Introduction to the Podcast
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Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Hosts' Banter and Carlton's Adventure
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Welcome to Episode 156 of A Life in a Nerd's Podcast. I'm your host, David Ian Howe, and I'm joined by my co-host, Connor Cochran-Johnin. Carlton will not be joining us today. Dr. Carlton, S.H.I.E.L.D. Chief, Dr. Gover is in the Dominican Republic, I think on a field school? Yeah.
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doing underwater archaeology, something that he doesn't have really any experience in but one time. And he's teaching it now, which is really cool. That's how archaeology works. Yeah, he's staying at an all-inclusive resort, I guess for safety reasons. Looks awesome. Carlson sent us a picture of that meeting, an all-inclusive breakfast this morning in the Dominican Republic. And then he sent us a picture of a giant bottle of tequila the day before.
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And I got at least six to seven memes, a real sentiment Instagram from Carlton that
Delving into Flint Knapping
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same night. So we know what Carlton was doing and then doing the next morning. So he is in the Dominican Republic sink. Is he looking for the Nina or the Pinto, the Santa Maria or something? You're going to say sinking ships. Searching is what I'm about to say. But yes, thinking underneath the search. Yeah, he's doing that. He's not a doctor yet. And he's in the process just as a as a heads up.
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But yeah, so it's just me and David. Way to be a dick. I mean, he would say the same thing. He wouldn't want, he wouldn't, he would, it's stolen valor, you know? He's a professor at his school. So I just, I just assumed doctor, you know, I'd call him doctor. Yeah, I think that's fair. We're going to try something wild and just spit ball, go from here, see what happens.
00:01:43
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Yeah. For some reason, I was almost going to say, let's take your questions off the live stream, but we didn't set that up. So for Morgan Robbins, we have, why did you skip last week's nap-in in Ohio or Indiana? Oh, yeah. I was going to go to a private nap-in in Indiana from a friend that was hosting one. I was really sick. Did I got some allergies and it was four hour drive away in my bus, which is
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And my bus would equal out to a six hour drive there and back. Roughly $10,000 worth of gas, right? Yeah. I was just like, if I'm not feeling well, I can't really like nap correctly anyway without just breaking rock because of my hands. And then.
00:02:27
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going to go all the way out there literally just to drink while I'm sick and spend money on drinking and gas. And I was like, I'll just stay home. Unfortunately. Just to clarify, that isn't like a gathering where you all sleep. It's where you flint nap, correct? We do all sleep together, not like in the same room, like you're camping. But yeah, yeah, no, no. In a healthy, like modern,
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a secure sexuality way. Like, like some guys bring their wives. Like, I'm taking this a whole deeper, but yeah. Uh, some of them may be gay. I don't know. They haven't told me. Uh, I can't, you know, snap them enough for me to know I'm not tried. Not there. Good to know. What does that consist
Artistic Aspects of Flint Knapping
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of? Like, what do you guys do? Do you just hang out and foot nap or is there like,
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Yeah, so a napin is like, it's kind of cool because it's a very like ancient thing, I would imagine. You meet up with people who were also good at napping, which I mean that was just kind of survival every day back in the past. But what I like about napins is that like normally in an archaeological setting, I'm taught napping by a teacher and a professor in front of class.
00:03:42
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And like you read about it in the book and you get into the weeds of like, this is a tertiary flank with approximately 75% cortex. And like 17% cortex. And then, or primarily because 75% cortex, I guess. But so here you go, you get into the weeds. Foot napping is not that. Foot napping is taking a rock and directing the forest to the rock to make it, make sharp rock, make it pretty. And like you can learn all you want about like hertzian cones and like,
00:04:08
Speaker
fracturing and really your scars and stuff like that. None of that means anything. Like I don't remember any of that from lithics unless I pull up my book. The way to nap is like to go learn from people who do it who don't know those terms because like people 100,000 years ago didn't know what a fucking hertzian cone is. Like they obviously saw that that effect when they were hitting it, but they didn't like put too much thought into it. I don't think because these people don't and like they're good at teaching it. So like if you hit it here, like look, it'll feel like this and you'll know based on the sound and yada yada.
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because we come from like a theoretical perspective, whereas they have been practicing and it's kind of more of an innate actually doing of the stuff, which is something I never really got good at. I could tell you about her teen cones and all that kind of stuff, but I couldn't make a bi face.
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Yeah, yeah, and I kind of like walk in this like two worlds right now because it's I'm a better flint knapper than most most archaeologists I think that just like generally like understand like stone tools Like I know there's a lot of archaeologists who are exceptional flint knappers for sure. I'm not one of them I know what I'm doing, but I'm not like great I'm not like an artist at it yet I would put it that way whereas like these people are straight-up artists at their craft and like
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learning from them. It's like I'll never know. I'll never be a perfect flint knapper like as good as they are. I'll also never be like the best lithicist in the world but I know both sides of things which gives me a better understanding of like the past I think a lot and the napkins it's cool because you're getting
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Speaker
You're learning techniques from somebody because when you learn from a class, like you just see a guy hit a copper bopper and hit a rock or a hammerstone and hit a rock is it. But like with these guys, it's like someone has a very different, like one guy uses indirect percussion. I learned from him and I got really good at foot napping when I learned that because it was just too much of a hurdle for me the other way. Other guy only uses Abbo. It's like only uses rocks and antlers.
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Another guy's really good at copper. Another guy has a diamond tipped pressure flaker, which makes beautiful flakes come off. It's just like you learn from these different people. And of course they all grew up on, I wouldn't say they're rednecks in any regard. Like that's just kind of the word I would, I think most people would do, but they're like country guys that grew up on walking farm fields, looking for arrowheads with their grandpa.
