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Nor'eastern PaleoIndian Archaeology with Dr. Heather Rockwell - Ep 86
547 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Heather Rockwell, who is an Assistant Professor at Salve Regina University. Big surprise, she is another fellow University of Wyoming alum. We begin by asking about her developing years in archaeology and then delve into her choice of undergraduate and graduate programs. She explains how having a diverse committee for her Ph.D. at UW was ultimately helpful for her. We then ask Dr. Rockwell to do a deep dive into Northeastern Paleoindian Archaeology. We finish off talking about the academic job market and her upcoming paper with Dr. Madeline Mackie.
Literature Recommendations
- 2005 The Organization of Male and Female Labor in Foraging Societies: Implications for Early Paleoindian Archaeology by Nicole M. Waguespack
- 2021 A Deep Presence: 13,000 years of Native American History, by Robert G. Goodby
Guest Contact
- Instagram for Regina Salve Department of Cultural and Historical Preservation
- @SalveUnivCHP
- Facebook for Regina Salve Department of Cultural and Historical Preservation
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 86 of a life in ruins podcast, reinvestigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And I am joined by my co-host Connor Johnen. David stubbed his big toes and all of his accomplishments and will not be with us today. Hashtag cancel stratter.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Heather Rockwell
00:00:30
Speaker
Today we are joined by Dr. Heather Rockwell, who is an assistant professor of cultural and historic preservation in the cultural, environmental and global studies department at Salve Regina university. Dr. Rockwell, it is a pleasure having you on with us tonight. How are you doing?
00:00:43
Speaker
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, you guys. Yeah, of course. As we've had this happen a couple of times this past couple of months and frequently, we have folks coming from the University of Wyoming and Dr. Rockwell is one of those folks as well. So you defended your dissertation right before I started and a year before Carlton started, I think.
Influences and Early Fascinations
00:01:06
Speaker
I think that sounds about right. I finished in 2014, but I stuck around for a while.
00:01:14
Speaker
had the pleasure or, I don't know, sometimes the challenge of working in a lot of different areas. So after I finished at Wyoming, I was there for a few more years working as a geographic information specialist for the State Historic Preservation Office. And then I bounced back East for a little while because my partner was working back here. And then I ended up taking the job as the Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer for
00:01:40
Speaker
about a year before ending up at Solvay Regina. So I'm going to kind of run around a little bit. Yes. Yes, you have. That is, that is for sure. And I think, yeah, Connor, you started in 2016. No, 2014. I started in 2016. And I remember meeting you, Dr. Rockwell, I think at pre-semester dinner at Jim or Hearn's house or something like that. But it was definitely, I know we've talked about this
00:02:03
Speaker
with several others, but you were, at least when I was at my master's program, you were one of the leading role models for graduate students to kind of not only impress, but like learn a lot from. So like very grateful for your tutelage at times trying to get through my master's degree. So yeah, thank you for that. And we're super happy to have you on tonight. Well, I'm happy to be here. I'm glad it's a model and not a cautionary tale. I try. You guys made it easy.
00:02:32
Speaker
Well, I'm glad to hear that. So while you're here on a life in ruins, so I guess we better get started. What were your first experiences in anthropology growing up? So like, were you a dinosaur kid, a history kid, or a nature nerd? What was that initial muse into anthro?
Education Choices and College Experiences
00:02:46
Speaker
So I feel like if I go the farthest back, I was kind of a nature nerd. I started, you know, I spent most of my time outside as a kid. My parents had that policy of like, you know, I'm kicking you out of the house. Come back when the sun goes down. I don't want to see you, which is ultimately, I think probably a good thing. You know, they sent me to science center camp as a kid to just be like, go outside and leave us alone.
00:03:12
Speaker
But they also were really encouraging of me to kind of explore things around history. So I had a really brief period of time where I wanted to be a marine biologist. And then I watched Jaws and didn't want to be a marine biologist because the ocean is terrifying. And I also realized that job is not actually just scuba diving.
00:03:30
Speaker
There's actual science that seemed kind of hard and scary at the time. And then really quickly, about eight years old, I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist. We had watched Indiana Jones. We liked history at my house. Both my brothers were history majors in college. My dad was that dad who always had some sort of history book on his bedside stand at night. So I kind of switched gears at about eight years old.
00:03:58
Speaker
And then by the time I was 15, I was still saying I wanted to do this. And my parents were rightfully concerned because they were like, I don't think, you know, she's more than a high school. She's getting older. She still thinks she wants to do this job that doesn't really seem like it's a real job.
00:04:19
Speaker
It seems like a job that like, you know, it's a movie job. It's not a real people job. So they started trying to search around to find a way I could go do some archeology and see what it really was. And my older brother actually found a program in the state of New Hampshire called the State Conservation Rescue Archeology Program. It's run by the SHPO office called the Division of Historic Resources. It's a volunteer program to train people in archeology.
00:04:49
Speaker
So they wrote the state archaeologist, Dr. Richard Beauvair, who's one
Graduate School and PhD Journey
00:04:53
Speaker
of my long-term mentors, about having me go out with him. Normally, he had only people over the age of 16, but I was a hardcore nerd. So I wrote a letter when I was about 15 and a half. I was like, can I please, please go? I'm really responsible. And they let me.
00:05:12
Speaker
And so my parents dropped me off for a two week field project, left me in the Northwoods of New Hampshire and picked me up two weeks later. And my mother was convinced. She was like, I thought I was going to pick you up and you were going to be like, I'm stinky and dirty and my nails are gross. I want to go home. Instead, they picked me up and I was hooked.
