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Our Ruined Lives with Gino Caspari - Ep 48
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In this episode, we are chatting with Dr. Gino Caspari, a Postdoc in Archaeology at the University of Sydney and the University College London. Dr. Caspari also runs a very popular archaeology Instagram account @ginocaspari that currently has over 123K followers and we discuss the importance of science communication and his experiences on Instagram. We cover his wild and interesting academic career, with many changes in majors and degrees. We also discuss Dr. Caspari's ongoing research in Siberia and his collaborative work with Indigenous Siberians and the issues of language barriers in publications.
Dr. Caspari’s Literature Recommendations:
- Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron-Age Horsemen by S. I Rudenko
- Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich
- Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific By Raft by Thor Heyerdahl
Contact for Guest
- Instagram: @ginocaspari
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- Website: www.alifeinruins.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 48 of A Life in Ruins podcast. Re-investigate the careers of those living in
Guest Introduction: Dr. Gino Kaspari
00:00:20
Speaker
life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-hosts, Connor Jonnan and David Howe. In this episode, we are chatting with Dr. Gino Kaspari, a postdoc in archaeology at the University of Sydney and the University of College London. Dr. Kaspari also runs a very popular archaeology Instagram account.
00:00:36
Speaker
You can find him at Gino Kaspari that currently has over 123,000 followers. Good afternoon, Dr. Kaspari. How are you doing today? Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on the
Lockdown Experience in Switzerland
00:00:50
Speaker
show. I actually just came back from bouldering outside, so it's one of the first nice days, one of the first days we're allowed back outside in smaller groups in Switzerland, so lockdowns.
00:01:02
Speaker
slowly coming to an end and life is hopefully returning to normal. So I feel pretty good. Excellent. Yeah. You're, you're enjoying your day and it's, it's seven AM for me and Connor. So for anyone watching the video portion, if we look a little tired, it's cause we're just waking up cause you're in, uh, you're in Switzerland right now, correct? I am and have been so for like the last year, which is rather unusual for me. I've been actually for the past 10 years. I never spent much more than three months.
00:01:31
Speaker
in my home country and now I've been basically stuck here for more than a year which is a bit annoying especially in terms of field work. That's where I am and it's not the worst place to spend your lockdown I think.
00:01:47
Speaker
I don't think so from what I've seen of it.
Romantic vs. Real Aspects of Archaeology
00:01:49
Speaker
I just want to tell the audience real quick that like everyone has this romantic idea of what archaeologists are like. Like you see like Indiana Jones or like Tomb Raider and stuff. You live that life, dude. Like every picture you post, I'm like, this guy's doing martial arts. He's in Mongolia with Hawks. Like what's going on, man? You got the coolest life.
00:02:10
Speaker
Well, I mean, obviously that is instalife and heavily biased on the nice side of things. Being able to work in Russia and work in Northwestern China, you really got to jump through some hoops.
00:02:26
Speaker
to actually make it happen. And yes, of course, the fun part is essential.
Fieldwork Challenges in Russia and China
00:02:32
Speaker
Otherwise, there's no way anyone would be doing it. But then there's the whole back office thing that everyone has to deal with that is just not really made to get likes on Instagram, I guess. Yeah, no, I got you. I always forget there's the Instagram bias, but at least your your non-biased part is
00:02:54
Speaker
pretty awesome right here. I guess the bias part, the part we see, there you go. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm, I'm selecting things and I, you know, to a degree, everyone who works in the field has these stories to tell.
00:03:08
Speaker
That's something I always found strange, actually, because, you know, either people in the public have this very strange, Indiana Jones-like view of archaeologists, or they think it's super boring, and it's just shards and mud and dust.
00:03:25
Speaker
And it's really somewhere in between, and everyone has these cool stories to tell, but people in academia rarely communicate openly about these things. So I think that's something that you guys are doing a great job in getting that out to the public, and it's something we should be doing more. Absolutely.
Research on Scythian Tombs
00:03:45
Speaker
So other than posting awesome things on our Instagram, so you are a postdoc, but you're also a postdoc for two different institutions.
00:03:52
Speaker
Correct. UCL and University of Sydney. Well, I've been jumping around quite a bit. I've been on several fellowships that just allow me to travel and work for my project. And since 2017, I have built up this large international corporation together with my Russian colleagues where we
00:04:14
Speaker
are excavating one of the earliest skithian tombs out in the middle of nowhere in southern Siberia. This is really the main project that I'm running and what keeps me busy. The university affiliations are more or less something that changes once in a while.