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and wondered how the quote Indians made the arrowheads they found. And that is very common in all the napkins I've been to and nappers I've met. They all didn't know it was a thing that you could do. They've picked up points and wondered how they made it and started hitting them and they broke an arrowhead in half and were like, oh, it breaks like this. Let me try that again. And then they started shaping it and then they got really into it and then learned it's foot napping as a thing, which I think is fascinating.
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That's, that's super wild. Cause that means that there's some like innate ability or innate understanding in our human biology and or cultural past that we have passed down to us that we can eventually figure it out. I guess our brains are smart enough to realize hitting two rocks together and breaking them at one point and ultimately like refining your technique is part of the human process. But if it does feel like there's something like innate in us.
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Speaker
I don't know. Would you would you say that or do you think it's like I'm fidgeting with one right now? Like I just I like touching it and looking at it and the bumps that go over it. And yeah, it's like you can look at art and appreciate like the Mona Lisa. Like you can appreciate Van Gogh and be like, oh, wow, that's an artist made that because you've been told that's a famous artist. But like.
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Oil painting is like, or watercolor is a very specific type of art form. Whereas like Flint and I think it's a tool, but like everyone needed to use it, but it now is like, it takes a lot of art and skill to make them look good and like make them right and make them thin and make them functional. And I think everyone appreciates, even if you don't like arrowheads or like
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Speaker
You didn't collect them or you don't care too much for it. I always notice when people who don't flitnap look at flitnappers, they're fascinated by it because it's like, it's just something so foreign, but it's cool. Yeah.
00:08:12
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Yeah, and there's some sort of artistic expression for all the stuff in the past. Like you can't assume that everything they're doing is functional. And I think you and Carlton kind of talked a little bit about this and the style versus function debate where I think Carlton was eating food. So we apologize for that. It was all fake. But there is an artistic element to, I think, flint knapping and projectile points.
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You don't, you don't go through these kinds of super intense expressions and variations on stuff just for, for function. I don't believe, I don't know if you, do you feel differently about that? Like the variations of like point styles. Yeah. Like it's not all functional point style. There's some artistic expression that occurs when creating a point.
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Yeah, I've also kind of like, I didn't get to touch on this in the style by function debate too, but like there's, there's style and there's functions. Like this one I'm holding right here is serrated on one side and the other side it's not because I didn't finish it. So like somebody might pick that up later and be like, Oh, look at this style. And like it's serrated on one side and sharp on the other. Kind of like a Bowie knife is not Bowie knife. Those like survival knives have a solid blade on their side.
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Yeah. But some people like physics or not or hunting or not might think like, oh, this will be more effective. And they just it's a psychosomatic thing. Like I notice I'm playing Jedi Survivor right now. I'm like, oh, well, like if I wear these commando pants, like then I'm definitely like, you know, more powerful. But like it's just a skin on the pants. Like it's like I climbed and like hiked and fought like 18 droids to get this little fucking chest upgrade or armor upgrade.
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And like, it doesn't do anything. It's just the effort you put into it. And I think a lot of foot napping is that too, because a lot of people are just like,
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This looks cool. And like, therefore it works better. You know, I don't know what the word is for that, but we do that and everything else. Like you got your lucky sports jersey or like, I know like my neighbor's grown up when the superstition, right? Yeah. Superstition. Yeah. Like he would wear the same boxers on a home Yankee game, like the same color. They had to wear blue or something. It was the opposite of whatever the Yankees home colors are. Yankees home colors are white. Away is gray. Yeah. So he had to wear.
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Sorry, it was these gray ones he had to wear whenever they had a home game. Yeah, it was weird. But like the
Crafting Arrowheads and Learning from Experts
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Eggies would win if he did that. Yeah. So there is like, so you think that is part of it is superstition and this looks cool and like human ingenuity too. I mean, we're just trying out different things.
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Yeah, I mean, the base really is the most functional part, like how it attaches to the shaft or the dart or whatever, or the foreshaft, or the antler that you're using it for a knife, but the rest of it just has to be sharp, like pretty much. I mean, the longer it is, the deeper it penetrates, I guess, but that's not always the case too, because you would get very tiny ones. Yeah. That's kind of what my thesis was about.
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Wrong. Well, I always thought it was interesting doing part of your thesis and the kind of how you attach the arrowhead to the foreshaft and the dart. It's kind of a super intensive process. You know, it's there's a lot of getting glue, getting ligature or whatever you guys are using tied up. Is that a word? That's not a word. What?
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isn't like ligature ligature is that like what do you ligaments trying to say literature what are you talking about you're taking shakespeare and you know you know little pieces i'm not sure but that that's the word does sound familiar okay ligature
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Yeah, it's whatever. Legaments, et cetera, to tie it up. It's like a really intensive process. It does an excellent job. I think most of your points didn't actually break completely off from the foreshaft, right? No, no, not all. Just the smallest ones broke pretty good. And the biggest ones kind of preserved all right. So the rock is like the weak point, or at least because it's taking the brunt of the impact.
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That or I think the biggest ones just didn't penetrate well, like just the tips kind of stuck there. Yeah, that's probably the case. Yeah, well, if you're interested in penetration studies, make sure and read. Isn't Pettigrew coming out with something soon? Hopefully. Yes, I think his comes out soon. Yeah. I like Napins because you learn a lot from people, you learn what their version of
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You know, it's all that they understand her seeing cones and they understand like, like they know the history of it. Like I learned from this guy who learned from Francois Bordeaux or something like that. And like they, they can tell that stuff and they watch all the YouTube videos of like nappers. And we all know like, Oh, you've seen paleo man, Jim, like the guy on YouTube. I'm like, Oh, he hasn't posted like eight years. Like what's up? And like, Oh no, I heard his wife died. And it's like little things like that, but we don't know that. We're just making that up.
