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Life in the Pueblo with Kathryn Kamp - Episode 16
588 Plays8 years ago
On today's show April and Chris interview the author of a staple in many anthropology classes, "Life in the Pueblo" by Kathryn Kamp. This is a foundational book for many people and we talk about her motivation behind writing it and what's changed over the years. We also talk about children in the archaeological record and about how they aren't thought about enough when doing analysis.
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Transcript
Partnership Announcement: APN and PCSJobs
00:00:00
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. The Archaeology Podcast Network is sponsored by PCSJobs. APN listeners can post for free by going to arcpodnet.com forward slash PCS. That's $50 off the normal price at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash PCS.
Introduction to Episode 16 with Dr. Kathy Camp
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the archaeology podcast episode 16. I'm Chris Webster. And I'm April Camp Whitaker. On today's show, we're going to be interviewing Dr. Kathy Camp, author of Life in the Pueblo. Let's dig a little deeper.
Dr. Camp's Journey to Archaeology
00:00:53
Speaker
Great. So today we are doing a little interview with Dr. Catherine Camp, who is an archaeologist at Grinnell College and amongst her many research interests.
00:01:02
Speaker
She's pretty well known for the book Life in the Pueblo, which is an introductory book used in a lot of classrooms. So we thought it'd be fun to bring her on, talk to her a little bit about background and how this book came about. So Kathy, if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about some of your background in archaeology and your research interests. Okay, I came to archaeology.
00:01:24
Speaker
I would guess you'd say late as an undergraduate. I was a biology major and then I switched and I became a psychology major. Then I went to graduate school in psychology and kind of fluked into archaeology because I wanted to get out of psychology and I thought, what do I like to do?
Comprehensive Practice in Archaeology
00:01:48
Speaker
And I decided going to museums was what I'd like to do. So I went to the University of Arizona.
00:01:55
Speaker
to be in their museum studies program. Unfortunately, I never took a museum studies course. I took an archeology course and I thought this is kind of cool. Then I went to Grasshopper Field School and I thought, oh my God, you mean I could get paid to do this? And, you know, the rest is history. I just never did exactly what I thought I was going to do. I got trapped.
00:02:23
Speaker
I think that's a lot of stories. It is just amazingly interesting, captivating. Even the lab analysis is fun.
00:02:38
Speaker
Nice. That one you might have a few of the centers on. Yeah, it depends. Some people like lab work, some people don't. Yeah, well, you know, I think you have to be excited about all the aspects because unfortunately, to be an ethical archaeologist, you have to do everything. You can't just go and dig things up or even survey things. You need to do the analysis and you need to do the write-up.
Impact of 'Life in the Pueblo' on Students
00:03:03
Speaker
Well, let's let's bring this back to the book. I'm sitting here looking. I was one of those uber geeks in my undergrad that and I was the only one actually, especially in an anthropology class in the year 2000, where I typed all of my notes, the notes that I took in class. I typed all those. I typed all that stuff and all my papers, of course. And I have all those things still.
00:03:28
Speaker
And I'm sitting here looking at a paper from January 31st, 2000. I started in an aviation program actually in Oklahoma, and then I transferred to the University of North Dakota. So this was my first semester at like a liberal arts college. And I filled up my electives with the intro classes for the anthropology department. And this was the ANTH 172, Introduction to Archaeology and World Prehistory.
00:03:52
Speaker
Yeah, and I've got a paper here about the first three chapters of Catherine Camp's book, Life in the Pueblo, and the paper is titled, A Processualistic Approach to Archaeology. Yeah, it's great. I'm actually reading through this, and I was reading through it yesterday, actually.
00:04:12
Speaker
It's really, I don't think I analyzed anything. It's really just kind of a summary of the book, because I didn't know what the heck I was doing or talking about. So why don't you tell us first, what year was the book published? I think it was in 1998. Is that right? Yeah, I'm not sure, because I don't have it in front of me. I recently moved, and I think it's in a box. It's either 1998 or 1999. OK. Well, we'll have a link to it in the show notes so people can go check it out and buy a copy if they want.
00:04:42
Speaker
Um, people are, I mean, you're still selling copies of this book. It's, uh, I mean, we're, we're, we're working on 20 years now. That says something about the staying power of the sort of foundational nature that this book has. I think, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about, you know, what it's about?
Fieldwork in the American Southwest
00:04:59
Speaker
Well, I went to teach after my graduate degree at the university of Arizona, I went to teach at Grinnell college and they wanted to field school.
00:05:09
Speaker
So my dissertation had been done in Syria and frankly, there is no way I was going to take a gigantic group of undergraduates to Syria for a field school. So we decided that the American Southwest would be where we would go. That's where my husband, John Whitaker does his research. And so we went, we looked for a site, we found a site that was going to be part of a land exchange.
00:05:39
Speaker
which means that they, the Forest Service wanted to have it as completely researched as possible so that it was, it's very close to current modern day Flagstaff and particularly to the railroad. And so they wanted to do a land exchange. As it turns out, they never did do the land exchange, but we were doing the first part of, you know, making that a possibility for them. We loved doing field schools. We did,
00:06:06
Speaker
a number of them, four of them on that site, and then we started writing up the professional monograph. And I kept thinking, huh, my students aren't going to read this. This was a very important part of their lives, but they won't read the traditional archaeological monograph with all of the detailed lithic tables and other extremely exciting parts.
00:06:37
Speaker
So we wanted to do a good professional job on that, but it also seemed important to have something that our ex-students, most of whom, because Grinnell was a liberal arts school, are not archaeologists.
