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Medieval Fish Bones, Belgium, and Salmonids with Liz Quinlan - Dig It 32
65 Plays3 years ago
In today's episode, we chat Liz Quinlan. Liz is currently a Marie Sklodowska Curie early stage researcher completing a Ph.D. in archaeology at the University of York. She is a zooarchaeologist who has worked with material from a wide variety of contexts and time periods. Tune in as we dive into her current work involving medieval fishing in the North Sea basin area!
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Transcript
Introduction to iDicket Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the iDicket Podcast, a podcast where we talk about the student perspective of navigating the world of archaeology and anthropology. I'm your host, Michaela. And I'm your host, Alyssa.
00:00:24
Speaker
It's always so awkward starting up an episode because it's just like, hey there, how's it going? Welcome to this episode. It's just like that. Exactly. I'm just going to use that.
Meet Liz Quinlan: PhD Journey in Zooarchaeology
00:00:36
Speaker
Today we have a guest, Liz Quinlan, who is currently a Marie Curie early sage researcher completing a PhD in archaeology at the University of York in zooarchaeology.
00:00:47
Speaker
And so hello there, Liz. How's it going? Hi, it's going pretty okay, considering that I'm locked in a quarantine hotel in Belgium. Well, the lighting looks great in your hotel. So thank you. That's nice. There's like a really leafy like courtyard behind me, which has been very conducive to doing work, which is nice. That's nice. That's awesome. So what are you there for? And how long?
00:01:11
Speaker
Um, so I am here to do, um, the first leg of a data collection trip, um, that I was supposed to have done last year because pandemic, um, basically a month ago, we got like permission for me to go do things. And then I just started scrambling and emailing people and being like, can I have bones? Thank you.
00:01:33
Speaker
I will be in your country on this date. So the whole trip is it starts here in Brussels and I'm supposed to be working at the Natural Science Museum here in Brussels. That is currently under review because guidelines are changing all the time. So there's some fun uncertainties at the moment.
00:01:57
Speaker
But more certain is my work in the Netherlands, which later in June, I'm going to be moving to The Hague. I have to quarantine there again, but less time. And then I will be spending a month between June and July going to 15 different archaeological depots, museums, and universities collecting archaeological samples from PhD work.
00:02:20
Speaker
driving around in a car and frankly collecting things. That's so exciting that you're able to do all this finally, move around the bunch while trying to catch up. Catch up to all the things we didn't get to do last year. Yeah, it's and it's especially good that because I was supposed to, so you mentioned at the beginning that I am a Ruiz Kvlovska Curie researcher and so
What are the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions?
00:02:48
Speaker
Basically, it means that I have a grant from the European Commission, and it's like a big network of people. There's 15 of us who are working towards PhDs, and our work kind of intersects a little bit. But the foundation of the MSCA and the Marie Skoloska Curie actions are that it's supposed to have mobility for young researchers working across Europe, going all over the place, doing amazing stuff. And of course, that all got
00:03:17
Speaker
incredibly cut off during the pandemic. So all of us were supposed to have done secondment positions at different universities across Europe, and none of it really happened. We're all kind of like stuck in our home countries, our host countries. And so now I'm finally able to technically I am though I am in Belgium, I'm based at the University of Groningen in the Northern Netherlands, because that's my secondment institution. So
00:03:44
Speaker
I am currently on secondment there, at least on paper, to make the European Commission project manager happy. I hope she doesn't leave the podcast. Is that position related to the actual PhD, or is it kind of like a parallel thing?
Challenges and Opportunities in Academia
00:04:01
Speaker
It's actually the reason I have the PhD. They are the same thing.
00:04:06
Speaker
Basically the deliverable of this job position is my PhD. So it's a job I'm hired as I'm in the UK on a work visa, which makes things a little difficult because I can't extend that. Whereas students can have arguments for extensions because of COVID, but I can't.
00:04:27
Speaker
So I'm really locked into my deadlines. But on the other hand, it means I get paid. So that's nice. Yeah, so we were all hired as researchers. These were advertised as jobs. And we get to do our work, which is wonderful. So in that sense, the PhD is fully funded because you're being paid to do the work. Yeah, the PhD is fully funded. We also have research budgets.
00:04:56
Speaker
kind of like insane like coming from the U.S. and Canada systems where because I did my undergraduate at the University of Toronto and my master's work at UMass Boston. So I'm very firmly sorry. So did my friend Jocelyn. She just oh Jocelyn Lee. Yeah. Yeah. We know each other. We worked together on several things.