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It's just a rumor. It's like 106, but like everyone's like, oh, I learned under just name. Like my friend, Jake Webster learned from this guy, Donald Dust. No, I mean, I would say Donnie is my main teacher, but
00:13:22
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Ed Mosier. And like he would say Ed Mosier over and over again as if I should know this like archaeological name as Ed Mosier. And it's just some dude that works in Indiana that also just flint knaps because he loved it as a kid. And like I've never doesn't have any archaeological work out or anything of just flint knapper. And it's just one of those things where it's like it's kind of like a piano teacher or a guitar teacher like, oh, I worked under this guy. And it's like, OK, I don't know who that is, but he's probably fucking great. Like pedigree kind of stuff.
00:13:51
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Yeah. And like the dude can bust out a Danish dagger in like two hours. It's pretty crazy. And a Danish dagger, if you guys are listening, look that up. It's probably, if you can make that, you're a flint knapper. Like you know what you're doing. They're very hard to make and it's a bronze age or copper age. Let's say copper or bronze age.
00:14:11
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Danish knife that was made to look like a regular knife at the time. But a Danish dagger, they made stone knives to replicate that. And they're like, it's just prowess. There's no real function to it. Yeah, they can stab things, but there's no need to make a knife out of stone that good when you could just make it with a copper ore. Holy shit, man. Yeah. And I watched the guy bust one out with a giant moose billet in two hours.
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I mean the flaking on that stuff is just gorgeous and then like the variation in like oh my god yeah and like the variation in like the thickness that you have from the handle to like the actual point itself is wild.
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And he prints out a paper cutout of what that should look like, puts it over the rock, and occasionally puts it back over the rock to see where he's at with it, and then he makes it perfectly. I'm like, damn. And he told me, he picks up a rock, this is Ed Mosier, he picks up a rock, and he knows what he's making out of that. That's a Clovis point. That's an archaic fluted, or an archaic notched. That's a turkey tail. He just knows. He sees it in there, and he'll make it there.
00:15:17
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I don't do that. I just like, I'm like, oh, maybe I'll shape it into something. Yeah. That's why he's like, yeah, he's like, it calls to me and I'll do it. And I'm like, damn, dude, like a shit like that. You don't learn an archeology class. Yeah. No, not at all. I mean, you get what? One, one day of where, you know, Alex, Alex, Craig will teach you that or Bob Kelly will teach you that. It was like one, one simple day and you kind of hit some rocks together for like an hour. And then we're supposed to understand that archeological record based on that.
00:15:45
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And then I'll post about how to identify sites based on flakes and stuff like that. And I'll get archaeologists that message me like, well, that's not like a tertiary flake is bainer, bainer, bainer. And I'm like, I don't give a shit. A tertiary flake is the smaller flake with less cortex on it that falls off when your later stage reduction. Then you know, early stage reduction and late stage reduction. Just put it on a spectrum. There's no need to make three specific little
00:16:09
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things and get into the weeds and be like fucking Damien and be like, oh, well, this one's like, and I'm like, no, you don't need to do that. Like, just. I think Damien's lost faith in the debitage analysis, though. Good. He should. I think we've all lost faith. On that note, we're going to end this segment and we'll be right back.
00:16:27
Speaker
Welcome back to Episode 156 of Life and Ruins podcast. We are your hosts Connor, John, and David Howe. We are going to not only talk about prehistoric archaeology again, but get further into the weeds of it. I'm just kidding. This is interesting for anybody, but when I worked for, I'll name some environmental firms out
Coding and Analyzing Artifacts
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East. Let's say I worked CRM for a bit.
00:16:46
Speaker
for a bit in different places. One company I worked for had such a specific, like, how reduced was the bi-face? What kind of bi-face? What was the formation? What was the, like, can you identify, is it Chalcedony, is it Cherry, is it Obsidian, is it Flint? And like, then on top of that, I was like, what stage reduction is it? How heavily retouched? And then also for flakes, it was like, how many flakes? How many are tertiary? How many secondary? How much retouched?
00:17:12
Speaker
Why? Why do you need all that information for like six flakes or anything? I get better to have it than don't have it, especially for dropping the flake back off in the dirt and not bringing it with you. But like just say it was late stage reduction. That's like it. It doesn't look like somebody was sitting here flint knapping. It looks like somebody like knocked off a few flakes to sharpen it. That's what I'll say.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah, and what I've learned from other people in the industry and even in academia is that no one really codes the things the same. We had a thesis here at the University of Wyoming, Casey Dukeman, who did this study where he sent the same debitage, same whole lithic collection to a bunch of different analysts and found out that they had vastly different interpretations based on their methods, based on their understanding. I didn't know that, that's cool.
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah, Casey Dukeman, check it out. We'll probably link it if we can in the show notes. But they had vastly different understandings of this. And these are supposed to be people who are experts in the field and should generally agree if our scientific method is correct, if we're doing things in a way that is replicable and good. So it is this kind of thing. And I think CRM companies are forced to make these deductions on the fly and
00:18:33
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They have to come up with a final guess on what is happening at the site. They can't just leave it like, oh, I don't know what's going on here. There's some flakes. There's some cores. I don't know if it's specifically late stage reduction, early reduction. I can't really say unless we do a larger sample.