00:05:32
Speaker
I was like, this is it. This is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. And I worked with Dr. Bovair all the way up until, gosh, probably I'd still work with him today. He comes out now and works on my projects, which is kind of a fun switch of roles. But I worked for him as a volunteer until I was 21. And then I started supervising projects for him for four years, I believe. And then I started running my own projects. So it was kind of a.
00:06:00
Speaker
Serendipity, I'm one of those few kids I think that knew what they wanted to do from the time they were really little and still love it. We've asked this question probably 86 times because this is the 86th episode, but I think that it's really interesting to hear there's only a handful of people who in high school get to get that experience of going out and actually doing fieldwork and really getting not addicted, but getting excited about archaeology during those times. So it's cool to hear that they have a program like that to allow
00:06:29
Speaker
even 16 or younger folks to do that. Yeah, it was a really powerful experience for me. I don't think I would have gone on the same path if I hadn't gotten to do that so young. This is my 20th field season will be this coming year, which is kind of crazy because I'm not that old.
00:06:46
Speaker
Absolutely. So you grew up in New England. What made you want to pursue an anthro degree in Wisconsin, right? That's W I as Wisconsin. I know my state abbreviations. Yeah, that's right. So it was kind of a funny trip for me. Cause so I knew I wanted to do archeology, you know, I was talking with my guidance counselor, trying to find some universities that I could go do.
00:07:09
Speaker
and was struggling a little bit, because there are some that I was like, I know I want to do archeology specifically. So we're trying to find anthropology programs that we're going to do what I wanted to do. And Beloit College, where I ended up going, kept kind of coming up. But I was really resistant to it because my oldest brother went to Beloit, history major.
00:07:29
Speaker
And I was like, I'm not going to go to the same college my brother went to. That's lame. He was there seven years before me. And I just like, I don't like that. I didn't want to do it and didn't want to do it. But I met with a recruiter from Beloit because Beloit has a really active sort of recruiting program across country. And he started telling me about all these great opportunities. For one, you know, they have tons of active field projects that they run through the university. The university itself is actually on an archeological site. It's surrounded by mounds.
00:07:59
Speaker
So it's kind of an amazing place to go. They also have a really great museum. The Logan Museum of Anthropology has actually is one of the best collections of South American pottery in the nation.
00:08:10
Speaker
but you also get to work in the museum. Even as a freshman, they let you go in and you can help with collections and help with collection management design. And that was all stuff I wanted to be able to do. So, you know, I applied to six schools, got into BOIIT, and, you know, debated very briefly on going to the University of New Hampshire, stay a little closer to home, but ultimately, you know, BOIIT went out and it was the right choice for me. It gave me kind of the training that I wanted, that broad kind of forefield training that's so important.
00:08:39
Speaker
and gave me a lot of hands-on experience that is still useful. So what year did you first start getting that hands-on experience? Was this from year one on?
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. When I got to Beloit, they, they start you right off kind of getting to do work as much as you want to. It's a really, it's a small school. There's like 1200 students. So it's really, really little anthropology is one of their largest majors. And they, they bring you right in. And if you say, I want to do this, I want to be hands on. I want to work with collections. I went on my field school through the university. They're my sophomore year. And I went to Chile.
00:09:18
Speaker
We worked in the Atacama desert of northern Chile in a very tiny town called Pisagua. Pisagua is so remote that it was actually used as a political prison by a Pinochet. But it's an incredible place for preservation.
Research in Paleo-Indian Archaeology
00:09:35
Speaker
We're working on Chinchouro period sites, so pre-Inkin civilizations, finding
00:09:40
Speaker
mummies with fabric and woven mats and all this sort of incredible, very Nova special kind of archeology stuff. So I got to that, that really kind of solidified why I was there in the first place. And they were really into kind of professionalizing you as a young student. So when I got back from that field project, I did a student symposium on it and led a talk on my research down there.
00:10:08
Speaker
And that kind of thing kind of setting you up to do those professional talks down the road. I really like that and I got a charge out of it. Excellent. So what made you, or what led you to pursue graduate school? Was it from this like getting a real hands-on experience in undergraduate and that getting that charge motivated you to continue down this path?
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, you know, in some ways it was. I also, you know, I was talking with a lot of people about where do I want to go with this? What's the career? Because, you know, deep down I am a fairly practical person. Eating and paying rent are important to me. So I started asking some of my advisors, you know, what's the next step for me to have this as a job? And they said, you know, if you want to be on projects, you want to run your own projects, you really need to go get a master's degree.
00:10:56
Speaker
I was also finishing undergraduate in 2008 when the economy was not awesome. So jobs were pretty, it was a rough scene out there. So graduate school looked pretty good as a secure way to kind of be semi-employed is what I would call graduate school, but also get that next step that I needed in order to kind of be prepared successfully. I hadn't initially planned on going beyond that.
00:11:24
Speaker
I sort of knew the master's degree was really what you needed to be SOI standard and to be brought on to projects at a higher pay level. So I picked that and picked the University of Tulsa, honestly, in not maybe the most informed way when I was applying to my master's programs. I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to study New England archaeology. And I wanted to go somewhere that would let me do that
00:11:54
Speaker
But I couldn't go to New England to do it. So you went to Oklahoma? Yeah. So I went to the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, mostly because I talked to people there. They were willing to train me in a skill set, which is something I wanted. I wanted more training and that hands-on approach is people who are doing science.