Public Engagement in Archaeology
00:06:52
Speaker
A few of them, but most of them aren't. And simultaneously, I was teaching
00:06:58
Speaker
an intro course called Human Evolution and Prehistory. And I thought there is nothing, or wasn't much at least at that time, that was the equivalent of those little spindler volumes. I don't know if you have ever read those, but they're still around. Tiny little ethnographies that you,
00:07:22
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could assign in that I thought were incredible fun to read, even before I got into anthropology. And so I wanted to write something similar to that. And Waveland had taken over the Spindler series. So I thought in terms of, well, maybe a Waveland Press book that was short and hopefully somewhat readable. And I
00:07:49
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wanted to think about how best to do this. And I wanted to interweave the students' story of their experiences, their discoveries, in with the story of the archaeological analysis, the stories of the past. I wanted it all to be kind of an integrated narrative. OK.
00:08:14
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So that was kind of the motivation for trying to to write life in the Pueblo. And it was so much more fun to write than the archaeological monograph. I'm sure, I'm sure. I also think that archaeologists really need to spend more time. And I wish we got more professional credit for trying to communicate with the public.
00:08:44
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And so Life in the Pueblo, in addition to having a few classes that still use it, sells in places like some of the national parks. And so I think we need to do more of that kind of writing, and there is more and more being done. Unfortunately, the profession doesn't, or at least the academic part of the profession doesn't reward it very well.
00:09:12
Speaker
Yeah, and I think just to kind of go on a tangent a little bit, I'm pretty active in sort of the digital side of archaeology, meaning blogs and of course this podcast network and then Twitter and things like that. There are a fair number of academic
00:09:29
Speaker
archaeologists, and I feel like they really started as PhD students before they finished, and they were writing blogs and doing these things and trying to get credit for this stuff. Some of their universities are starting to turn around a little bit and recognize that the writing contributions you make from a public non-peer-reviewed standpoint are actually valid.
00:09:53
Speaker
Even if you put things on academia, which is just a digital scholarly format, but people read it. They find it and they read it. Those blogs are the same way. I hope you're right that there will be Common Avenue. I will say, I don't think Grinnell really
00:10:13
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recognizes that yet because it's not peer reviewed and all, you know, the whole emphasis in our tenuring process is, is it peer reviewed? Right. I think it's being recognized more as part of the current drive for archaeologists to have a public outreach or a public communication component. So it's not counting towards our publications and kind of scholarly development, but it's counting as engagement.
The Role of Blogs in Archaeology
00:10:40
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Right.
00:10:41
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And I see it as important for getting a job. I could see it as one of the things that a department would look at and say, oh yes, this person is really good at reaching out and they're gonna really click with students. I could see.
00:10:58
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and i do i do actually see it as uh i i mean so let's look not that we intended the conversation to go this way but this is fantastic um yeah you know you look at a you look at a a traditional peer-reviewed article and that's reviewed by a handful of people you know not not very many just a handful of people they look at it you know you make revisions and then it gets turned back in right a blog is
00:11:21
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is actually peer reviewed by potentially thousands of people. I mean, it's not the official peer review process, but when people start leaving comments, people on the internet are brutal. Now, some of those comments are just going to be ignorant comments, but other comments are going to be from your peers saying, hey, did you think about this? And did you think about that? It really gets people thinking in a much more
00:11:42
Speaker
I think realistic way then then four people looked at your article and you're kind of preaching to the choir a little bit and then it gets published and then there's no room for comment because it's stuffed away in a journal that only six people have access to. So you know I yeah go ahead I was gonna say they also you know we always say that students vote with their feet in classes so you can sometimes tell a failing teacher because no one will sign up for their class right similarly
00:12:10
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if people start subscribing to your blog and following you, you know you've done something right. Yeah, yeah. And I think books can be, it takes a little longer, but books, you know, popular, I guess, I don't know, I don't know what the right term is, but any book you write, I mean, if it's used for, like, for example, your book has been used for 20 years in schools. That's a pretty good peer review right there. Your peers say, I want to use this to teach my students about archeology.
00:12:40
Speaker
and I mean that's a that's pretty high praise right there more than more than any article you probably wrote 20 years ago is anybody still looking at those you know but the book is in national parks it's in classrooms it's in students backpacks right now so um that's a that's pretty high praise um
00:12:58
Speaker
But let's bring it back to the book a little bit and I want to, I want to get, cause we can actually go on this forever, I think for the rest of the episode. But let's go back to the book and, and, and dig just a little bit deeper into it. Just cause I mean, it's been a long time since I read this, but now it's all kind of coming back to me as I read my, the couple of papers that I wrote about it. Lizard Man Village. Tell us about that.
Excavation of Lizard Man Village
00:13:23
Speaker
So Lizard Man Village was, I think, a very typical kind of site for the Sonawa to have. It was occupied right post the eruption of Sunset Crater, so sometime around the mid 80, 10 hundreds, and then abandoned sometime around 80, 12, 50.
00:13:49
Speaker
So it was occupied a long time, but never very intensively. So it was a small village and probably people who were related. And we know that they were utilizing the surrounding area. We have some field houses to do agriculture. We have field houses and so forth. But the area is not really suitable for very intensive farming.