00:04:35
Speaker
I have a bunch of different collaborations going on, depending on topics people are interested in. And so things change, you go there, then you go there. And sometimes you keep an affiliation for a little bit longer. Gotcha. Yeah, I think going from London to what, it's Sydney, right?
00:04:54
Speaker
That's a move, all right? But yeah, you definitely have a very impressive CV, along with a very impressive social media presence.
Documenting Archaeology Beyond Artifacts
00:05:05
Speaker
Is that the stuff in Russia? Is that the stuff that Trevor Wallace has joined you on? Exactly. He's been basically working with me since 2015 on our documentary project, just trying to tell the story of how archaeology is done in a little bit more depth.
00:05:22
Speaker
than what it's usually coming out as in documentaries because I guess usually documentary production budgets are fairly tight and people just parachute in when fines are being made and they're like, oh, look, these people are finding these awesome items. And that's not really what the process is like, right?
00:05:44
Speaker
And so what we've been trying to do for a while now, which hasn't been quite that easy, is actually tell the entire story behind actually getting to a point where you're making finds. I really liked that. And I talked about this with Trevor and I can't remember what episode he was on, but.
00:06:00
Speaker
uh, go check that out. But yeah, I think it's really cool to kind of explain that. And cause it's not always this, this glorious thing, especially in working in Russia, where I assume that temperature is variable, the weather is variable, and it might not be pretty every single day when you're actually out there doing stuff
Siberian Fieldwork Environment
00:06:16
Speaker
like that.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, we try to have fairly long field campaigns at this Royal Burial Mounds. It's about 150 meters in diameter. So it's like a sizable site with a huge periphery. The whole site was used over the course of almost 2,500 years. So there's a lot more than just early Iron Age finds start somewhere in the Bronze Age and goes all the way to the Turkic period, like the sixth century AD.
00:06:46
Speaker
You know, we try our best to get as far as we can in the timeframe that is given to us through the environment. We start in May usually when it's open, still get some snowstorms in there.
00:07:00
Speaker
And then June is fairly nice. That's where the sun comes out. But then it's situated in this river area that periodically floods. And so in July, it's really hot. It's flooding. And then, of course, you're in Siberia and in August, the mosquitoes arrive.
00:07:19
Speaker
And those beasts are by far worse than any snowstorm we've had so far. Basically, throughout the entire month of August, we have this black cloud over our tent that is just sitting there. And once in a while, you go there with a flamethrower and try to wipe them out. But then just keep them coming until the end of August, where we have the first night frost and it gets minus five at night sometimes again. And then they die off, finally. That's usually a reason for celebration.
00:07:50
Speaker
Wow. That sounds like a good time except when the mosquitoes are there, I guess. But I think the same thing happens in Laramie when we went to school. It'd be like beautiful weather all year and then like August hits and it's just a black cloud of stuff that makes the fieldwork suck. But yeah, it's worth it. So what got you into being an archeologist as a kid?
Kaspari's Lifelong Interest in Cultures
00:08:13
Speaker
I was interested in ancient cultures for sure. That was something that's been sort of running through as a red thread. But I had like plenty of different ideas in mind. And even, you know, after doing my BA in archaeology, I went into a completely different direction for a while.
00:08:31
Speaker
It just happened to coming back to it, and mostly for the reason of archaeology being this field science that really challenges a number of skills that have happened to have developed over the years. So it's interesting intellectually, but it's also fairly physical if you're going into these remote areas. It's a leadership challenge. It's a lot of organizational stuff.
00:09:01
Speaker
very aware of cultural differences, you have to watch your communication and it's just this sort of project management in this challenging environment is something that really appeals to me and fulfills me in a way. It just is something that makes me happy and for now it's a really good way I think to spend my time.
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah. And I think when we first received your CV, it was interesting to see the different directions you took throughout your career. You know, we got a degree in history to start out. Is that, yeah, you started out with a minor in history and then some other stuff like that. And then you got, you know, master's science and business administration. And then how do these, all these degrees help you work in the field today?
Educational Background and Cultural Adjustments
00:09:49
Speaker
Well, I guess it's like in retrospective, it's super easy to rationalize this. That doesn't mean that at the moment where I took the decision, it actually I had like a long term plan or anything. You know, the thing is, I started out with archaeology in art history, because I was interested in it.
00:10:08
Speaker
Fair enough you just gotta try it out because once you finish high school you don't really know a whole lot about the world you think you do but then once you enter university this whole universe opens up and at first it kinda confuses you so you gotta start something and see how it goes.
00:10:32
Speaker
I guess in Switzerland there's this very strong idea socially of having a job, having a proper job. And a proper job usually is either, you know, being a doctor, a lawyer, maybe an engineer, maybe going into business. It's certainly nothing in the humanities. I guess my BA in archaeology wasn't all that challenging and I had my friends always complaining about how easy we had it in the humanities. So I took a few business courses.