00:12:19
Speaker
And that was what attracted me to there, but I had applied to a lot of different programs. And that was the one that kind of fit the best. They had really good support for their master's students, which was also important to me because I didn't want to go into more academic debt. And they seemed like they really wanted me. And I'm glad I went. I worked with Dr. George Odell down there, the late George Odell, unfortunately, but he trained me in micro rare analysis.
00:12:46
Speaker
which was a really useful skill set for someone who's interested in New England archaeology. Because New England, we have rocks, but we don't have much else. So you really have to extract every piece of information you can. And micro wear lets you do that. So micro wear or use wear analysis is when you examine the edges of stone tools.
00:13:09
Speaker
and from the patterns of the way they break and the way polish develops and things that are called striations that are kind of like little lines in them, you can determine what the tools were used for, which is pretty helpful on sites that are just little pieces of rock.
00:13:25
Speaker
Absolutely. And then you went to Wyoming, good old UW, also working on New England archeology, but getting further from New England and you go to Wyoming. So what led you to Wyoming? Was it specifically for Dr. Wagusback?
00:13:41
Speaker
So Wyoming was another one where I ended up applying to a bunch of different programs. And again, I knew I wanted to do New England archaeology. And to do that, I knew I needed to go somewhere that was going to offer me some research freedom.
00:13:56
Speaker
Because there's some programs, you go into the PhD, you work under a particular professor, they hand you a project and say, this is what your dissertation's on. And I didn't want that. I wanted to design my own project, and I wanted to study what I wanted to study.
00:14:13
Speaker
So I needed somewhere that was gonna let me do that. I also knew I wanted to do Paleo Indian. I kind of caught the paleo bug really early. I worked my first paleo site at 16, loved it, was totally hooked, thought this paleo thing was incredible and what I really wanted to study. So when I was selecting programs, I wanted to go somewhere that was gonna push me theoretically.
00:14:39
Speaker
in the world of studying paleo, people who are really going to help me hone my ideas. You know, I had a skillset, I could do lithic analysis, I could do micro wear, I could do statistics.
00:14:52
Speaker
I needed people who were going to teach me how to think about paleo. And in my opinion, there are a few places better for that than the University of Wyoming, especially to work with someone like Dr. Wagesback, Dr. Sorobell, and Dr. Kelly. That was my dream team. That was my core dissertation committee. And I learned so much about how to think about people in the past from the three of them. Were you the last Dr. Wagesback student?
00:15:22
Speaker
I was actually the first Dr. Magus back PhD student. I was her first, she was my chair and I was the first student that she was a chair for. So she was on lots of committees before me, but I was her, the first person she chaired for. I believe her last student was actually Dr. Malloy. Oh, that makes sense. She really finished just two years after me.
00:15:46
Speaker
We should talk about the intersection between those three minds in the beginning of the next segment because it's interesting how
00:15:54
Speaker
they all approach things from different angles. So yeah, I think we'll start off there and then go into some of your PhD research. This is episode 86 of the Life of a Ruins Podcast, and we will be right back. Welcome back to episode 86 of a Life of a Ruins Podcast. We are here with Dr. Heather Rockwell, and we ended the last segment talking about her moving to Wyoming and getting a committee full of folks who would challenge her theoretically and help her
00:16:25
Speaker
inform how she approaches kind of the archeological record. So could you speak to how kind of your committee members helped work with you on your dissertation and lead your research? Yeah, absolutely. So I talked to my dream team. So I had Bob, Todd, and Nicole, and they're all really different people. And they all ask you to read really different stuff.
00:16:53
Speaker
So, and I used to kind of, I would spend a lot of time talking with each of them. So I used to just go into their offices and sit down and do a lot of talking about here are the things I'm thinking about right now. What am I not reading? What am I not engaging with that I need to be engaged with?
00:17:10
Speaker
And it was always really funny because I just get such different stuff, even though I'd go to them with the same problems that I was exploring or being like, you know, I'm trying to connect, you know, activities to mobility.
00:17:27
Speaker
How do I attack it? I'm doing this micro-ware analysis and I'm seeing what activities are occurring within a site. How do I take this and look at it on a regional scale and understand how does this affect people moving about a landscape? In a way that's real, in a way that's not one of the big criticisms of micro-ware analysis, and I think this is fair, is it tends to be anecdotal. It tends to be being like, we have these pretty points and they got used for this.
00:17:57
Speaker
And that's all they say. And it doesn't get put in a broader context of what does that mean? And why does it matter for human behavior? And that's the kind of questions I wanted to ask. So Bob would always kind of, he'd give me some really interesting stuff with like, occasionally it would be ethnographic things where he would be like, you need to go read, you know, this, go read some, some John Yellen or.
00:18:19
Speaker
You know, go to go read some, some new new foragers. And then other times it would be, you know, these technology things where he'd be like, go, go look at, you know, he's like, go read it. Go look at three sides of a bi-face. Three sides of a bi-face is wrong. And usually it wasn't that he'd usually, Bob is actually secretly very humble and he would always recommend he'd like, go read Mary Prasse Eunice's
00:18:41
Speaker
work on, you know, lithics and her study where she did the cutting genes. Go read that. And Todd would give me a lot of, I always felt Todd is in the high nerdery.