00:14:19
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And so there's a necessity for these small villages rather than big sites. In fact, towards the end of the occupation, we've been after we excavated a lizard man village, we excavated one season, it's something called Fortress Hills Pueblo, which is a very, very similar site. And then we went, wow, this is a very similar site. You know, we feel like we kind of understand this site because we spent
00:14:47
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four years at Lizard Man Village and it kind of reaffirmed that this was, you know, looked typical. So we went to a slightly later site, one that initially was occupied during the latter part of Lizard Man Village and then continued on a bit later, called New Caves Pueblo. And it is different in that it is larger and it is also
00:15:15
Speaker
located in kind of a defensive location. After sites like New Caves Pueblo were abandoned, in fact, the whole area was abandoned. And we think that really the larger sites were probably unsustainable given the ecology of the area. Even New Caves isn't that huge. Maybe 200 households at a time was the max possible.
00:15:46
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I'm not sure that was ever gigantic. And what's the time period that for the village for this village? When was it at its peak? For new caves? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So lizard man village was being abandoned in in the mid 1250s. And fortress sorry, new caves was being occupied
00:16:15
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for the first time probably in the late 11, early 1200s. And then it was abandoned somewhere around 1350. So a little bit of overlap. Yeah. You said this was going to be part of the land swap that the federal agencies do, but then it wasn't. How long has it been since you've been back there? And do you know what the status of the actual site is now? Well, we visited.
00:16:45
Speaker
almost every year. Just to check up and see what's happened and it had various things happen. There was a train derailment one year right essentially onto the site. It didn't cause all that much damage, but apparently perhaps reasonable given where we're from, which is corn country, there was a
00:17:10
Speaker
dumpage of corn and corn syrup and some things like that on the site. But the Forest Service asked us to go out and do a little bit of an assessment for that, just to take a look at it and make sure that there wasn't a lot of damage. But people go out there and shoot. People leave mattresses out there. And we'll sometimes do just a tiny bit of cleanup.
00:17:38
Speaker
But essentially, it's the same and it's still, unfortunately, so near of Flagstaff that people come and dump their old mattresses. So it's not an ideal location. But since it's been very heavily excavated, I suppose there's a lot less that can be damaged now.
00:18:01
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Nice.
Preservation Challenges at Lizard Man Village
00:18:02
Speaker
I didn't realize how close I was probably to that. We did a, my wife and I, she was an archeologist at the time. We did a project in New Mexico and on our time off we would go, cause we were on a nine on five off schedule. And so on those five days off, you know, we travel all over New Mexico and Arizona and we went to sunset crater. Um, and I think is, uh, is Wupatki if I'm pronouncing that right. Is that near there? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and yeah, lizard man's near the towns and went on a road. Okay. Okay. Which doubtless went on.
00:18:32
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Yeah, that one. Yeah, out out to the east of Flagstaff. Nice. So you probably are near. Well, we're going to go to break. And while we do that, I'm going to think about archaeologists 500 years from now finding remnants of corn syrup on this site and trying to figure out what the heck all that means. So I think there's nothing now. Nice. All right. Well, we're going to break and we'll be back in 30 seconds or so.
00:18:58
Speaker
I'm Jessica Equinto, and I'm the host of the Heritage Voices podcast. Heritage Voices focuses on how CRM and heritage professionals, public employees, tribes, and descendant communities can best work together to protect their heritage through tribal consultation, collaborative ethnography, and indigenous archeology. Now back to the show.
Storytelling in 'Life in the Pueblo'
00:19:22
Speaker
So Kathy, now that we're back with the show after our short break,
00:19:27
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One of the things we want to talk about too is just sort of the structure of the book a little bit. So we know that it's a sort of general introductory text about archaeology, presents a lot of the methods. But can you kind of tell us what some of your favorite segments are and what the inspiration and ideas behind them are in terms of kind of engaging people with archaeology? Well, I guess I liked a couple of segments. I like the fact that we started off with
00:19:57
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the story, the Hopi story of Sunset Crater. I also liked the fact that I challenge people to think about what happens if you try to yourself envision the past
00:20:16
Speaker
but make a path that's consistent with what archaeological evidence we have. I think it's one of the most valuable things for an archaeologist to do. It was inspired initially by Ruth Tringham, and then others have taken that up. But if you start trying to write a little short story, a scenario, whatever, you start realizing all the questions that you need to answer.
00:20:46
Speaker
I have liked the fact that I know some classes have had their students try to do this, to try to take evidence, whether from that book or others, and write stories of the past, but make them consistent with the archaeological evidence and then fill in the little cracks. So you know that people, you know that the Sonawa raised corn, beans, squash, and you know they had
00:21:14
Speaker
fires and they had vessels and they cooked in these vessels over the fires because they're blackened and so on. But exactly what were their recipes? We don't know. We don't know whether cooking was minimalist or whether people tried to spice things and make interesting stews and so on. We assume they did because that's the kind of things people do.
00:21:39
Speaker
But I think it's really interesting to start realizing what you don't know as much as what you do know.
The Detective Work of Archaeological Analysis
00:21:47
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So I like that. I also like the fact, and this is a little bit of nostalgia for me, of the fact that it talks about some of the discoveries that we made, some of the challenges in analyzing. So people often think of the analytic process as kind of boring.
00:22:09
Speaker
measure flakes, you sort them into little piles. But I found things like trying to figure out what the little basalt cylinders that we were finding at the site, trying to come up with an answer of what those were, what they might be. I'm never sure that we came up with the right answer. But doing some experiments to try to test out different hypotheses.
00:22:37
Speaker
I personally found that really fun and exciting. And I think the students at Grinnell who were involved in those processes did as well. Similarly, trying to ask questions like did with these little ugly figurines and tiny, tiny, tiny miniature pots made by kids, made by adults, what were they? You know, I found trying the process of trying to answer those questions to be
00:23:06
Speaker
one of the kinds of engaging things about archaeology, a little bit of the detective work. And I try to get a little bit of that narrative as well into the book. I think
00:23:21
Speaker
Just just looking at this, you know what you're talking about telling stories. I can't remember if they if my professor had us do that in in our classes.