00:18:49
Speaker
there, but they're forced to like kind of make these evaluations because we have to, you know, evaluate it for the National Register of Historic Places. So you have to have to have the final say right then, right there of how and what is going on at this site. And it's kind of, and I know a bunch of other CRM people would agree with me that like, it's kind of damaging to
00:19:08
Speaker
how we understand the past.
Challenges in Cultural Resource Management
00:19:10
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And it's not really accurate or a good way to analyze stuff in the field. I don't know. I think you probably had the same experience working for those environmental companies, right? Yeah. It's just like, I was flabbergasted when I went out there, like being a fucking, not to say like I'm a Wyoming archeologist, but I was trained there in a processual nature where you do quantify things like a lot and qualify things like that a lot.
00:19:34
Speaker
And like, I was shocked at like how much they want you to quantify and like qualify all these little things. Like, it's like, damn, like that's just not easy. And like you said, it's too into the weeds and everybody codes it differently. So like what somebody calls tertiary is not going to be tertiary. It's going to be secondary to somebody else. And like, it honestly just becomes like a circle jerk of like what you believe and like what people think should be the right way. And it's just dumb to me, like.
00:20:03
Speaker
Albeit in Wyoming and Colorado and Utah and like anywhere out west where there's a lot more surface finds like that. Sure, it is a little better to be pretty thorough because that's most of the archaeology out there.
00:20:13
Speaker
Yeah, and you can sample more and you're not just getting like a couple flakes from a shovel test out east or something. Yeah. Like that. And out east too when you're doing like historic archaeology, it's like, I've seen it too. It's like what kind of brick, it's red brick. What kind of brick? Is it wattle daub? Is it like clay fired brick? Is it hard fired brick? What era? What year? Like, I don't know that shit, especially if I'm
00:20:36
Speaker
Like if you're, if you went to school for historic archaeology and you got a job being historical, doing historical archaeology CRM, you're going to know that stuff a lot more. You're going to know a lot more about like Eastern ceramics and like colon aware and Spanish ceramics and English ceramics. But like,
00:20:51
Speaker
I don't coming from out there, but I'm also put into that same job sometimes. And I can tell you it's historic ceramic. It's China or it's porcelain. I can tell you that. Yeah, you're forced to as a tech to be a master of none.
00:21:08
Speaker
decent at all or whatever. I think it comes to the role that you're forced to play as a CRM archaeologist, project director, or PI. You have to make management decisions on the fly as you're going. You're like, we have to protect this site. This is going to be impacted here, so I have to argue this and it has to be protected. I have to have very specific arguments about why this happens.
00:21:32
Speaker
I have to put two shovel tests in. I have to figure out that there's deposits, et cetera. You're kind of doing this within maybe like 20, 30 minutes of what you're given at a site. And then you're forced to like, oh, this is exactly what's going on here. I understand it perfectly when we really don't.
00:21:49
Speaker
We're just sampling and we have like a little understanding of what's going on there. Like we really want to get into it and understand what's going on at sites. We have to do data recovery or more intensive auguring. We're not given those luxuries as CRM professionals. You're kind of forced by clients, forced by you and your own company at time to get things done and to make these quick decisions.
00:22:10
Speaker
I think people are good at it, and I think a lot of CRM archaeologists are really trying hard to protect resources and do good science, but they're really only given these small opportunities and forced to do these non
00:22:27
Speaker
not super scientific kind of analysis on the fly. Right. And in that regard too, like you're to say like, Oh, this is a place to see an alluvial drainage with sub angular blockage sediment. That's a 10 or four on the Munsell scale that also is
00:22:42
Speaker
Let's say riddled with tertiary flakes of a calcedony reddish nature that are also intermixed with silver coins from a Spanish fort that was nearby in the late
00:22:59
Speaker
1560s and I'm just naming things off here that are like made with, let's say El Castillo style brick molding, which comes from Cordova and like just shit like that. You have to say that kind of stuff because when you write the report trying to tell Walmart not to bulldoze this land down, you want to make it sound good as to why you want to keep it.
00:23:19
Speaker
I get it. But also, it's a fucking brick wall built by colonists. Wouldn't you know anything more about that? No. Like, that's like, do we keep it or not? I'm assuming you're going to keep it because it's made by fucking white people. Well, like, not, you know, I don't know how it works, at least. Yeah. Well, in prehistoric stuff, like there's, there's, and it's really interesting because you can make arguments for eligibility and protection
00:23:43
Speaker
kind of in four different things. They have the four different, what are they called? I don't remember the ABC and D. Yeah. They're eligibility requirements. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can argue, I don't know, having this on top of my head, it's associated with like an important person. It's actually taped to the inside of my field bag. So I can say.
00:24:00
Speaker
I can't remember off the top of my head. So I think A is a person's interpretation to people too. But anyway, keep going. Yeah. Yeah. A is person, place, thing. It's important in history. B is, isn't it the works of a craftsman or like a very unique style? Style rings a bell. Yes. Or like tech. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:22
Speaker
It's like a good representative of this, of the style and C is, I think C is associated with historic events. I mean, they might not be in this order, but it's important people, important events and important, like stylistic and stuff. Good representation of that culture. Yeah.
00:24:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And then D is what most prehistoric stuff is, is potential for research or potential to give information about the past. And you're not going to very often argue prehistoric sites for A, B, or C. They just never would never happen. And they always have to fall under D.
00:25:01
Speaker
So it's really interesting. Yeah, very subjective. And I think it's, you could argue very easily that it's biased towards historic stuff and giving them more options to do that. For sure. And like that was a pretty apparent thing with Trump's wall, which…
00:25:19
Speaker
Apparently most of it's been built under the current administration, which is funny to me, but just all stupid. It was rerouted, like the working of it a lot, like the route around historic European cemeteries, but it was blasted through native land or like native potential archaeological sites.
