experimental. Like I love YouTube videos that show like how we're trying to as authentically as possible build this Iron Age style house using only the types of tools that they would have used. Like I love projects like that. I love when people just really go all in and like we're wearing hides and we've tied elk teeth to them and now we're going to dance for hours to see if there's different wear on the teeth from being
00:48:13
Speaker
you know, strung together. I love things like that. And so what I would love to see, because I think this is such a cool tool for engagement is to see this stuff happening, to see people trying this stuff out, often with sort of
00:48:26
Speaker
you know, failure as a consequence because we don't necessarily know how everything would have worked in the past. There's a lot of missing pieces. And so trying to fill in those pieces can often be illuminating or comical or frustrating or sort of terrible. So I would love to see, this is my sort of semi-serious pitch for a TV show that I want to see or like a YouTube show that I want to see. Do you remember the show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe?
00:48:51
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I want that, but for archeology. So like a non-expert, it could be an archeologist, but just like a non-expert in, you know, obviously it's not someone who knows every time period everywhere, but a host who talks to expert experimenters in a particular, who are looking at particular questions about a time or place like an Iron Age house, whatever.
00:49:15
Speaker
and tries to do the things, so it's guided through the process. A, so people can see how experimental archaeology is done and how the research methods are built up and how good research is conducted, because not all experimental archaeology is good research. You need to account for variables and you need to have a solid plan.
00:49:37
Speaker
But I want to see the research methods presented, but I also just want to see a non-expert trying to do the things that people in the past did every day because I want to show how skilled people were in the past. A lot of times because technology in the past is certainly not as advanced as it is today, but that doesn't mean that people weren't skilled. It doesn't mean that people didn't
00:50:03
Speaker
know how to do really amazing things. And so I want to show these experts, you know, creating adhesive out of birch bark and using it to have to point onto an arrowhead. I want to see someone, you know, building an atlatl, I want to see someone tanning a hide, you know, things that would have been pretty normal commonplace activities.
00:50:27
Speaker
a hundred, two hundred, a thousand, a zillion years ago. I want to see the expert do it. I want to see the novice try to do it. And I want the context of what it would be like for the lives of the people in the past and how it sort of compares to our experience today. I think that would be a really, really fun show to watch. There are not enough hours in the day, otherwise I would pitch it and make it myself. But maybe in the future,
00:50:55
Speaker
I think the Pawnee Nation Tipo is doing some experimental archaeology or ethnography right now because then rock art and ledger art Pawnees are usually depicted wearing black moccasins. We're trying to figure out how you do that. How do you dye them? How do you dye them black? What do you use to dye them black? He's been doing some things that we've been texting back and forth since he's figured it out yet. I think it leads to something to do with walnuts.
00:51:17
Speaker
I was, I was going to ask if it was walnut. So that's making me sound like I totally am lying, but I swear. Cause he's tried a couple things and it's just, it hasn't been, it, they make them gray, not black. So next one is cause, but though, you know, you start crushing walnut shells and that stuff's just everywhere.
00:51:36
Speaker
No, your hands are splotchy for a week. So remember when I did research in the south of France? Because I'm so fancy. There is a drink there called van de noir that's very popular in that region because that region is famous for its walnuts. And so you basically take green
00:51:56
Speaker
Well, they're black walnuts, but they are green because they're not ripe yet. You take green walnuts and sort of let them steep in a combination of red wine and brandy and spices for a couple months and it sort of mellows into this really, really delicious sort of magical potion. But yeah, so we harvested some green walnuts and cut them up and they're just like...
00:52:18
Speaker
I forgot to wash my hands soon enough after doing that and then like all of a sudden the dye like it oxidates it oxidizes and and then just like oh god no so yeah I was I was uh stained but I bet I bet I hope walnut works that's interesting
00:52:37
Speaker
Yeah. I'd like a nice pair of like black casual moccasins. Those would be pretty sweet. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Like this has been so much fun. Oh, likewise. I've had a blast. Excellent. So before we end the show and what are a couple of sources that you would recommend for anyone interested in zoo archeology, podcasting or experimental archeology?