Multiple Interpretations of Findings
00:23:29
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However, in the in one of the papers that I wrote in the second paragraph, so right right near the beginning, I, I have a quote from you that says, you know, one of your goals was to present says to present my interpretation of lizard man villages, one of several possible readings of the past and
00:23:45
Speaker
This would have been my first introduction into, you know, formal academic archaeology. I'm like a month into this new curriculum here. And this is my first foundational thing. And I I'm just reading that thinking, man, that is that is such a huge problem that I face in in CRM archaeology, which, you know, people see, you know, ABC artifact equals deconclusion. And it's just, you know, they're like, well, we have this that must mean this. And I like how you say,
00:24:14
Speaker
uh several possible readings of the past because we can almost probably never know exactly how somebody used something like you said those little cylinders um i mean i'm looking at several things in my office right here that are probably not being used for the purpose they were intended by their manufacturer and
00:24:30
Speaker
And I have an abundance of things compared to people in the past. They had a handful of things that they had to make work for. I mean, it was the original iPhone, I think, was probably stoned back then. It was a multi-purpose device, and they really nailed it well before Steve Jobs did. I think that's great.
00:24:51
Speaker
I think that probably made its way into my subconscious somehow. And it's just been reinforced over the years. And now I think about that kind of thing all the time. And this was probably the genesis of that. So well, thanks for that. Yeah, I think it feeds this idea of kind of writing stories and narratives and thinking about here's the fact here's what we know. Now, what are the holes? How do we fill these holes? How do we kind of people a past with action and activity?
00:25:19
Speaker
really feeds into some of the current theoretical and approaches that archaeologists are now taking, you know, just thinking about work on like the archaeology of the human experience, which is really hot and trendy. And, you know, people, I think archaeologists are catching on that there's only so much we can do by just analyzing an artifact. We have to think about how the artifacts made, and then we have to put it into the
00:25:46
Speaker
And then we have to think about what does that mean when people are making it and using it and how does it fit into the rounds of activities? And I know one of my friends looks at macaws and was just thinking about, how do you transport a macaw from Mexico to Arizona? What is it like carrying this noisy, squawking bird hundreds of miles in a basket? Um,
00:26:12
Speaker
You know, and just thinking through the logistics of that, how do you do it? What do you need? What do we know about how people were doing this? Um, so I think that's a really interesting way of approaching archeology and helps us kind of probe those deeper questions or ask new questions that we don't think about asking. So it's interesting to see how, how archeology builds upon itself.
Evolution of Archaeology: Identity Focus
00:26:38
Speaker
It also is extremely interesting the way, I'll say, identity politics of various sorts has come into archaeology. And I first started thinking about this really with Life in the Pueblo because my graduate training at Arizona was very processual. And, you know, we really didn't
00:27:03
Speaker
think too much about who was doing it. We said, they planted, they did this. And it was very non-individualistic. Once I had things like toys or possible toys, I had to start thinking about actually peopling the past, as you said, April, and trying to figure out what's the difference between being a young person and being an old person?
00:27:33
Speaker
What's the difference between being an older male and being an older female? What if your child, and how is it different to be two than it is to be 12? I would say for me, this was an exciting career moment too.
00:27:54
Speaker
I'd say the only other paper I've written that had legs was one that I wrote on childhood called Where Have All the Children Gone, and that was a long time ago, and people are still using it. But this notion of figuring out who people of the past has really also taken off in archaeology that in a way I wouldn't have predicted when I was a graduate student.
00:28:23
Speaker
because we just weren't talking about it then. So really quick for some less academically trained or informal archeology listeners, can you define what we mean when we're talking about processual archeology since that's not necessarily part of the general American parlance?
Processual vs Post-Processual Archaeology
00:28:44
Speaker
Chris brought this up, but it was a movement in the start really in the 1960s and an attempt to
00:28:54
Speaker
both make archaeology more scientific and to emphasize that archaeology wasn't just studying unique little culture histories, so we're not just studying about the Sonawa or the Sonawa of Lizard Man Village, but we ought to be studying about cultural processes and we ought to be looking at some of the broader questions of interest like
00:29:23
Speaker
How do societies adapt to their environments? Why was agriculture developed? Some of those. So kind of applying the analysis from one site to the larger interpretation of the area. Right. And also really trying to be very careful about adhering to scientific processes. And one of the reasons that individuals
00:29:53
Speaker
weren't discussed or gender identities, age, was that people at that time would have thought, well, how can you do that? You can't really do that. You can't really accept perhaps through burial access individuals. So the pushback from processualism was post-processualism. What did people not like about it so that they changed? Wow.
00:30:23
Speaker
Did I get a little too theory heavy just a minute ago? Yeah, so I'm not, I mean, I consider myself now, I guess, a post-processualist, but I really think it's post-post-processualist now. I'm not even sure what the current terminology is, but I think archaeology in a lot of ways has become a lot freer to accept multiple kinds of approaches and that really
00:30:51
Speaker
good archaeologists simultaneously use all kinds of approaches. So I would hate to say I was a processualist or a post-processualist. I would like to say, yes, I try to do what I can in a most scientific way possible. But I also don't like to close off my mind to the kind of insights that ethnography and ethno-archaeology can bring and that even
00:31:22
Speaker
using the imagination can bring archaeology.