00:25:37
Speaker
But is it a result of the institutions being colonists and racists saying, fuck it, it's just a Native American site, go through it? Or is it kind of just like, to people who know nothing about archaeology, that looks like a pile of dirt with some rocks in it. That looks like a building. Like, we need to go around it. And like, it's hard to, for me and you, we're sitting here screaming when we see that shit happening, because it's like, there is potential for research there, like, especially right there at the border.
00:26:04
Speaker
But like, you're out along the river. But I don't know what to tell people sometimes. Yeah.
00:26:11
Speaker
It's hard to make that argument when you can't see it as much like you're saying on the landscape, like you can European stuff. Like it's just, it's always going to be fundamentally difficult to, unless you find this beautiful horizon or if you run into human remains, like you, you really have, you're fighting an uphill battle to protect anything that is pre-contact, whatever the term is these days. I'm, I'm probably using the wrong term, but whatever.
00:26:35
Speaker
Pre-contact prehistoric indigenous, you know, whatever it is. It's it's really hard to argue and And you have land managers with different agencies who will fight against you when you try to call stuff eligible and deserving of protection
00:26:50
Speaker
So you as a CM archaeologist are placed in between a federal archaeologist and a proponent who wants to build stuff there. And you have to try to argue to both of them that you should protect this site. So you're fighting in between them, and then your proponent wants you to get stuff done at a certain time frame. And the BLM person also kind of wants to push it through, or the US Forest Service, whoever it is, wants to push it through. So you're stuck in this middle ground
00:27:17
Speaker
You're trying to protect resources, but you're also being pressured by both federal archeologists and your proponent to get stuff done. Yeah. And when I was monitoring this summer fall, I should say in Colorado.
00:27:32
Speaker
The bulldozer crew that I was with like, you're not, you're not supposed to stand with them all day and talk to them, but you're doing nothing
Fieldwork Anecdotes and Ethical Dilemmas
00:27:39
Speaker
for eight hours. So you end up talking. And like, I pretended to be this like conservative Christian Trump guy for three weeks talking to this guy. And it was really fun. Like I had my whole life made up and like him and I were best friends. His opinions on things were wild.
00:27:55
Speaker
He ended up opening up to me and he started crying at one point about his girlfriend that got hurt in a car accident because of his DUI and stuff. I was like, this guy has never opened up to somebody in his life. I feel bad. I was there for him. It wasn't David. It was Chris. My name was David on my tag. I'd come up with different lives for these people because I don't want them to know who I am.
00:28:20
Speaker
his car, he can't drive because he clearly had a DUI. His license was taken away. This is your tax money here too. There's the dozer guy who runs the bulldozer and it flattens the pad, the flat lands that can build us like a power tower there, like a big like power transmission tower transmission line. Yeah.
00:28:39
Speaker
A giant like electric pole, put it that way. And you've got to flatten the land. I have to watch him to make sure no sights come up or no stains or features or bones. He has a guy who's out there who literally has to stand in front of the dozer and wave and tell the dozer, keep coming, keep coming. Even though the dozer can see on the computer in the front of his, on the front of his whole thing.
00:29:01
Speaker
where he is. He's paid for this. He's paid, I think, 15 an hour, not great, but he's paid a lot for it. This is because he's constricted to the pad. There's very strict laws of where they can disturb, and that's part of it, is that that guy has to say, hey, you're at the edge of what we've determined is the pad. You gotta back up.
00:29:23
Speaker
And you have to, you know, direct them as such. That's his job. Yeah. And then there's a guy who goes out there with a track co and Samsung. I'm getting to the weeds of this, but the point being, he's out there to do that job that the spotters there to do his job. And I'm out there to look for stuff. And occasionally I have a partner or this paleontologist.
00:29:41
Speaker
with me too. He couldn't drive and the guy, the bulldozer guy had got him a job and said, come on up to Colorado, I'll get you a job this summer. Get your life straight. And he was like, cool. He's like a family friend and like he would yell at him and lay him into everybody. That's kind of funny.
00:29:56
Speaker
But anyway, they seem to have a history. And at the end of the day, I would often, I had the truck because I have to have my equipment in there to monitor stuff and I need to have my food and my water and stuff. So at the end of the day, I would drive them back to their truck, which was maybe a half hour drive from site back to the entrance to the BLM property and then another hour drive back to town.
00:30:19
Speaker
And like, you're not supposed to necessarily do that, but there's nothing that says you can't, I don't think. At least on this project that I was just helping him because I'm not going to make him walk the whole way.
00:30:27
Speaker
And at the end of the day, like we want to go home. We're doing the same job. We want to make sure this pad gets built and we want to go on to the next one. But I'm out there literally all day as an antagonist to them being like, hey, don't don't go there. Like stop. I need to look. And like that annoys me because I know they just want to do their job. But at the same time, your tax money and my tax money goes to me to do this and to make sure I'm preserving indigenous heritage and not bulldozing through something. But at a certain point, it becomes like
00:30:57
Speaker
You're not preserving indigenous heritage, you're... You're impeding progress or you're like... Yeah, like you're just in the way. It's kind of like how I feel most of the time. And when I feel like that, I'm like, no, I'm doing this for indigenous people. But then also, no, I'm doing this because it's the law, which is for indigenous people. And then like...
00:31:18
Speaker
But it's also for environmental reasons so they don't get sued and things of the age. It's a whole thing. And I kind of lost track of what I'm trying to say. But if I were to say, hey, there's stuff here, don't dig. I know how much work and you know, too, from the mapping and all the.