00:11:01
Speaker
I was like, oh, well, I can do that too. It's not that hard. And then I ended up pursuing a master's degree in it. That's how I got to that point. Then you finish your master's degree and you're like, well, damn, now I need to find a job, right? So at the same time I had, since I've practiced martial arts, I've practiced kung fu for a while, I had
00:11:23
Speaker
this interest in China, and I had started learning Chinese, so I applied for a scholarship to go to China, learned the language a bit more properly, and then I basically had the option, okay, find a job in marketing management, or go to a completely new place that I really didn't know anything about, and learn a new language, meet new people. And that wasn't really a decision for me at the time, it was absolutely clear, right?
00:11:51
Speaker
So that's how I ended up in China in the first place. Very cool. You know, I think we all like get to that point where we stare in on the precipice after getting an MA that you're like, what's out there in the world? But I'm glad that you found an interesting route to kind of take. So.
00:12:07
Speaker
Ultimately, you went to China for a little bit and then you decided to get a Master of Arts in East Asian Studies at Columbia. Was that a big transition going to living in America? I mean, the real culture shock actually happened when I went to China because I couldn't speak the language and everything was different. So when I first
00:12:29
Speaker
wrote an email to the international student's office at my small university in Xi'an. An email came back and was like, hello, who are you? And I was like, oh, okay, so they don't know I'm coming, great. So with regards to that, Columbia was a bit more organized, I have to say. And therefore, like the transition wasn't that hard at that point. You know, I've made sort of my
00:12:58
Speaker
international experiences already. It's New York, you can figure things out. What part of town did you live in in New York? I was living on the Upper West Side, actually in the International House, right?
00:13:12
Speaker
Okay. So just a couple of hundred meters from Columbia, really expensive. Obviously it was like a sort of broom state chamber, something like that. That cost me about a thousand dollars a month, but I was lucky to have a Fulbright scholarship at the time.
00:13:30
Speaker
That was actually the reason why I went there in the first place otherwise Sorry, you guys tuition fees are just nuts. That's like borderline criminal Nobody would do a degree if you can do a degree in Europe Yeah, well not a bad part of town to live but it definitely is expensive up there
00:13:47
Speaker
Then afterwards, just to go through this, you get your undergrad at University of Baren in Switzerland. You get your master's in business admin at University of Baren. Then you go to China for two years. Then you come to the U.S. What, that took about a year to get your master's? Two years? One year. Yeah, one year. You got that master's real quick in East Asian studies. You don't want to pay for more tuition fee than necessary. You want to cut those semesters short.
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you there. And then you start working on your doctorate at the University of Hamburg in sinology and archaeology, correct? But you started that in 2013, so... Yeah, actually, I did put two things in peril. So coming back from China, I was like, okay, now I have all these experiences and I have all the
00:14:38
Speaker
there's access in china and i could bring it back together with archaeology chinese language and the sort of nice network in areas that people actually haven't done that much research in and so i
00:14:52
Speaker
basically went to a professor I knew at Hamburg University and told them, can I do a doctorate? Can I start doing my research? And they were like, well, you don't really have a master's in archaeology, so we cannot give you any funding, but you're welcome to do research.
00:15:11
Speaker
And so that's why I applied for Fulbright scholarships and stuff and ended up actually going to the US to pursue this master's degree because that was something that actually sustained me. All right. That seems pretty busy. That's nuts, man. And with that, we'll be right back with Dr. Gino Kaspari here on episode 48. So please stay tuned.
00:15:34
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 48 of the Life in Ruins podcast. We're here in segment two with Dr.
Insights into the Scythian People
00:15:39
Speaker
Gino Kaspari, the man that met the legend. Much like Trevor Wallace on a previous episode, Gino has been overseas, specifically in Siberia, the Russia area, doing a lot of archaeology on what's called Scythia. And I have a working knowledge of what Scythia was. I know Alexander the Great went out there and
00:15:58
Speaker
I made work of them over there. And then there's also the lady who's the leader in civilization. That's us at the end, but other than that, I know nothing. Would you be able to explain a little bit about Cynthia? Cause they're kind of a lesser known culture to people over here. They're also a playable faction in Rome, total war two. And that's about the extent of my knowledge. I guess that's a start.