Childhood in Archaeology
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, I've never liked putting labels on things because people tend to try to fit into those labels and put themselves in a box, you know, and, uh, with, with cultural resource management, archeology, I mean, we do have a heavy focus on data collection, primarily because the reason we're there is the site's likely going to be destroyed. So, you know, we, we have to collect more data than we think is even necessary on, on maybe another site, just because we don't know what's going to be useful later on and we can't go back. So, um,
00:31:55
Speaker
So, but I think what that means is you collect data and you do the best you can to, you know,
00:32:04
Speaker
give the site exactly what it needs from a data collection standpoint and a scientific standpoint early on. And then later on, other people can come in and apply their own touches and their own interpretations to what you did. And maybe even some further analysis, like the interview we just recorded chronologically here, this doesn't make any sense for the podcast episodes, but we recorded an episode yesterday where they're looking at data from a site that's, you know, from the early nineties.
00:32:29
Speaker
and they're running new analysis on these things because they properly collected the data back then so that now they can take samples and apply new techniques and learn new things. So important. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's good. And that's another reason why I think this is a good foundational book because I do think, you know, even back in 1998, almost 20 years ago now,
00:32:55
Speaker
You were writing that people need to kind of keep an open mind about this stuff and just interpret what they see, but don't think that that's the be all, end all interpretation to what they are seeing. There might be some other perspectives, especially as us going in as Western, people of Western descent trying to interpret what's going on at a Native American village that's 700 years old. How can our perspective possibly equal theirs?
00:33:23
Speaker
And how can we see the world the way they see it? It's interesting. It is, it is. I think some of this feeds into some of your more recent research, kind of looking at children and childhood. Would you mind telling us a little bit about what you've been doing with that and kind of how that has, you started to talk about it and how that grew out of life in the Pueblo a little bit and your interests and research at Lizard Man. So my interest in childhoods
00:33:54
Speaker
began because I had these enigmatic little clay figurines that I was curious about. And because John and I were the main excavators, we and our students ended up trying to analyze all the collections, we didn't have any money. So, and luckily, John could do some funnel analysis, and we did get a few people to
00:34:20
Speaker
do things like some pollen analysis. But essentially we were the show. So what we kept going through collection by collection and one or the other of us would be assigned to that collection. So, you know, we worked sherds or these little figurines or whatever. So I was doing the figurines and I was trying to say something about them. And that got me interested in, you know,
00:34:44
Speaker
What other kinds of places do people find these figurines? And that I did some little experiments with fingerprints and decided that at least some of the figurines had actually been made by children. And so then I started looking for the childhood literature, childhood and archaeology. And I was like, oh, you know, children are so important in societies. And if you read any ethnography, children are there. If you
00:35:11
Speaker
go to any place. You see children. They're around. They're about. But for the archaeologists, wow, they're kind of invisible. They were particularly invisible in the late 1990s. And so I started thinking we need to be paying more attention to this. Luckily, now there's a fairly vibrant subgroup of archaeologists, oddly, primarily women, but a few males.
00:35:41
Speaker
who study archaeology in childhood and are trying to impart people to the past with young people. Not as many people are studying the archaeology of aging. And obviously, that's another niche that we probably shouldn't neglect.
00:36:03
Speaker
But yeah, I'm fascinated by it. It's inspired me most recently to start doing some ethnography, interviewing parents of young children. So I currently have 67 interviews. I'm trying to aim for 100. I don't know why, just like that magic round number. But to start understanding how material culture in the modern US
00:36:34
Speaker
is interacting with very young children, infants and toddlers. And if you do this, you will be appalled, maybe shocked at how much material culture goes with infancy in the modern US. I did an ethno-archaeology dissertation in Syria and there,
00:37:02
Speaker
There was very, very little material culture associated with infants and small children at all. I mean, some clothing. But in general, babies at that point in a small, poor village did not have toys. They didn't have, they slept with their mom.
00:37:24
Speaker
And so they didn't have a crib or a cradle. There was very little material culture. And now you, you know, you baby-proof your house, you buy millions of toys, bottles. I mean, the list is endless. So anyway, I've gotten very interested in material culture and childhood, partly because of that. So careers do that. Careers meander.
00:37:51
Speaker
Nice. And that's the way they ought to be, right? That's right. Never stuck. There's a logic that you don't always see if you're an outsider. I know if you're not the person with the career, but I think it's important that people realize that they have the opportunity to do a lot of different things. You know, I've been lucky and archaeologists are particularly lucky this way.
00:38:18
Speaker
You're not where your fields, you as an archaeologist do not have to be wedded to your dissertation, your field school, any place in any problem. If you look at the truly famous archaeologists, they've done many things, but even those of us who aren't have opportunities and you should grab them.
00:38:43
Speaker
go excavate in some other part of the world or go do a survey someplace you've never been and start learning about somewhere new. It's really exciting to do that. And it will make it better. Your interpretations will get better. If you excavated a really big site, your site will start seeming more the size it really is, for example.
00:39:10
Speaker
Well, that's good. I'm, I'm glad you said that. Cause we, we talk about that all the time on some of my other podcasts, you know, how archeology can, can be whatever you want it to be and to, uh, you know, to just keep looking and experiencing new things. Um, we're going to go to break. I want to come back to the children after the break.
Innovative Laboratory Analysis
00:39:27
Speaker
Uh, and I would like to say one of your approaches to solving, not, not having any funds for all the lab analysis was to just grow your own lab technician. Right. April. So, um,
00:39:40
Speaker
All right, so we'll talk about children again here in a second right after the break.