00:18:56
Speaker
where he would give me a lot of like stats papers, like papers that are really doing like hardcore quantitative stuff or programming stuff. And you know, he wanted me to go explore some of that literature and really dive deep into kind of some of the more colonization literature that's high techy techy. And then Nicole was always so interesting to talk to because she would just give me these
00:19:22
Speaker
resources that I had never really thought to engage with. One that her and I used to bond over was the work of
Challenges in the Archaeology Job Market
00:19:28
Speaker
Wendell Oswald. Have you heard of Oswald before? Oswald did these really interesting kind of ethnographic collections, but he took a really material culture approach to them. So he would look at technologies from a culture and then break them down to these things he called techno units.
00:19:50
Speaker
and look at sort of how many pieces go into a single artifact. So if we're looking at a harpoon, how many pieces of technology go into that one overall tool?
00:20:05
Speaker
and what different kinds of material culture are there. And thinking about that, for what does that mean for our sites? Because when we see archaeological sites in New England, we just have lithic materials. We just have stone tools because the geochemistry there is terrible. So we don't get a lot of preservation. We don't get a lot of faunal. We get almost no plant remains. We get very few even features, which can be really hard to deal with.
00:20:34
Speaker
So how do we get to all of the soft material? Because when we look at any culture across the world, when we look at their technology, most of it is perishable. So if we're only seeing the rocks, we're seeing like 5%, maybe. So how do we get back to that stuff? And my answer was Microware. Microware is how we get back to that stuff. Because we can see, I can't tell you exactly what they made, but I can tell you what they were working. And that really matters.
00:21:03
Speaker
So she used to kind of get me to think about my problems and my research from this really different angle than I ever thought I would approach them from. That's awesome. I have never taken a lithics class. I've managed to miss both times when Bob did his and then Doug did his. So no lithics for me. I just kind of rely on, yeah, that's a point. Those sure are rocks right there.
00:21:30
Speaker
Look at those. Excellent. So yeah, that's, during my time at Wyoming, I only had Dr. Waggis-Pack for like a semester before she moved on to New Mexico. So I unfortunately didn't get to meet her, but I've always heard really good things about Dr. Waggis-Pack's research. And I did watch her Wyoming public radio, or she did that thing about the overpasses for Antelope.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah. And yes, I saw that. It was great. I was like, I recognize that person. That's all I can contribute to this conversation. I am so out of my environment. I really liked her way of approaching problems. So a lot of her work, I was really aspirational because it was so impeccably researched.
00:22:22
Speaker
pulled from so many different sources that I wouldn't have thought to engage with. I always felt like she was a masterclass in building a really incredible library of resources because you could just go through it. It was just all of these materials that I never would have thought to look into to get some answers. Really sort of like classic old firsthand accounts of cultures that
00:22:48
Speaker
I think a lot of times we sort of discount because a lot of them are pretty bad, but there's some gems in there if you're willing to dig. And she really knew how to dig deep into literature and just get some incredible results from it.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, I felt like I was really blessed to just have Nicole as a teacher, have all of them teach a class for me and learn from them. Because like you said, they approach it from such different angles and you'll get, you're trying to answer the same question, but you'll get so many different, like, you should go this direction, you should go this direction, you know, it can be hard at times.
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, when you talk to the three of them, you bring them a question, you get three different answers, which it's always good because you get to kind of decide which aspects of each of those answers you really like. And, you know, I always really liked working with the three of them because it's not like I didn't always agree with them.
00:23:41
Speaker
on theoretical stuff, big debates in archeology, Clovis versus pre-Clovis, adoption of agriculture. Sometimes we'd end up on different sides of those debates. But I always liked that they really respected their students enough to, they'd sit down and debate it with you.
00:23:59
Speaker
and stuff, and they wouldn't try to just shut you down that you weren't on their level yet. So I had some just great conversations with the three of them. I just took New World Colonization Theory with Nicole. I think it was my first semester at Wyoming, and it was just spectacular. That's very cool. So you ended up writing your dissertation, obviously, I think you wrote your master's thesis on this as well, on the paleo-Indian period in the Northeast. What does that look like, and what does one study? Yeah.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess like how is paleoindian archaeology different in method than it is like in the greater Rocky Mountain, Great Plains area? Well, as I've alluded to, we've had some challenges.
00:24:43
Speaker
Preservation is an issue for us. We've just got really bad geochemistry throughout most of the region, particularly where I work. I work mostly within Northern New England. The swales are incredibly acidic, so almost no bone, very few hards. We do get them, we're pretty lucky. My site I worked on for my master's thesis, the Potter site in Northern New Hampshire, we were actually getting some of the rocks were de-solicifying.
00:25:09
Speaker
And so we have some that we only exist in photographs because when you tried to collect them, they turned into powder. Is that what de solidifying means? De solidification. So it's when the silica starts to leach out of the rock. Yeah, it is not good. It makes your job very, very hard. So you guys are in like hardcore mode up there in New England with paleoindian, like you're dialing up the difficulty rating.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's actually Dr. Kelly in my dissertation defense, you know, I was talking about all these challenges we have and he was like, so the geochemistry is terrible. And there aren't that many people working there. So you don't have that many sites. And they're really hard to find because there's trees everywhere and there's lots of private land. So why bother?
00:26:03
Speaker
And I remember waiting like a full five beats before trying to collect an answer.