Resources for Zoarchaeology and Podcasting
00:52:55
Speaker
Oh, boy. Well, for podcasting, it's such a broad thing. The nuts and bolts of podcasting, if you want to know specifically how Amber and I make the dirt, both sort of our philosophy behind the show and the actual steps and software and hardware that we use, we did a... I'll dig up the link for this. We did a workshop for the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network that was recorded and I believe is on their YouTube channel.
00:53:24
Speaker
just exactly about that. But otherwise, there are tons of tutorials online for how to set up a basic recording setup. It's one of the great things about podcasting as a medium for creating stuff is that it's a pretty low cost entry point and it's a reasonably shallow learning. I mean,
00:53:47
Speaker
I'm sure it'll depend on who's doing the learning, but it's a pretty shallow learning curve. There are even a lot of apps now that are just sort of plug and play. So in terms of podcasting and learning how to do it, I would say just
00:54:01
Speaker
listen to a lot of your favorite podcasts and emulate the things that they do, the things that you like about them, the way that they structure their show. If it seems to work for them, try it out. See if it works for you or eventually you'll find your own voice. But for Zoarchaeology, I would like to shamelessly plug an episode of The Dirt, which is the Funna with Fauna episode. We have fun with our titles.
00:54:25
Speaker
But that is episode 59 of the podcast, and we break down what zoarchaeology is and talk about a few case studies and sort of what those show about lives of people through the lens of the animals that they interacted with. So that's a fun one.
00:54:43
Speaker
I mentioned Flint Dibble before, but he's phenomenal on Twitter. He creates a lot of Twitter threads, not only breaking down concepts of zoarchaeology and how you can learn about the past through it, but also just
00:54:58
Speaker
A lot of, he debunks a lot of pseudoscience and pseudo-archaeology on there. He also has a YouTube channel where he's posted several of his lectures. So if you want to get a little bit deeper into a little bit more than just basic introductory Zoharck, I would say start there.
00:55:14
Speaker
And then if you want to get even deeper, I can recommend two actual textbooks. One is The Archaeology of Animal Bones by Terry O'Connor, which is pretty approachable. It is definitely an academic book, but it's written in a pretty straightforward and accessible way. And then An Introduction to Zoarchaeology by Diane Gifford Gonzales. It does exactly what it says on the tin. It's An Introduction to Zoarch.
00:55:41
Speaker
But yeah. Excellent. And where can our listeners find you on social media?
00:55:45
Speaker
If you don't want to go on social media, you can just go to thedirtpod.com because all of our socials feed right to the webpage. But if you do want to join the dumpster fire, that is Twitter, you can find me at Anna Goldfield, just my name, and you can find the dirt at dirt podcast. And then you could also follow me on Instagram, me specifically, if you mostly want pictures of food and cats, but I'm at puppy digs and the dirt is at the dirt pod on Insta.
00:56:14
Speaker
Excellent. And if given the chance, would you still choose to live a life in ruins? Oh, yeah. I live a life pre-ruins. I'm living a life in caves, baby. Excellent. Oh, perfect. I love that. Pre-ruins, first one. All right. Well, everyone, we just interviewed Dr. Anna Goldfield. You can find her on Twitter at Anna Goldfield and of course the Dirt at Dirt podcast.
00:56:38
Speaker
as well as Instagram at puppy digs and at the dirt pod. Please be sure to rate the podcast and provide us with any feedback on whichever podcasting platform you're using to listen to our show. And as always, if you're listening to this episode on the all shows feed, please go find the life ruins podcast and subscribe to us there and follow us and listen to our podcast on our page to help us grow our channel and help us eventually take over the dirt podcast. And with that, we are out.
00:57:14
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.
00:57:42
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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 chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.