00:39:51
Speaker
Women in Archaeology is a show about archaeology by the Women of Archaeology. An alternating panel of women archaeologists discuss the issues in archaeology that impact professionals and the public every day. Check out Women in Archaeology for a different perspective on the past today at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash WIA. Now let's get back to the show.
00:40:17
Speaker
Okay, we're back for our final segment and I want to bring it back to the discussion of children because this is something that's also affected my career a little bit as a as a serum archaeologist just in thought. I remember working on the east coast and we found
00:40:32
Speaker
we kind of jokingly found you know we're saying these things but we found uh you know really crude you know lithic artifacts by faces sometimes projectile points and sometimes it was a factor of the material i think in practice people would see something that that didn't look very polished and say uh you know
00:40:51
Speaker
Maybe it was the material, maybe it was something, but maybe it was children. Maybe it was people learning how to make projectile points. Maybe it was people not quite as experienced as the elders doing this.
Children's Contributions to Artifacts
00:41:02
Speaker
And then when I came out here to the west, I did a project here in Nevada. And a gentleman, and maybe you know of him, Kathy, is Jeffrey Gunner. And he started looking at the archaeology of children and doing some experiments and things like that.
00:41:20
Speaker
And it just it seems like a completely under interpreted section of the entire archaeological record to me. We always try to like we said earlier about putting people in boxes with their with their theoretical ideas. It's the same thing with artifacts. You look at these things and you say, OK, I found this one thing, so it must have been made by an adult and used for this because that's what the books tell me. But, you know, we have to really think about
00:41:44
Speaker
the other people that were in that village that had to learn, that had to do things that were part of that society. And then at the same time, I spent some time in Africa as well in Kenya and Tanzania.
00:41:57
Speaker
And I was just telling somebody about this the other day because I'm still constantly impressed by it. I don't have kids myself, but every time I see somebody's children and especially the kind of parenting styles that we have today. And I look and I say, you know, this parent is treating this six year old like they're an infant and they're not allowed to do anything. And I saw six year olds. I saw six year olds out in the Savannah.
00:42:20
Speaker
you know, herding sheep around, they weren't old enough to have the spear and to herd the cows and to keep the lions away. But they were, you know, they were just about at the point where they could wander around the Savannah miles from the village and be on their own. And then and then watch these little sheep and things like that. And I'm like, my God, if we sent a six year old from the United States out into the Savannah, they would be lion food in seconds.
Cultural Perceptions of Children's Roles
00:42:45
Speaker
Child protective services would have taken the child away from you.
00:42:50
Speaker
Right, right. Yes. Yeah, thinking about that stuff is just amazing. And it could have been four-year-olds starting to make projectile points. We don't know, you know? Yeah, there's a great website somewhere on the web that I unfortunately can't find. But it shows a picture of a little girl. She looks about two, I would say, from the chubbiness of her hands, et cetera. She's sitting there and she has a gigantic knife in one hand.
00:43:17
Speaker
and a piece of something that looks like celery, but it's probably not, and her other, and the caption, I wish I remembered which faculty member somewhere was teaching with this, and it said, when I show my students this picture, they say, oh my gosh, does her mother know she has that knife?
00:43:44
Speaker
And I say, oh, her mother gave her that knife so she could learn how to fix vegetables and help. And I think, pardon me, think that's just really empowering for kids, having seen kids in places like a Syrian village where they're a little bit more empowered at a younger age to have a little more freedom than we give our kids.
00:44:11
Speaker
The other thing I think that people don't think about that relates directly to children and material culture is we, as archaeologists, have a tendency to sort places and objects into, even if we're thinking about kids, it's a kid object or it's an adult object. Almost everything is an adult object, but occasionally we'll say, oh, that's probably a kid pot. That's really ugly and tiny. Maybe that's a kid pot or maybe that's a toy.
00:44:41
Speaker
When you think about it and the kids are using all the same things that everybody else is, kids are living in houses, eating out of bowls, they're interacting with the whole environment. And I will say in most places in the world, they don't create little miniature environments for kids and segregate them.
00:45:09
Speaker
Kids are just a part of the fabric, and so we would expect them to be using the same things that everybody else is using. Yeah, and like you said, that attitude doesn't change with modern.
00:45:26
Speaker
I guess, and by modern, I mean, I guess current, quote, unquote, primitive societies. I mean, I read a book not too long ago called Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett. And he went there with his, he went there initially by himself, but he went there with his family. And I want to say it was back in the early eighties, maybe even the seventies, but they've continued to go back every year and they went actually as missionaries to translate
00:45:50
Speaker
I think, to learn their language and then to translate the Bible into their language. He ended up becoming a cultural anthropologist, I think, and kind of abandoning all that and just studying the people and then writing about them. And like you said, there was an example of mothers sitting around a fire. And this one mother, she's got like an infant child in her arms. And then there's another one, maybe two or three years old, probably younger behind her.
00:46:15
Speaker
And he's got this huge butcher knife that they'd gotten from some person that had visited the village. They didn't make it. And the kid drops the knife behind her, and the mom, seemingly not looking, was actually paying attention, turned around, picked up the knife, and gave it back to the kid. Because the kid had dropped it. And the white people here in the village, he was writing about this, and he's like, his wife was beside herself. She's like, what are you doing?
00:46:43
Speaker
And it's just a different way of approaching it. It's a different way of looking at it. A different way of looking at it. And maybe, I hate to say this, but maybe a better way because that kid is going to be competent with knives. Oh, yeah. And there's nothing inherent of the dangerous about things if they're used correctly.