00:16:22
Speaker
Also overall, we have these horse riding nomads appearing in the first millennium BC, all over the Eurasian steppes and Scythians or Scythians. I think in the Greek version, it's written with an SK. We're really just, you know, a few peoples in the northern Black Sea region just due to
00:16:48
Speaker
history of research has sort of become associated with the entire material culture of these highly mobile nomadic pastoralists of the early Iron Age. So if, you know, usually refer to them as Scythians, but we don't really know if they saw themselves as that or if they saw themselves as something completely different. But that's how the whole cultural history approach works, right?
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, and so we basically have three characteristics that we find in these burials. They're dead into these mound burials and they interred them with weapons, with horse gear.
00:17:32
Speaker
And with a very specific art form called the Scythian animal style, which features a lot of animal fighting scenes. And a lot of the animals have these weirdly twisted hind legs. So we don't quite know what's going on as something strange happening there. The whole thing really came up in roughly the 18th century, other than sort of the other ancient antique cultures that people are sort of aware of.
00:18:02
Speaker
These really were more or less forgotten, but then quickly contextualized with Herodotus and his ethnography on the northern Black Sea region.
00:18:15
Speaker
People found these really nice golden items in burial mounds all across the steppes and very quickly this became sort of associated with the Scythians and got people really interested because it was something that wasn't really known before. That's super cool and I'm actually looking at some of this art and it's pretty interesting. I understand why the Greeks were like, whoa, you know, Herodotus was Greek, right? I'm not crazy.
00:18:45
Speaker
Yep. Okay. So this, these, uh, Scythian people seem similar to the Mongols in, in their lifestyle. And they're kind of doing that in the same place. Is that a, is that a fair comparison? I would say to, to a lay audience, it's certainly a fair comparison. We have really this transition from the bronze age where we have just small scale trans humans, pastoralism, and then
00:19:15
Speaker
The use of the horse makes all the difference. In the early Iron Age, people used horses more extensively for both herding and transportation, but also for warfare. And that's what they become famous for, for the sedentary peoples around their outer fringes, because they're really quick in getting out, burning down a village, taking the stuff and heading back.
00:19:40
Speaker
out into the steps and people just didn't like that for some reason. And this is why they frame them as these barbarian hordes that just come out
00:19:52
Speaker
from nowhere and just disappear again. They were also super good horseback archers. For the Greeks, for example, you had these very structured kind of battles. And then once one party was fleeing, it was basically clear that the battle had been won. But with the Scythians, they just turned around and still shoot arrows at you, even though they're running away. And that seemed like a really unfair thing to do to a lot of people.
00:20:22
Speaker
used a bit more traditional, honourable warfare.
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah, not very civilized
Geography of the Eurasian Steppe
00:20:28
Speaker
warfare. When you talk about the steppe, you're talking about the Eurasian steppe. So that's like Eastern Ukraine, a city always, that culture area that also extends into Poland too, correct? Well, it goes a bit into Eastern Europe. It's mostly the Northern Black Sea region and then draws through the Caspian Sea into Central Asia, large stretches of Kazakhstan. Then you sort of have the Altai Mountains that interrupted a little bit and continues
00:20:57
Speaker
east of it towards Mongolia. And so it's really this large stretch of land of grassland that you cannot really use for agriculture very much. And once people had horses and knew how to herd livestock, this made this entire environment economically viable. And this is one of the questions that we're looking at
00:21:23
Speaker
uh, more intensively at the moment is like, when does this transition happen? Why does it become possible, et cetera? Yeah. Cause that same like geographic area, it's really similar to like the Rocky mountain front range, right? So for like call it for like David and Connor, that's, I mean, we're familiar with the front range. Like it has that similar, what's landscape. It's Kansas.
00:21:46
Speaker
It's like the Front Range Colorado, so it's not like mid-prairie Kansas, it's like short prairie out here. But it reminds me a lot, because here, thinking about the Scythians, that kind of geography, and then when you get horses in the Americas, the traditional horse nomads that we think here of indigenous tribes like Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, this is like the same landscape that they're occupying as nomadic horse raiding cultures.
00:22:12
Speaker
I think that's an interesting
Interest in Nomadic Cultures
00:22:13
Speaker
duality. So what attracted you to researching Scythian archaeology?
00:22:18
Speaker
Oh, funny enough, now I see this red thread once again running through my CV that somehow got in touch with nomadic horse people once in a while. One thing is actually that my BA thesis on a Scythian topic already was looking into the labor expenses that went into building these burial mounds. And so early on, what attracted me to these nomadic cultures was
00:22:47
Speaker
that they're kind of metal in a way that these barbarians, they have these completely different customs, you know, and they seem just to be completely different than the sedentary people. And this difference was something that I think was appealing to me also because a lot of our professors didn't seem to know a whole lot about it. You know, they come in once in a while. I was studying Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology and, you know,
00:23:17
Speaker
once in a while they make an appearance in the historical sources, but they don't really become tangible in a way.