00:26:23
Speaker
for why we're doing this to ourselves. At the time, it's your dissertation offense, so my panic levels were at about a 15. And so what I ended up coming up with was, just because something's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
00:26:39
Speaker
And that's kind of the approach you have to take in New England, is you have to be really dedicated to trying to find those answers. I do try to pitch it to people as we've got some good stuff going for us. For one thing, I think it's a really interesting area of paleo. For one thing, we're late. New England paleo is really late to the party.
00:27:01
Speaker
We are solidly later than the rest of North America, really, as far as we don't have any Clovis occupations in New England. Our earliest occupations are Kings Road Whipple points. They're considered a Clovis variant, but not true Clovis. So we come in afterwards, but I say this is an advantage because the thing that people in New England don't have to deal with is pre-Clovis.
00:27:30
Speaker
We know there is no preclovis in New England. There can't be because it's deglaciated fairly late. And even after it's deglaciated, there's some evidence to suggest that New England may have been really hard to get to.
00:27:47
Speaker
So as the ice sheet is sort of retreating into Canada, all that water has to go somewhere. And there's some studies that are suggesting that water is going straight down the Hudson River Valley. And it may have been basically making New England an island that you couldn't get to. Which means we have a temporal control. We know there's no pre-clovis there. So I don't have to worry about sussing out that mess.
00:28:16
Speaker
I can look at sort of a clear window on what colonization should look like. So if I want to understand colonization process and how people do it, I don't have to deal with the muddiness that the rest of the country does because I know when people got to New England. So I actually get to look at what's first.
00:28:35
Speaker
And doesn't it also take time for vegetation to reestablish itself behind retreating glaciers?
Improving Anthropology Education
00:28:41
Speaker
It's not just like, oh, the glaciers have gone boom, 30 foot tall pine trees. It takes some time for life to come back from that under ice hell. Exactly. Yeah, it's going to take a hot minute for the land to recover. We have a place to see Fauna here. This is the other thing that's interesting. So we have remains of mastodons and mammoths in New England.
00:29:04
Speaker
We have zero evidence of them being hunted by people here. Man, I really wish David was here for that because this is an ongoing debate between us. We have no evidence yet. Now we know they overlapped. So a recent paper by my colleague, Dr. Kitchell, they redated a mammoth found in Vermont and the dates for that seem to suggest it is at the time when people are
00:29:30
Speaker
in New England. So we know they're here, but we see no evidence of them being hunted. What we do see them hunting, which is really different from the rest of the country, is caribou. So New England had large herds of caribou. Now, how those caribou behaved is up for some debate.
00:29:49
Speaker
What we assume is that they behave like migratory bands of caribou. The ones that group up in the fall, massive numbers, maybe thousands of animals that would kind of move north. And then in the spring, they'd group up again and they'd move south and they'd have kind of more dispersed pattern in the winter and the summer. And we know people are hunting caribou, sites like the Vale site in Maine,
00:30:13
Speaker
There are some caribou remains there. The tenant swap site in Tling, New Hampshire has a remains of a baby caribou at that site. So we know that's a spring occupation. So we know they're kind of using these caribou herds to their advantage, which is a little different because following a migratory species like caribou requires some pretty different hunting strategies than ambushing
Recommended Readings & Social Media
00:30:38
Speaker
mammoths.
00:30:39
Speaker
So we're seeing a really different pattern of behavior here. And what's interesting, so what my dissertation research focused on is, okay, so New England has this better control over time. So how can we use that to our advantage? And I said, well, let's see if we know what the earliest sites are in New England. So let's look at the behavior we see at those earliest sites and compare it to sites that come later.
00:31:08
Speaker
because then if they're really different, then we should be able to say, hey, this is what colonizing behavior looks like. This is how they behave. And that did not work at all. My research basically found there was almost no difference in behavior between kind of early and middle paleoindian sites.
00:31:27
Speaker
And my explanation for that is I think by the time we can actually see people on the landscape, they've already been settled in that environment for a very long time. I think the colonization process is essentially pretty invisible because people are smart and they get into a landscape and they instantly spread out in way faster than the blink of a radiocarbon eye.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think you mentioned we need to give a, you give a talk at Wyoming. There's a, that's a lag, right? So like the expression of this. Yeah. Yeah. So we see people here and especially, you know, with our dates in New England, because I said bad geochemistry, not a lot of features and some of our classic kind of early paleo-videon sites, you know, we'll have dates on them that it's like plus or minus 200, which is,
00:32:22
Speaker
It's not great because that's a long time.
Episode Conclusion
00:32:27
Speaker
I think by the time we're seeing them here, we're seeing people who really know what they're doing. The sites that I saw that are kind of early paleo suggest people that are really mapped on to resources in the region.
00:32:40
Speaker
You know, our earliest site, one of our earliest ones, the Whipple site, which is also located in New Hampshire, dates to the early Piliwandian period. They have material at that site that comes from where my current project is located in far northern Maine, which means the earliest site we have in the region, they've already accessed material from a site hundreds of miles to the north. So they've gone there and back again.
00:33:07
Speaker
Wow. And we never saw it. Well, that makes sense because you look at like a distribution curve and the earliest sites are going to be like in the 98th, 99th percentile and extreme early edge. And those are just, like Connor said, going to be like darn near invisible. Like you'll never find the earliest site. And if in a environment such as New England, where you're already talking about taphonomic bias and environmental bias, where it's already difficult enough to find a paleo and insight, like you're
00:33:38
Speaker
that difficulty increases exponentially. Exactly. And we should anticipate we'll never find the earliest sites, but we should find a cluster of like early sites. And I think we've got that cluster of early sites, but we just don't see a behavior that says, you know, every now and then I always get frustrated with articles that are like, we're seeing colonization in this site. And I'm like, are you?