00:47:06
Speaker
Right. Yeah. You give a, you give a kid a knife these days at eight years old or something like that, and they've never experienced something like that. They're going to whip it around like everything else, but you teach a kid at two or three that, Hey, that's the pointy end and it's going to hurt. They learned that lesson pretty fast, you know? And if that was a little boy, I don't remember if it was a little boy or a little girl, but if it was a little boy in that village, a little boy is going to be on hunting parties in, in not too many years from that experience. And they need to be on their toes and literally on their toes in that village, I think, but, uh, you know,
00:47:36
Speaker
It's just a completely different way. And it's, I mean, we don't, you know, we, again, as archaeologists shouldn't pass judgment, of course. We shouldn't say, is this right or is this wrong? Is the way, is the way we do things now right or wrong? It's not, it's just different. It's just different. And, and if you're around certain kinds of things and you're used to seeing them used and you're used to using them, you learn at a very young age. Kids are smarter than we think.
00:48:05
Speaker
And I was reminded of a story. My husband, who makes stone tools at my instigation, made a stone tool kit for my cousin's kids. And they were about 10 at that time. And it was all beautifully. Everything was labeled. And there were, of course, instructions. This stuff is sharp.
00:48:33
Speaker
So it was two boys. One of the boys goes to his mom and said, mom, this is cool. This is so sharp. And then he takes the stone tool and his palm and he slices his palm open to show his mom how amazingly and wonderfully sharp. Now you know that no prehistoric kid would have ever done that.
00:49:00
Speaker
No. Well, they may have only done it once though, or watched their brother do it. At age 10. No, no. But then maybe they wouldn't have their finger. Um, right. But if you learn it too, that it's sharp, you, you know, you learn. Yeah. I think about this a lot too, going back to kind of the experimental archaeology side of things and also my museum background where
00:49:27
Speaker
We try, like in museums, you'll go and visit some of these living history museums where they're presenting, you know, past cultures and native
Lost Skills in Modern Interpretations
00:49:35
Speaker
cultures. And it's often being done by people who didn't grow up practicing these skills. And so everything looks clumsy and crude instead of polished. Cause if you've been making a basket or skinning a deer hide since the time you were three, you know, it's second nature. You're good at it. You're fast. You're quite competent and you're skilled.
00:49:57
Speaker
And I think about this, too, as archeologists, when we're trying to do analyses of things like lithics or ceramics or even how to, you know, construction techniques where we haven't done this, we haven't grown up foot napping since the time we were three. And so how competent are we in some ways to really do all of these analyses? Because there's a certain understanding of how something is made that can only come from making it.
00:50:28
Speaker
So I think that this is a really interesting problem in archaeology for all of us to think about, not only is people in the past with all these different characters and thinking about what their competencies are, but also considering what are the competencies that we lack that we are then not fully able to understand or think about in doing analyses. That's great that you brought that up, April, because I always
00:50:54
Speaker
I always equate, and I keep coming back to projectile points and things, because that's pretty historically, that's like 99% of our archaeological record here in the Great Basin, because that's what survives, so that's what we find. But every time we find something that looks really great, it's not broken, it's got really good, really even flaking on it, it's got a nice thickness, it just looks like a really awesome tool. Most of the people on the crew, including myself early on,
00:51:18
Speaker
We're like, oh, look at this thing. It's amazing. And it's blah, blah, blah. And I, I try not to look at it that way. Honestly, I try not to, to put it up on this pedestal because I equate projectile point making with driving today. Nearly everybody can do it. Not everybody's as good at it as some other people, but almost everybody can do it. It's a skill that you almost have to have in the United States to just be a person and to get places and do things.
00:51:43
Speaker
And I feel like that was the same thing with projectile points, you know, even even 150 years ago, where this was just part of your life. This is what you had to do to survive and eat. And it wasn't special. Now, of course, some of the ceremonial type objects you get out of obsidian and other things that are crazy, I think those probably were the works of masters. But your every day, your every day projectile point at the end of a spear or an arrow or dart point or something like that. I mean,
00:52:12
Speaker
They look cool to us, but I try not to objectify them that way and analyze them that way when I'm thinking about the site. This is just something that was there and it's one of the things that they had. It's kind of how I try to look at it, but I don't know if that's right or not, but that's my interpretation, I guess. Well, or even thinking if you have a craftsperson and they
00:52:34
Speaker
can make something that gorgeous, do they do it every time? Sometimes you just want to do something quick perhaps, or maybe they did have the kind of pride and craftsmanship that they would say, no, no, I'm always going to make it beautiful.
00:52:53
Speaker
Right. Well, look at our experts like your husband, you know, he can probably nap out some pretty fantastic looking points in a pretty short period of time. Does he think now, now at this stage of his career, does he think those are, you know, amazing in the work of a master? He hands out to an undergrad and they probably think that, but he's like, I made 25 of those like before lunch. So, um, you know what I mean? The kind of values that they may have had, you know, maybe, maybe different.
Mass Production of Artifacts
00:53:23
Speaker
to the expert, you're right, mass production. He would say 10 minutes to make a projectile point, and of course, it would take me, no.
00:53:36
Speaker
a hundred tries and 10 hours. That would take me all day and I'd only be able to count to nine by the time I was done too. Cause I was, that's how that would go. Um, well we've got about a four or five minutes left in this show.