00:23:26
Speaker
And so that's what got me started and that's what got me interested. I love that you called them metal because that is extremely accurate. They're pretty hardcore. So you worked on your thesis about, did you ever kind of stray from being interested in that and what ultimately got you back into working in the field specifically on these sites?
00:23:49
Speaker
Also, my main focus really, aside from these early Iron Age tribes, is a methodological focus on remote sensing in landscape archaeology.
Research Difficulties in Xinjiang
00:24:00
Speaker
And that's what I'm really doing with most of my papers, is actually trying to look at human landscape interaction of sorts. What got me into working in Russia was basically more a lack of opportunities of working in China, because I had built up my PhD research project in northwestern China, so in Xinjiang.
00:24:26
Speaker
And back in 2013, when I started my PhD, I had traveled there a couple of times. I had made some friends among the local Uyghur minority. And I started to develop this really nice network up there that probably nobody seemed to have because whenever I looked at
00:24:47
Speaker
maps and archaeological publications, I saw that it kind of stopped with the Russian border. Maybe somebody took in Kazakhstan, or then somebody was just exclusively working on Mongolia. But that upper area of China, there was just not a whole lot of data on it, which was accurate as an assessment, but kind of naively assuming I had found something that nobody had really looked at yet.
00:25:16
Speaker
There was, of course, also a reason for there not being a lot of data. And that was that access is extremely hard. So, you know, things have deteriorated since then with all the human rights issues that we have in the area that was perceivable at the time, but you could still kind of
00:25:39
Speaker
weasel your way around things around the regulations, people were a bit more lenient towards foreigners at that point in time. And so I actually was able through good contacts and friends up there actually being able to pull off a survey in that area was great. That's really what got me through my PhD. But since 2017 fieldwork in Xinjiang is essentially impossible. It's as hard as working in Tibet.
00:26:09
Speaker
And so getting off that tangent, that was basically the reason why I will not be able to work here in the future and at least not be able to.
00:26:19
Speaker
sort of build a sustainable project that delivers data on a regular basis. And so I need to go somewhere else. And a logical idea was to just kind of jump across the border into Russia and continue my research there, because with the material culture, I was already familiar. And there's just a language barrier and a nation state border in between, which
00:26:45
Speaker
obviously didn't really matter in the ancient times. Can I ask you some like nerdy archaeological questions regarding the Scythians? Because I'm like generally interested. Go ahead. So what's the time span that the Scythian culture existed from? Well, so basically we look at them as being roughly between the 9th and the 3rd, maybe 2nd century BC. Okay.
00:27:12
Speaker
And then the settlement pattern. That's a tricky one because Scythians having really nice shiny objects in their burials and being nomads, obviously archaeological focus has been mostly on the nice shiny objects. That's only something that we're really just starting to look into and
00:27:41
Speaker
at the very beginning this kind of research. So we're starting to actually find campsites and things like that now that people start looking for them. Before that, people would just kind of like wave it off as, well, the nomads, of course, they don't live anywhere, they just move around. Which, of course, is not that simple when you start looking into it.
00:28:04
Speaker
There's still not that much data around. In some areas, they're a bit more sedentary, especially if we're going towards
00:28:12
Speaker
Eastern Europe, you have some hilltop supplement type of things, but in the Eastern steps, the picture is very much vague and fuzzy. I guess my assumption was that, like you said, that nomads would produce, it'd be hard to find campsites of these kind of nomadic people, but it's just that people haven't really looked for them, right?
00:28:36
Speaker
It's you can find them and then like a bunch of modeling tools out there now where you can look at for posture quality and find ways how people move through the landscape. And that gives you some preliminary ideas where you could be looking for but they're very fleeting traces. And usually, you know, you get bits of charcoal, a few pottery shirts, and then that's it.
00:29:02
Speaker
So it's nothing spectacular, something that is hard to find funding for, even though obviously the question is super interesting and important because we don't just want to look at the world of the dead, we also want to look at the world of the living. Exactly. Well, I think with that, we're going to take our next break and we'll be right back with segment three of episode 48 right after these messages.
Breaking Archaeologist Stereotypes via Social Media
00:29:29
Speaker
Welcome back again to episode 48 of Life Herns podcast. We're here in segment three with Dr. Gino Kaspari. Gino, I have social media envy for you. You've got, I think like a couple of times the amount of followers that I have. So I guess my question would be one, how did you get started with that? What made you get started with it? And then two, you enjoy it? Do I enjoy it? Yeah, very much depends on the day. Um,
00:29:58
Speaker
How I got started is a good question. I think I was mostly forced by my friends because they were like, well, do you know you have a nice and interesting life? We guess people would be interested and you could amass quite a following with that. I was like, yeah, I'm really not a big fan of this. Do I really have to? And I started off and it just kind of took off.