00:34:07
Speaker
Are you seeing people that know what they're doing already? Because in theory, people who are colonizers, people who are really in a landscape that's totally new, they shouldn't have it all figured out. They shouldn't mess up a lot. They should maybe use crummy lithic resources or maybe camp in areas that kind of stink. And we don't see that at all. They ignore material from lithic resources that are easy to find, super big.
00:34:37
Speaker
and perfectly serviceable material just gets ignored. They don't use it at all. And then they go find stupid, hard to find stuff in Northern Maine. Absolutely. And that is an app description with Thanksgiving coming up, even though, uh, this episode doesn't come out till December 13th, talking about all the problems of early colonizers. So hashtag Jamestown. We'll be right back with episode 86 of life for its podcast. And we'll be, we'll return with Dr. Heather Rockwell.
00:35:01
Speaker
And welcome back to episode 86. We're going to do a pretty hard transition here. There's no way to really segue. But as we were reviewing Dr. Rockwell's CV in preparation for this episode, there was a very interesting in press or in review. That's what I should have reviewed. Not the episode I'm about to mention, but where is this publication?
00:35:21
Speaker
It's still to be submitted. It's in progress. It's in prep. That's the word I'm looking for. And so Dr. Rockwell is coauthoring an article with Dr. Maddie Mackey, who appeared on episode 71 of Mammoths and Handsprays about a very important and topical, I don't want to say topic, thing. It's definitely a thing. It's definitely a thing. Basically a very important, why a crisis? Is crisis the right word? I think it's a crisis. Crisis is the right word.
00:35:50
Speaker
yeah, crisis that's going on. And so we really wanted Dr. Rockwell to kind of introduce us to this article. And when it's published, we will have Dr. Rockwell and Dr. Mackey back on so we can do a deep dive into this like we've done with topics in the past. So Dr. Rockwell, if you could please introduce us to the concept of this work in progress.
00:36:09
Speaker
Sure. So everybody needed a COVID project. And shortly before the lockdown happened, this paper came out by Speakman et al. talking about job hiring trends in anthropology. Anybody who's trying to get a job who has a PhD in anthropology right now probably knows what I'm talking about because it's not good out there. The job market is
00:36:35
Speaker
a really scary place for someone with a PhD in anthropology. And I am speaking specifically for people with PhDs, master's and undergraduate degrees are a very different world. But people who made the great misfortune of going on and getting a PhD in anthropology. Hello. Hello. Sorry, Carlton. In the aughts,
00:37:00
Speaker
It's really tough. And we're talking about this paper that it basically suggests that they did this big study and they found that there's a very small number of programs that basically hold the majority of the market share of jobs in an anthropology are held by people from just a very small number of programs.
00:37:22
Speaker
And Dr. Mackey and I were both concerned by this. I was personally concerned by this because at that point, I had been sitting out on the job market for about four years. It was about the time you start to question what you're doing. In my own job search, I applied for 113 academic positions. Nailed it on the 114th, which is a lot. I graduated in 2010. I got offered this job.
00:37:52
Speaker
Excuse me, I graduated in 2014. I served in 2010. Thank goodness. I graduated in 2014. I got offered this position in 2019, technically. So in December of 2019, I got offered the job I currently have at Salve Regina. But I was looking at staying within state government, going a very, very different route than kind of the classic academic track.
00:38:16
Speaker
And so our COVID project, we said, can we explore this phenomenon further? What are some of the things, some of the things we know are driving it are, one, there are fewer academic positions than there used to be, especially within anthropology. I would say across many disciplines are seeing this in liberal arts. There are really cutting lines, going to farm or adjuncts, which has its own problems and can be pretty exploitative.
00:38:42
Speaker
But we're also producing a lot more PhDs than we used to, far more than we should. And there are a lot more programs than there used to be. It seems like every time you turn around, a university is trying to have another PhD program. And so our work, we wanted to kind of explore, one, is it really the case that if you basically need to go to a small number of very well-established PhD programs in order to be successful on the job market,
00:39:13
Speaker
Or is there something else driving this trend? And so that's kind of what we decided to explore is look at kind of graduation rates across the nation and see where are people getting their PhDs and where do they end up? And also how long do they sit on the market for? Like I said, I sat on the market for basically five years before I landed an academic job.
00:39:38
Speaker
Now, I was employed in that time, but in a variety of statuses. I worked for the National Park Service. I worked for the SHPO as a contract employee, and then as the deputy SHPO. I was also briefly a secretary in an elementary school. Because again, eating and paying rent are really good things. Whereas Maddie, who is my dear friend, had great success in the job market. She basically kind of nailed it in her first year out. And we said kind of,
00:40:08
Speaker
What's kind of driving some of these trends that we see? When do people get picked up? And maybe also, when should you give up? Academia can be kind of insidious in that we all really want the dream. We all want to go out and we want to be that professor. That's why we got a PhD in the first place is because you want to go out and do research. That's why most people stick in the discipline. Because for archaeology especially, you don't really need it to do almost anything else.