Upcoming Book on Archaeology of Childhood
00:53:53
Speaker
Um, have you been asked or thought about doing an update to the life in the Pueblo book, a second book or an update to the original or, you know, a similar theme about a different site? And have you, have you thought about that? Well,
00:54:07
Speaker
You know, I've had a lot of fun writing Life in the Pueblo. I have occasionally thought, oh, well, maybe we should update it, you know, bringing in, first of all, more recent techniques that exist out there. And secondly, some of our work at New Caves. But actually, I think what my next book project is, I've actually written an NEH grant for this, so I have my fingers crossed, is one on
00:54:36
Speaker
archaeology of childhood, where I want to look at childhood through an archaeological lens, and try to communicate with students and more popular audiences about what we do and don't know about prehistoric childhoods from a variety of different kinds of places, and how these relate to the kinds of questions that people are asking about
00:55:06
Speaker
the nature of childhood today. So I think that's going to be my next fun, my next fun. Nice. I feel like we should really be covering that on the archaeology podcast network somewhere too. This is the first time I can remember thinking about spending any time talking about that. It might have been mentioned before, but spending any time talking about the archaeology of childhood, because I think it's
00:55:34
Speaker
I feel like it's one of those big, huge gaping holes in our interpretive methods for looking at sites, especially with CRM archaeologists.
Gaps in Archaeological Research
00:55:44
Speaker
You know, we're all very, we seem very textbook about stuff and just like, you know, this, this, and this, and not really thinking outside that box. So maybe we should have a longer discussion about that. And if you get that grant and start working on the book, you know, we'll do a short series or something and start lining it up. Yeah.
00:56:02
Speaker
So I think that's a really interesting comment you made, these kind of gaping holes in archaeology. And I haven't identified them all, neither have you. But when you hear a hole, you often go, oh my God, why don't people talk about that? So for example,
00:56:28
Speaker
not the past SAAs, but the SAAs before that. April Noel and Nan Gondland organized a session on archaeology of the night. And I kind of went, oh, wow, that's brilliant.
00:56:47
Speaker
I always picture places like Lizard Man Village in the daytime. I never picture them at night, but of course it was night a lot, and all kinds of things happened during the night. And in part, things may have been laid out to facilitate things that happened at night. And so it's a really big challenge. And when you hear one of these questions that archaeologists don't ask,
00:57:17
Speaker
It's incredibly challenging. I think the people who started with gender, people like Meg Conkey, when they started talking about gender, it must have been that same kind of excitement of like, wow, yes. Why are people asking this question? They ought to be asking it more. It ought to be routine that we think about some of these things at site.
00:57:47
Speaker
And for our less established listeners, this is how people make amazing careers is by realizing one of these gaps and starting to be the first person to kind of poke at it and explore it. And that's how they make their name. Yeah, and that's another example from that, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes book. And I'll have a link to that as well in the show notes. One of the observations he made was that this Amazon village, and this is 30 years ago and probably still today,
00:58:17
Speaker
They they didn't really have a lot of responsibilities. They didn't have any like warring villages they were dealing with. So their basic day to day was just hunt, eat, sleep and make babies. And that was pretty much it. And he said, you know, they they treated food like it was the last meal they were ever going to eat. And sometimes hunters would bring back, you know, they'd be gone for days, days at a time, and they would be back at, you know, 11, 12 o'clock at night.
00:58:46
Speaker
But they've got food. So everybody's up, everybody's awake. They sit and eat until the food is all gone. I mean, they don't save any of it. They sit and eat until the food is all gone and then they sleep again. So our concept of nine to five really is just from the, you know, from the industrial age. And, but we try to put that on top of our sites and say, well, you know, like, like you said, Kathy, you know, what's the site look like during the day, but we don't consider the night, but they didn't have that concept of day and night. They were, you know, constantly on the lookout for food, constantly on lookout for predators and probably.
00:59:16
Speaker
We're just awake when they had to be in a sleep where they had to be and just dealt with it that way. So, you know, it's, it's, you're right. It's a huge gap that we don't ever think about. So April, April, you got any final comments? Well, uh, this was a great conversation. Um, I think my final one is, um, cat, if you check out our show notes, we'll have a couple of links to different things. And, uh, Kathy has said that she'll potentially have a short PowerPoint with a couple of slides, um, images to help support.
00:59:46
Speaker
what is in Life in the Pueblo if people are using that book and want a little bit of extra material. I hope I'm not spreading false rumors, Kathy. No, no. That would be my pleasure. I have occasionally responded to queries that people who were teaching with that gave me. Do you have some slides you could share? Do you have some PowerPoint slides? I, of course, would say yes. Nice.
01:00:16
Speaker
Okay, well, thanks a lot, Kathy. This was fantastic. I didn't think when I was reading this book 17 years ago that I'd be interviewing the author on a podcast, but you never know where life is going to take you in archaeology, like we said earlier. Well, I think it's a fun niche that you have found and it's a great way to communicate with a broader public as well as with other archaeologists to have things like podcast blogs, et cetera.
01:00:43
Speaker
It's cool. And 17 years ago, that wasn't a thing. Podcast didn't even exist 17 years ago. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. It's insane.
01:00:53
Speaker
Yeah. And, and we're recording this on April 30th and we're on track to hit 70,000, 70,000 monthly subscribers across all the shows on the APN, uh, this month. So I, um, I'm not looking at the numbers yet. I'm giving it to the end of the day. I'm keeping my cool on that. But I think, I think we're going to hit it or get dangerously close. So it's, uh, you know, a lot of people are listening to this, which I'm glad so they can hear, you know,
01:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, well, well, thank you. And it's only with, you know, guests like you that keep this thing going anyway. So thanks a lot, Kathy. And thank you so much. It was fun. Thank you, April. And we'll see all you guys next time.
01:01:44
Speaker
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01:02:08
Speaker
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01:02:46
Speaker
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01:03:04
Speaker
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