00:31:33
Speaker
paperwork side of it, how much work has to happen, how much work has to halt, millions of dollars in case I find them. And I've did, I found a few burials. There are, I think Oregon Trail era, like pioneer burials. Still, I had to have them move around and like the whole road had to be moved and like the whole road's already mapped in, it's flagged out, it's been looked at by everybody and like
00:31:55
Speaker
I don't know how they missed it, but I was like, they're right here. So I have to then... All these people are like, another fucking month out here because we got to move everything, reroute everything. But that's the law, that's my job, and that's what we're supposed to do because it's not our land to begin with.
Importance of Archaeology Despite Challenges
00:32:11
Speaker
Yeah. To put it in perspective, I don't think that million dollars or whatever it costs them is a drop in
00:32:19
Speaker
drop in the bucket for these huge companies. No, not at all. We're not really impeding progress. I've talked with other people. We have to make these stops. It's part of the law. You can even get in trouble. An EI, which is an environmental inspector, can come dock you for not doing your job there. They're the real bad guys. They're the ones who are telling the destruction of people.
00:32:43
Speaker
I don't know if you get paid enough money to be an EI. And if you are an EI, I'm sorry. Because it seems like it's- Devin was. Devin was my EI.
00:32:52
Speaker
Devin Pettigrew, we're sorry. We're so sorry. But I think if we put it into perspective that we are just kind of a small drop in the bucket of this money cow that is these large corporations, we don't really impede that much. But it is a perilous position, like you're saying, to put yourself in. You feel like you're in the way. You feel like you're stopping construction when you're really just trying to protect
00:33:16
Speaker
what is in the past and follow the laws that are governed. Yeah. And sometimes I'm out there for eight hours and it's hot. And I had sometimes you can't bring the trucks or the hike all the way out to the site with steel tow boots. I'm not hiking boots. I have to wear steel tow. I guess there's maybe steel tow hiking boots.
00:33:33
Speaker
Anyway, it's hot. I'm out there and I don't want to have to now dig a whole site while I'm out there. And a lot of it frustrates me in that sense too. It's just so fast. You have to just constantly be watching and if you miss it and if you find something, I have to dig that out and inspect it while he's still bulldozing the other side of the thing. And there's just one of me.
00:33:56
Speaker
And like, it's just, it's so disheartening and frustrating. It pays well, luckily, but like, I just, I understand why no one wants to do it and why they have to pay a lot of money to monitors because it's, it's so seriously like a thankless job. Yeah. And on that thankless note, we'll end the segment and we'll be right back.
00:34:15
Speaker
Welcome. 156. David. Connor. We're doing things. I think we ended up on like a similar tirade on a preview episode, but I don't think it came from a different angle. I don't know. Either way, I do want to say, I do want to clarify that we...
00:34:30
Speaker
You know, we do, we might be criticizing methods. We might be talking about how there's some issues with archaeology and CRM, but we do believe in it. I do believe in it. I do think that's something that we need to do, but that doesn't mean we can't criticize it and can't want to make it better. I think. Yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
So I'm going to put that disclaimer in.
Precision in Spatial Data and Mapping
00:34:51
Speaker
But I'm also going to tell you how much it sucks mapping these features that you find.
00:35:08
Speaker
critical part of archaeology and I don't think we really ever talk about it so like just go off king. I mean it's just it's not that interesting because it's a computer program. It is. I don't know it's it's it is very important. What do you think Vasco Gigama is saying right now in his grave and saying maps aren't important.
00:35:28
Speaker
I mean, you could argue that it's like the single most important piece of data that we get out of archaeology, right? If you don't know where the site is, you could describe millions of different things. You wouldn't know where it is. The location in space is huge, and that's something that we are constantly dealing with at my job. And I did a little baby rant about this on our rants and raves, but collecting accurate spatial location is probably the most important thing you can do in archaeology site.
00:35:53
Speaker
I will argue that I will die on that that hill. I know Sam Levin who's also was my predecessor here will also die on that hill like that is the single most important thing you can do when you're recording stuff is to take accurate spatial information and do it well. Inconsistently I'd imagine. Consistently and using
00:36:12
Speaker
data collection standards and methods that are consistent and replicable and you can use them every single time. So a lot of my job at Alpine archaeology, shout out those, I miss you all. A lot of my job was creating those data standards and creating
00:36:27
Speaker
programs within the GPS and other GPS's and tablets to certify that we are getting consistent data collection, consistent options for things, features, recording all features the same, recording all sites the same. We're getting as much information about each site from the GPS units themselves. So that was a big part of my job and it's not the sexiest part of archaeology.
00:36:54
Speaker
It fascinates my brain because I think it's important and I will absolutely die on the hill, but it just... But also, dude, when you're giving a site report to the BLM or to the Forest Service or somebody that needs the report, that person reading it might have no idea about lithics. But when they see the site and the extent of the site and can see the legend on the map and this is all the concentrations and here's the burials and stuff, that's important.
00:37:23
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. There's so many ways you can mess up GPS data and get incorrect stuff that it's a little harrowing. So you really have to do a good job of managing and creating
00:37:39
Speaker
standards and methodologies to record stuff. Because I mean, you could take a point in the field and then convert it into something, into a coordinate system that doesn't match what you took it in, and then it ends up like a section away. And then you're giving the wrong information at the BLM. So there is a lot of stuff that you can potentially mess up. I see it on a regular basis. You have to record things in the same coordinate system all the way through.
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah. Does that make sense to you? Do you do I elaborate on that? I mean, please elaborate. But what I mean, just do the gist of what I'm getting is like consistency, like it's got to look good.