00:30:22
Speaker
So that's how this whole misery started. And I guess now I got to feed the beast. It's going so far. I know exactly what you mean. Cool. With my, I think what, 26, 27,000 I have.
00:30:41
Speaker
I get some interesting characters, some that message you every day wanting to be your best friend. And then two, I get some really, really weird messages and just like being called out for this and that. Do you get that kind of stuff? I mean, I try to ignore some of it. I try to be nice overall because it just really doesn't help getting into arguments with people who are not to be argued with.
00:31:07
Speaker
Overall, I think it's a really useful way to bring archaeology and the everyday life of an archaeologist out there to a broader audience and tell people about how things really are. Of course, there's the social media bias that we've talked about at the beginning, but at least you can break a little bit with the stereotypes that people have in their heads. And there's a fair amount of these stereotypes out there.
00:31:37
Speaker
Ranging from yes, this is completely super boring to like you're in the Indiana Jones, right? I think that helps a lot. Also with a certain respect for our profession and understanding why we are needed and what we actually do.
00:31:56
Speaker
and just overall get people interested in ancient cultures and heritage that they're sometimes not that much in touch with. Yeah, I think that's an awesome way to look at it. I mean, that's the goal, right? Like to get it out there for people to see. Yeah, and there's like an aspect of archaeology that probably people
00:32:17
Speaker
you know, don't understand. From a non-professional, and that's not just degree seeking, but from a non-professional person looking at archaeology, right? Big misconception is that it's treasure hunting, that what we do is basically we study these things, we go out to go look for treasures,
00:32:35
Speaker
to make ourselves rich, which is not how we've done things for a while now. And the other is that even though we study things in the past, they have relevance for today in modern, even geopolitical contexts, right? So when you are posting on social media, your Instagram account in particular, ultimately what is it you're trying to communicate? Is it that flashy aspect or is it more of
00:33:02
Speaker
really the fascinating side of fieldwork of archaeology? Well, I think it's both. There are some constraints with regards to the overall environment of social media because some things just won't work. I cannot post tables and graphs because people don't look at these things. They're not on Instagram for looking at
00:33:30
Speaker
raw data, essentially. So you have to frame it in a certain way that it becomes accessible to people. And the image often is just, in my case, kind of hook
00:33:44
Speaker
for the caption where they can then go further and start actually learning about things and asking importantly most of the time just asking their own questions just trying to understand that things are maybe not as clear cut as they always imagine things would be.
00:34:02
Speaker
Now, of course, this creates a little bit of tension with the academic colleagues, because at least from, say, the older generations, they don't quite understand what social media does. It's like mostly a bad thing, I guess.
00:34:18
Speaker
people sometimes call me out for, you're not accurate, this is oversimplified, and it's like, well, guess what? It's not an academic article. It's a different format. We have 2200 characters. Yeah. Right. And you sort of need to break it down for a general audience. You know, I could, of course, talk about, for example, highly nomadic pastoralists of the early Iron Age, or I could just say Scythians. Scythians is maybe not as accurate in many cases.
00:34:48
Speaker
But the other thing has this whole background of concepts that you need to first understand before you even get to read the caption. And it's just not what your everyday person wants to do.
00:35:01
Speaker
So in a way, you're really putting yourself out there and sometimes in between a rock and a hard place because your academic colleagues don't like you for getting the exposure often. And the public sometimes doesn't like you for being maybe too rigid on your ideas and things like that.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a tricky balance to catch. Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to ask because you work in Russia and Siberia, have you had any issues with posting some of your research and any interference from, say, governments that don't want that data out or things like that?
Importance of International Collaboration in Archaeology
00:35:38
Speaker
Since I have worked with my Russian colleagues for years now, we have a very good mutual understanding of what things actually belong out there into the public.
00:35:49
Speaker
and what things don't. So it's mostly, I think, international corporations in general are mostly a question of good communication. And that just, you know, that has all these different issues associated with it, including cultural ideas, how things are being done that you have to be aware of. But once you're at this point, you can make things happen and you can actually give people exposure for great projects.
00:36:19
Speaker
that don't necessarily even get the exposure in international academia because
00:36:25
Speaker
a lot of Russian colleagues are almost exclusively publishing in Russian, and they have amazing findings, but they don't really get into the good international journals, for example. And so the real treasures out there that, in my opinion, deserve more exposure, and the work of my Russian colleagues deserves more exposure internationally, so that it really is fit into an international scholarly discourse as well.