00:40:36
Speaker
You can get up pretty high in the National Park Service or in the federal system or at a CRM firm with a master's degree. You don't need to have a PhD. So if you're getting the PhD, it's because you want a university job. So it sucks people in and they get in this trap and they feel like they can't go for anything else. They have to get that academic job or it wasn't worth it. And it's a long time. I finished my PhD in four years. That's considered pretty fast.
00:41:05
Speaker
many people stay in for closer to eight years. That's a lot of wasted time if you don't end up in the job you want. And so that's kind of the area we've decided to sort of explore in this upcoming work. And I think you also, as you get a PhD, you work yourself out of jobs. You like, you know, over qualify yourself for certain positions in CRM or anything like that. And I know my company in general,
00:41:35
Speaker
Not that they don't, they won't hire a PhD student, but they generally don't hire folks for those positions because they're looking, like you said, for academic jobs and things like that. So you, yeah, you can wiggle yourself out of jobs by doing the PhD as well.
00:41:51
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So my first job with the National Park Service, I had just finished the PhD, was working as a contractor with the SHPO office and was applying to everything under the sun, tons of academic jobs, but I was also applying pretty heavily within the federal service. But the issue was I had never worked in the federal service before. I had no previous time in that system.
00:42:15
Speaker
So I ended up applying for a lot of jobs way below, you know, when you have a PhD, they put your recommended grades somewhere up by like a GS11. And my first job in the federal system was at a GS7, way below that. And part of that was because I had no previous experience.
00:42:36
Speaker
in that area. So I was sort of overqualified on the education front, but underqualified in federal service. And so it puts you in a spot where you can't really win. And this can be true of contract firms as well. Unless you're able to pitch it really well that you've done some of the shovel-blown life and you are okay with going back to that, it can be a tough sell.
00:43:03
Speaker
to hire a PhD, because also you just put in a lot of time and probably a lot of money on an education and you might like to get paid fairly well, which doesn't always come when you're still frankly pretty green for some of those jobs.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, I had a PI in my first CRM gig. He just removed his PhD from a CV and applied for the CRM job, and he was able to get one. And he worked CRM, and I guess one day he slipped about his dissertation topic, and then they found out he had a PhD. And then they're like,
00:43:39
Speaker
well, he's not on the market. He's been working with us for such a long time. Let's just promote him to a PI. So it went from like basic shovel bomb, kind of proved that he was in it to win it and then let it slip. He had a PhD and then boom, all of a sudden he's a, he's a PI. So it was like, I guess it kind of worked out for him, but it was this weird, this was like fresh out of undergrad for me, like in between Radford and Wyoming when I was doing this and like,
00:44:02
Speaker
I had never heard how bad the PhD job market was before. Now I'm here and they're like, yeah, the market sucks. I had to lie about my education just to get a job and not make yourself look better. That's not fair. I wouldn't say if you took your PhD off, you'd look worse.
00:44:22
Speaker
As Connor said, a big reason with CRM companies, if you have a PhD, they assume you're on the job market for a professor job. Why are they going to hire you as a CRM company? Why are they going to put all this time and energy into training you for their CRM company if you're just going to go?
00:44:36
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it, you know, I think some of that is, you know, a failure of academic programs to also kind of one, pitch the reality of what you're going to see out there. You know, I, when I was applying to PhD programs, I didn't have that conversation with anyone.
00:44:54
Speaker
I got told like, oh, it's challenging and competitive. But I didn't get told that things like 70% of people who get a PhD are not going to end up with a job in academia. And those are what the numbers are suggesting, is that most people will not end up in a job in the academy. Which means we maybe need to rethink the bill of goods we're selling people.
00:45:23
Speaker
You know, if you want to go get a PhD.
00:45:26
Speaker
Think about what you want to afterwards and have some backup plans, you know, having a, okay, I'm going to apply for PhD programs for X amount of time, but I'm also going to apply for these jobs over here because, you know, we do, we have a decent set of skills. Surveying companies get really excited about the fact that we know how to run a total data station, you know, sell yourself for other things. You know, one thing anthropologists can do is talk to people. So usually we can sell ourselves at least a little bit.
00:45:57
Speaker
And we, I think, need to really take a good look at what we're telling people when they're coming through and how many students we're taking on. Way too many PhD students are going into programs and there's just not jobs out there for them. And I mean, some of this is also related to the fact that I always joke about how anthropologists, they don't retire. They die on the bench like they're in the Supreme Court.
00:46:20
Speaker
They die on the keyboard. They do. They never leave. You know, I always laugh. You go into these programs and there's people in there and they're like, I'm 80 years old. It's like, are you emeritus? No, just hanging out. And I get it. There's something to be said for the fact that they love their jobs. But there's some really hungry people in their mid thirties who would really love it if you retired. I think I might have a solution. Archaeology, PhD, squid games.
00:46:50
Speaker
The prize is a tenure track position. We throw 300 archaeologists with PhDs into a room with sharpened trowels and just do a number of tasks. And at the end, someone gets a tenure track where the rest are dead. So that way we were opening jobs and also eliminating the inflation in the market.
00:47:07
Speaker
The scary thing is it's kind of already like that, especially if you start looking at some of these applications. There's a joke thing going around right now. They're going to send a plaque to the worst job application this year.
00:47:22
Speaker
Because I think they've kind of gotten wise to a lot of these applications. They can ask for whatever they want. And there's so many desperate people that they'll get it. So places ask for CV, cover letter, research statement, teaching statement, diversity statement, three sample syllabi and letters up front. And these take hours to prepare.