00:38:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So if you record, coordinate systems are a way of just like marking our place in the world. You can do it lat long, which is a worldwide coordinate system. What we use in the US is the UTM, or at least in archeology we use the UTM, which is universe transverse Mercator, which is a series of systems that allows you basically whenever you're in a certain area to be roughly facing north,
00:38:43
Speaker
when you're going north in numbers. So it's like adjusting for every little location on the earth. So Wyoming occurs in two different zones, two different types of coordinates, or two different zones, which are different locations to kind of adjust you north. So they're in zone 12 and zone 13. But if you record something in zone 12 and then record it as 13, you're like a thousand meters away or something ridiculous. Wow. Okay. Yeah.
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's bad. So it's important. So keep your coordinate systems consistent, especially in Esri. Another hell I will die on. What is Esri? I know, but for the people listening.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yes. Yes. All right. I don't know the acronym. They are the basically the one and only your science recording and industry or something like that. Yeah. Environmental science, science recording industry or something like that. They are the dominant program for basically all GIS. I mean, I don't want to say it's monopoly, but it's a fucking monopoly.
00:39:45
Speaker
Like 100%. They've kind of cornered this market and... Environmental Systems Research Institute. That's it. Yeah. They've cornered the market on this. If you do GIS, you usually use Esri Products, ArcGIS Pro. It's like Adobe for GIS. Yeah.
00:40:01
Speaker
100%. And if you're in the field, you use collector or field maps. I mean, basically every company that runs it or runs some sort of Esri product when doing recording, monitoring. I mean, you used it for the monitoring project that you mentioned. So they dominate the industry.
00:40:22
Speaker
it's fun and you know as part of this project that you were working on i had like you i had to turn around these maps in like an instant so you had to dig that feature up in like ten seconds record everything etc i had to take that data later that day and get it back to create a map from it
00:40:43
Speaker
and send it off to the archeologists at the, I think it was the BLM within 24 hours, which is insane. So I was like on call. I know we were suffering together from afar, which was nuts. But yeah, turning around that data into making kind of usable product within like 24 hours is insane, especially when our- It's demanding. Yeah. And when we usually report stuff, you know, we're given two weeks, months to kind of
00:41:10
Speaker
get all this information together and put it out.
Appreciation of Western Landscapes
00:41:14
Speaker
It's hard on the GIS people as well. I know the field folks take the brunt of it, but I didn't slightly lose my sanity last summer because of this. Yeah, I could see it happening too. When I'm out there too and the little clunky iPads and stuff that I had, not to say Alpine stuff was clunky, it's just like
00:41:35
Speaker
Just technology. Yeah, you're limited by the technology you have to like, it's not Star Wars. You can't pull up a holo map of the site and point where the things are. You have to like fill out little forms in a tablet, make it standardized so it's the same for every site. It's hell. Like there's a lot. And for people that want to go into CRM, like that's like.
00:41:56
Speaker
It's like the tech is like it we only It's not star wars. We can't like do everything with it and it's not tony stark. So You're kind of limited by that and like I imagine The most efficient way to get everything written out would just be to take like a loose leaf piece of paper and and write essays on the site but like you can't do that you got to make it quick and
00:42:17
Speaker
No. And I know companies, companies use forms where they type everything like on the, you would on the loose leaf, but you have to use technology. Like you can't use loose leaf today in the CRM industry. Especially out where it's so windy. Oh, this one record of the site. Okay. Bye-bye. So cute. Bye-bye. That's another thing too, working out there. I was like,
00:42:43
Speaker
is BLM land in the middle of the Colorado-Utah border. It's so peaceful. It's just so empty. And out east, growing up, you can't see past the tree line. There's just trees everywhere. But out there, I can see, okay, well, here's where the glacier melt is and here's the flood and here's the
00:43:05
Speaker
And you know, like where the continental shelf is, I can see the Rockies. There is a fault line. Like you can literally see all that. Maybe not all of that in the same view, but see all that and then like assess how the site works and like the deposition and things like that. It's pretty cool. Yeah. You could probably pick out where sites are going to be too. If you have enough experience, you're going to be like on that, on that bench up there overlooking the river, there's going to be probably some paleo Indian site or there's going to be some sort of prehistoric stuff.
00:43:34
Speaker
I was going to say to Chris Rose, this is his point, like a lot of times I'll be like, oh, there's probably a site right there at that river. And I'll look it up on the thing. It's the one spot of private land. I'm like the whole thing. It's like somebody already bought it because it's good land to have a site on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, I did miss and being in Washington, you, you obviously are constricted by forests, et cetera.
00:43:58
Speaker
But like you said, it really is like peaceful to be out here and kind of see very far and see landscapes. Like I had to I had to drive to Warland, Wyoming, which is in Northwest BFE. Bump fucking nowhere, Wyoming. But I drove across like a crazy landscape where I didn't see anyone. Yeah, it's calming to me because like out east you're taught like, you know, there's always going to be some creeper in the trees or coming out of the subway or coming out of like
00:44:28
Speaker
Like don't go down that alley. There's like somebody, but I would eat out West. It's like when you're not in a city and you're just out there, like you're the, you're the biggest, meanest thing that maybe there's a mountain lion. Maybe there's a bear, but like you can see if a person's coming, like maybe I'll eat my words and be like, Oh, someone's in the tree ready to shoot me. Like that's always going to be a thing, but like.
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, you're you're like the you're the apex out there and like I'm really not scared of things out there. Like I'll think about skinwalkers or like Bigfoot sometimes and get all like, oh, no, like, oh, is it going to get me? And then like you get like that psychosomatic, like your hair stands on them when you hear something. But that's just in your head. But the rest of the time, like out in Wyoming, I could literally be out there in the middle of the night wide open and like the like lay on.