00:36:54
Speaker
And so I think we haven't had issues with putting things out there for a long time, actually, because people are glad that this is happening. And they deserve it, frankly. Yeah, I 100% agree. And from just my own limited experience working in Ukraine, which I probably need to be bleeped out at this point, because I mentioned Ukraine, God knows, since I've been there. But one thing I noticed really quick is that
00:37:21
Speaker
most of the articles written on Ukrainian archaeology are either in German or Russian. And then those articles aren't translated to English. And it's hard for, you know, especially Americans, because our language literacy is like one of the lowest in the world. Like I can tell you how to get to the bibliotheca down the street, thanks to my very
00:37:45
Speaker
very limited Spanish knowledge from high school, but that barrier of language and talking about global history and world heritage is a huge problem. One of the things that I noticed is that for the Ukrainian PhD students in archaeology, they have to pass an English literacy test just so that they can perform their work in their own country because
00:38:10
Speaker
That's one of the major academic languages, is English. We had a Danish archaeologist on Maria. Her episode comes out, I guess, tomorrow for us, but for the people that are listening, it's already out. Her whole degree program in archaeology was in English in her home country of Denmark.
00:38:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. And I think I think only like building up that only the big finds get translated in English. So like anything you hear about Siberia is like mammoths, you know, frozen mammoths, stuff like that. And that stuff gets translated. But it seems like there's this whole body of work that we're missing because it's not as sexy as frozen mammoths with in the tundra up there. So it's interesting.
00:38:58
Speaker
that these finds aren't generating this stuff. And I'm glad that you're promoting stuff like that, Gino. I think it's really cool. No, absolutely. I mean, this is a general problem, of course, but it's in particular a problem in Central Asian archaeology because, well, you have all the Russian sources, but then you also have Mongolian, you have Chinese, and these nation-state borders are really visible in the research.
00:39:26
Speaker
And you see that there's some scholars from Germany who speak really good Russian. They publish well-written articles but leave out the entire Chinese side of things. And I think there's one reason why in these areas we need to work together to actually produce outcomes that just go across regions and give a bit a better impression of what has actually been going on. Because people just discard entire regions, entire
00:39:56
Speaker
material culture is basically based on a language barrier, and that's really not how you should be doing science. We actually just have submitted a paper to Clause 1. We'll see if it gets through, but it's talking about this material culture complex from the third to the fourth century AD in southern Siberia.
00:40:19
Speaker
When I put it into Google Scholar, it's called the Kokal Culture. It's a very local thing that has a long research tradition in Russia. But if you put it into Google Scholar, I think about five articles come up, and none of them really has this as the main topic. So if you work in Central Asian archaeology, you get to actually introduce
00:40:44
Speaker
entire cultures if you want to an international scholarly audience. That is awesome, right? Like isn't that that's the goal is to be the guy that everyone cites that you have all the how all the information even though you might be
00:40:58
Speaker
not the original research, but making it, you know, publicly accessible, or, you know, accessible to wider audiences. Well, I mean, in my case, actually, I think I don't really deserve to be the first author on a study like that. Those are my Russian authors, because they are my Russian colleagues rather, because they have the knowledge about these cultures. I am often taking more of a
00:41:24
Speaker
translator type of perspective where I really take their texts and I redesign them in a way that they actually make it into international journals. There's also a lot of theoretical developments from mainly, I guess, the Anglo-Saxon American world that hasn't really made it into Russia. So there's a lot of
00:41:45
Speaker
potential issues involved with all the research that needs to be intertwined with the data that we have. That is, in terms of quality, very good. And so I think having this mediating function, but leaving the first authorship to Russian colleagues is important. Excellent.
00:42:05
Speaker
Shifting gears here, I got a question for you and I try to ask this to a lot of our guests. If there was one thing that you like are super interested in that you want to tell the world about or like maybe just like your favorite thing you found over there or in your career, like what would that be?
Excitement of Discovering Preserved Materials
00:42:22
Speaker
Well, I mean, people often ask me what was the most interesting find that you've made in your career so far. And for me, it was in 2017, where we had mounted this small expedition, just a bunch of friends of mine, and myself going to southern Siberia. And we had spent
00:42:44
Speaker
roughly half a day trying to dig a tractor out of a swamp because we had tried to get to the site and they had like some completely into the mud. And so we arrived on the site quite exhaustly started where we had left off with the excavation. And first we found super well preserved wood that was
00:43:07
Speaker
part of this large burial mound that we're now working on. First of all, having organics on a site is always great news for an archaeologist, obviously, because there's just so much more that you can talk about if some of these things are left over. And then just about 20 centimeters below it, there was this big piece of mud that just came off and below it there was frozen ground.