00:47:46
Speaker
if you're doing them right, because you do have to tailor them. Anyone who says you can send the same letter to every school you apply to is not going to get a job. You have to tailor every single one, and when you have to do an eight-part application,
00:48:01
Speaker
you are wasting tons of time, but the schools know they'll get it. Gosh, I remember there was one job listing from an institution which will remain nameless from several years back that was advertising a, it was a permanent job at a community college system, but you would teach on five different campuses. So you would have to drive between these different campuses
00:48:29
Speaker
And the pay was $45,000 a year. I mean.
00:48:36
Speaker
That's a, you literally go out and get a job doing almost anything else and do better than that and do a heck of a lot less of driving around because there's no guarantee that the five classes you would be teaching a semester wouldn't be on all five campuses. But that's the kind of thing that places can ask for. And it's, it's taking advantage of some really desperate people.
00:49:01
Speaker
What is the hope? What's the silver lining to this article that you and Dr. Mack are working on? What's the call to action? So the call to action is, some of it is, I think we need to... One, I think we're starting this really early on. So with my own students, we got to do professional development training from the get-go.
00:49:20
Speaker
Every single one of my students who graduates with me is going to walk out of there with a CV, knowing how to apply for jobs, and with a clear view of what this market is like. I think we have to have those conversations with students early, so they really think about what their options are like out there and what all of this means. You know, what does it mean when you have student loans and you are in graduate school for 10 years?
00:49:47
Speaker
You know, what does that do to the interest on them? What will your student loans look like when you come out the other side and you haven't been paying them? It's, you know, I think having some of those really smart conversations early on with students is going to be key. But also thinking about what are the kinds of jobs that archaeologists can do because we've got some skills.
00:50:09
Speaker
Like, archaeologists are good at kind of a wide variety of skills, but we've hammered into people getting PhDs for so long, there's only one path forward, and that's just not the case. You know, in my own area where I'm living in Newport, Rhode Island, there's a huge number of preservation organizations that would love to hire people
00:50:31
Speaker
who are archeologists because we have broad knowledge. So I think also just there's an opportunity to be more creative and to pursue different paths. But I think the key is we need to tell people that those paths are okay and not sort of put academic jobs up on a pedestal, that these are the only path forward.
00:50:55
Speaker
Yeah, and we hope that this program and A Life in Ruins in general can give credence to that, that we give that people take different paths in archaeology, and we want to highlight that as part of this program. Like our unfunded and unpaid podcast that we do on our free time. Also, I'm going to recommend The Purge as part of your squid games thing. You're part of it too as well.
00:51:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's the thing. I always tell people, archaeologists are some of the coolest people you'll meet. They have awesome skills, and they would be really good in a ton of different positions. Archaeologists can do anything, so we should just get more creative in the jobs we want to do, like podcasting.
00:51:38
Speaker
If all else fails, there's always corporate recruiting. So Dr. Rockwell, before we end the show, what are a couple of sources, these could be books, articles, videos, blogs, whatever, that you would recommend for anyone interested in paleo Indian archeology or the archeology of New England.
00:51:53
Speaker
So a couple of sources that if you're interested in paleoindian archaeology that have really meant a lot to me. One, I have to shout out because it's from my dissertation chair, Nicole Wagesback, the Organization of Male and Female Labor and Foraging Societies, Implications for Early Paleoindian Archaeology. It's one of those papers that I've drawn a lot of inspiration from because I
00:52:13
Speaker
love taking scientific approaches and then saying, what other things can we think about with this? Then a new book that's come out very recently and is written by a dear friend of mine and a wonderful archeologist working in New England, A Deep Presence, 13,000 Years of Native American History by Robert Goodby. It's very much accessible, it's meant for the general public, and Bob is just
00:52:39
Speaker
is a really great person who has been doing the work in an area that is really hard to work in. So this book was really needed, so I'm excited that it's out right now. Excellent. Would you say that Bob is doing goodbye to the Paleo Union Record up in New England? He is doing goodbye to the Paleo Union Record in New England. You'll have to see his name to understand that pun. Okay, so excellent. Where can our listeners find you on social media, Heather?
00:53:08
Speaker
So you can find me on Instagram at Solve University CHP and on Facebook at Solve Regina University Cultural Historic Preservation.
00:53:19
Speaker
Excellent. And for our listeners, you can find those handles in the episode description, wherever you're listening to this podcast. Osman, because this show is the show it is, we have to ask you. So if you were given a chance again, would you still choose to live a life searching for New England paleo-indian archeological ruins? I would choose a life in ruins every day of the week.
00:53:46
Speaker
Excellent. And with that, we just interviewed Dr. Heather Rockwell, assistant professor of cultural and historic preservation in the cultural, environmental and global zooties department at Solvay Regina University. That is a mouthful, Heather. That is quite the title. And I actually may have to correct you on that.
00:54:03
Speaker
What happened? It's fine. It's close enough. Okay. I'm sorry. I had, I like looked, I googled the page. But anyways, you could find Heather on Instagram and Facebook at Salve University CHP on Instagram and on Facebook, Salve Regina University cultural historic preservation program. So you can find those in the show notes below. Rate the podcast. Yeah, do that. Buy our merch. We have stickers, please. Excellent. And with that, we are out.
00:54:38
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. So bad. So bad. Ready for it. What do New Englanders call a crate full of dentures?
00:55:19
Speaker
That felt like a punch in the heart
00:55:43
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 Rachel Rodin. 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.