00:45:13
Speaker
on a sleeping bag without a tent sometimes, if it was nice enough out and I'd feel safe. Like if I have my dog, I'm fine. Like it's cool. Or just stay in a random cave. I mean, the biggest thing you have to worry about as land owners, private landowners is like, if you stay on public land, people, yeah, people leave you alone. I mean, that's, that's what we pay for. And that's, we own it. Yeah. Hell yeah, brother. No, I'm excited to be back here. It's, it's, it's beautiful. The archaeology is great.
00:45:39
Speaker
Um, I, I did notice like when you and I go to like historic tours and stuff like that, like you, you like, you gravitate towards the maps at our friend's house, our friend's family cabin. You like, I mean, they went and looked at the topo, topo maps that are upstairs. Like you were all about it.
00:45:57
Speaker
I just, I, it's the way my brain works. I've been like this since I was a kid. I, you know, we would drive across Colorado and I'd have like the topo map out. Why don't you get a topo map on your other arm, like of places you like, like Laramie and like your hometown is. Yeah. I think like that'd be fucking cool. Like hypsography or even on my back. It's all like lines. Yeah. That's a good idea. After I get my llama tattoo, you get a llama.
00:46:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's gonna be like right under my eye. Face llama tattoo. Makes me look hardcore. You ever put down a llama, boy? You ever taken a llama under the mountains, boy? They kick and scream. When you kill them? Not the other one. You ever seen a llama shit, boy?
00:46:51
Speaker
You tell me about that. They shit in a circle? They're just so awkward. They get up on all four legs and they just look embarrassed as they just stand. They're just like, eh, don't look at me. It's because they know what we're judging them. Yeah, but they get the last laugh. Luckily, they don't kick. They just spit. It's true. Camels are weird.
00:47:15
Speaker
Camelids in general are just crazy. Well, thank you all for listening to this podcast. Whatever happened in this last segment, I don't know. Yeah, I don't even know where I am. I think I know what happened. Jacob Arnzen, our previous guest, texted us about...
Gaming and Social Interaction
00:47:34
Speaker
Sailing. Playing Sea of Thieves. You guys haven't played Sea of Thieves. You're missing out.
00:48:03
Speaker
But the main threat is other pirates on the ocean that also want to hunt you and steal your treasure. So you have to work, you have to sail, you have to move the sails, you have to race sails, you have to turn the sails, you have to have food, you have to have provisions, you have to have strategies. You have to play instruments. You can play instruments, you can get drunk. It's a very fun game and it requires a lot of teamwork. So it's fun to play.
00:48:07
Speaker
This podcast is currently sponsored by Sea of Thieves.
00:48:25
Speaker
Shout out remote distance video gaming in this generation. It's kind of nice. It's like the new way of socializing, at least for some groups of people.
00:48:37
Speaker
I was trying to explain to some people a few weeks ago that were asking me about, do you go out and hang with friends? I'm like, when I'm in person, yeah. We always go to the bar. We hang out. We're together all the time. When we're not in person, why would I go hang out with new, make new friends when I could just play video games with my other friends on the phone? They're perfectly good friends. Am I gonna sell them? No, I can't see them, but you're seeing them in the game and you're interacting. It's so fun.
00:49:07
Speaker
Yeah, and it's the perfect way to keep distance. I still play with my homies from Washington. Shut up, Brendan and Steve, Steve the pirate. Yarg. Yarg. That was fun. Definitely in COVID it picked up for us, I think. We started playing a lot more.
00:49:25
Speaker
Cause you were both, you were both in Colorado then. Yeah. Yeah. I was in the middle of nowhere. So it's great. On that note, maybe we should make a MMORPG archeology game that we can all play sometime, all the listeners, but you know, that'll never happen cause it's just going to be grave robbing to rating.
00:49:45
Speaker
Actually, just make a BLM archaeology monitoring simulator. I mean, I do farming simulators. Every time the bulldozer comes back, he goes, and you get a point. And occasionally it keeps going and like it will compound like every day. Like, let's just say every hour of the game that you play, you get.
00:50:06
Speaker
Let's say 25 US dollars and every eight hours, that's a whole day's work. And then you can take some of that money and like the government takes some of it and the state takes some of it. The booze takes some of it. The who? The booze.
00:50:22
Speaker
The booze takes some of it. Let's just do per diem. And then, like, as the game goes, like, well, you stand there like and like the it like a little thing, like a little ghost bounces around your head. It's like, and you're like, no, don't do it. Don't do it. And you're like, hey, quit, quit. And you're like, don't do it. You just had to hit X like it's the boss battle every hour, you know. And like as you play the game, the money that's just taken away kind of compounds in something called a 401k, but it's digital and like
00:50:53
Speaker
That's your life. And it's a video. Well, and then if you find a feature, you have like a two minute timeframe to like, get it dug out and it starts getting like intense music. It's like,
00:51:04
Speaker
And at the end of every eight-hour game session, you have to then write a perfectly worded reason why what you did that day was worthwhile and worth keeping. And if one word or thing is wrong in that six-page paragraph you have to write, the BLM will say, no, sorry. And it's very hard. Yeah, that sounds like something everyone's going to listen to. Oh, brother, this guy stinks! All right, we'll see you guys next week.
00:51:41
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 archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Connor, do you, uh, do you have a joke for us? This one's going to be painful. The urge to sing a lion sleeps the night is always just a whim away.
00:52:16
Speaker
I'll find that tape in right now. Bye!
00:52:37
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.