00:43:33
Speaker
I put my hand on it, and it was just, oh, this is ice. This is really cold. And then immediately, of course, the implications come in. It's like, whoa, this could mean that there are preserved textiles. There could be preserved human tissue, even. There could be horse hair and all these different things. And this whole world of questions opened up at that very moment.
00:43:59
Speaker
And so what people I think often don't get is it's not really about the shiny thing is because, well, you can find another piece of gold and yeah, you don't really get to keep it as an archeologist anyway. So it's like another piece of gold, but context like these and understanding the implications of a frozen piece of mud. That's what really gets us excited. I think. Yeah. And I think we talked about this in the episode about the dig, but like,
00:44:28
Speaker
It's more about the behavior and like the daily life of people in the past than it is about, you know, shiny stuff. Though I do love a good shiny thing, but like, yeah, it might seem boring to a lay person, but I mean, finding wood in the step must be really awesome for you guys, you know?
00:44:47
Speaker
And with that, Dr. Kaspara, thank you so much for coming on the show today. What are a couple sources that you would recommend for anyone interested in Scythian archaeology or Central Asian archaeology that you found extremely helpful? I knew that question was coming. I just didn't know the actual topic.
00:45:07
Speaker
Uh, giving it a thought. And so I prepare three sources, but then don't relate to skinny and archeology. Oh, that's fine. Yeah. Happy to. Yeah.
00:45:21
Speaker
Unfortunately, to be honest, for the Scythians, there's really not that much scholarship with regards to a general introduction on these horseback warrior nomads out there in the English language. And I think that's something that is probably
00:45:42
Speaker
will have to be written further down the line, maybe once I finish my project or something like that. They're really good sources in German, by the way, if you read German. But what I was thinking about more like books that got me excited about archaeology of the steps anyway, and I think one classic that you shouldn't miss out on is Frozen Tombs of Siberia by Sergei Rodenko. That's sort of
00:46:10
Speaker
the classical one, discovery of the Paziric tombs high up in the Altai Mountains with frozen mummies and tattoos and horses dressed up as mythical creatures. Amazing stuff, definitely something you can read and it's in English. Another thing that I've recently read is David Reich's book on who we are and how we got here. It's basically a general outline
00:46:39
Speaker
of ancient DNA and how it can be used for archaeological questions. And I think the longer the more we actually need to work with ancient DNA, because it feeds into so many questions that we traditionally already had in archaeology about migrations, about relationships between people, etc. So that's a really good introduction if you're interested in the topic and basically know nothing about it.
00:47:09
Speaker
I think one of my all-time favorite books is Kontiki by Thor Heyerdahl, which is just something... It's essentially an adventure story, but really gets across the excitement of testing out theories and trying to actually make archaeology exciting because it is.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's awesome. I hadn't heard of those last two books to check those out myself, but where can our listeners find you social media or academia, anything like that? Yeah. So of course, uh, if you're generally interested in what I'm doing and the bit of private life as well, outdoor adventures and stuff, just check out my Instagram at Gino Kaspari.
00:47:55
Speaker
Otherwise, there's a bunch of papers out which are accessible through ResearchGate and academia.edu. Okay. Awesome. I actually have to check some of your stuff out too. I was looking at your CV and was like, what? So give that a look. Because this is a life in ruins, we have to ask this question. So would you, Geno Kaspari, first start off in school in Switzerland and then go to China.
00:48:20
Speaker
and then spend some time in China, go to America and then go to Germany and then ultimately study in Russia and live a life in ruins if you had the opportunity to do it again.
00:48:30
Speaker
Well, I have no regrets, so far. Well, all right. We just interviewed Dr. Gino Kaspari. You can find him on Instagram at Gino Kaspari. And please be sure to rate our podcast on Spotify and iTunes, wherever you're listening to it. You can also send us, I mean, please review us, send us questions at a Life in the Roads podcast at gmail.com. If you want to know Carlton and or Gino's hair routine, you can also ask us those questions. So we will let you know.
00:49:01
Speaker
And on that note guys, see you next week. Bye. 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.
00:49:28
Speaker
I think I've been saying this wrong. My dad sent me basically a beautiful link that I can get all my dad jokes from. He didn't write these all. He's pretty witty, but he did not write all these. So I'm Buzz Aldrin, second man to step on the moon. Kneel before me.
00:49:47
Speaker
Thank you. Yep. Excellent. Now I need a lot of coffee.
00:50:11
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.