The Sea Changes Network and Research Focus
00:05:18
Speaker
We're in. Yeah. She came in
00:05:21
Speaker
the year, her first year was my last year, but like overlapped and we know each other. Yeah, we're in the same cohort now at Stanford, so that's wild. Yeah. Full circle. So cool. That's crazy. Yeah, Dawson's great. Amazing. So yeah, I coming from like the US, having this experience with like, archaeology is not funded. Who are you talking about? Like, who are you, crazy?
00:05:48
Speaker
Um, or like having, you know, basically what you can get is like a stipend from your university. And then maybe if you're, if your PI is like super famous, you get an NSF grant. And those are like the big deals, like a winner. Like those are, you know, you have to try real hard, which of course not to say.
00:06:06
Speaker
that my supervisors didn't try really hard. So the network I'm part of is called Sea Changes, and we're all working on, as you might guess from the name, marine and some freshwater mammals and fish and also turtles, looking at human environment interaction using a bunch of species as models. So we have people
00:06:30
Speaker
who are like the really cool thing is we have people who are not archaeologists working on this. We have ecologists and conservation people, biologists, ecologists, and then like me, I'm just an archaeologist who likes bones. I somehow like convince people to hire me.
00:06:51
Speaker
It's really cool because our project kind of intersects me and my colleague, Katrin Dierks, who is Belgian and is also here in Belgium, but at her parents' house. She's working on flat fish. We're both based in York and we have like a shared like pilot study site and stuff like that. Whereas other people are working on sea turtles and walruses and sperm whale teeth for scrimshaws. And we're doing ancient DNA work and stabilized to work.
00:07:22
Speaker
Zooms and all sorts of cool stuff. So it's like this massive, amazing, interconnecting network of funded positions with salaries and like research budgets and travel budgets that just, there's no framework like it in the US. And so the European Union, I'm literally down the street from European parliament right now and I'm just gonna be like, hey, I love you.
00:07:47
Speaker
Like if I look down the screen I can see it. Like, hello, thank you for the money. My wallet loves you. Loves you so much. Maybe get a wallet that has a little heart and you in it. Yeah, basically.
00:08:02
Speaker
I'm wondering if you could talk a little about the process of how you found this specific job position after graduating from your master's and what that was like. Sure. Twitter. Wow. I love social media. Yeah, Twitter. So I'm very active on Twitter, at archaeolas on Twitter.
Educational Pathways: From York to UMass Boston
00:08:25
Speaker
perhaps too active. And one of the ways I found out about it was, I mean, I'd heard a lot of chatter about it in the Zuark world because it was like a big deal. Very not often funded Zuark things. And I had seen it on like one of the couple of listservs and on Twitter.
00:08:46
Speaker
And then I saw, so my supervisor, David Orton, he is also a Twitter friend of mine. And I've been friends with him on Twitter longer than he's been my supervisor. Um, and the same with my other supervisors. So both my supervisors follow me on Twitter. So David had posted about it and I had actually, I was originally supposed to do my masters at York, um, in, in England because I, they have, you know, as the archeology masters, I was going to go do that and then maybe get folded into a PhD after that.
00:09:16
Speaker
I was going to work on David's rat project. That was the thing I was going to do. But then my father got lung cancer and very rapidly declined. And I had gotten into UMass Boston. I'm from Massachusetts. I was living there with my dad. And I, for a variety of reasons, needed to stay. And so I declined the York offer and went to UMass. Had a wonderful time.
00:09:45
Speaker
Unfortunately, my dad, the spiteful man he was, I had a complicated relationship with him. But spiteful man he was died just before my program started. So I could have gone. But it's it's you're like,
00:10:00
Speaker
You're like, you don't want to laugh, but it's very funny. Nothing is not a sense of timing. But if I didn't do my two-year master's at UMass, I never would have been right at a great position to apply for this PhD. So basically, like I said, they were advertised. One great place to look at if people are interested in looking at these types of European-based funded opportunities
00:10:30
Speaker
is EU access. It basically it's just like a website. You can also look on like literally find a PhD, which sounds like it's not legit, but it is. And yeah, it they because a lot of these are required to be publicly shared and published and you have to share them while like widely
00:10:50
Speaker
Um, you can't just have kind of like internal candidates, like some places, but yeah. So, and basically from there, it's just kind of contacting the supervisors. Usually there are networks of like 11 to 16 to even 20 PhDs. And they all might be on very different things. I.
Research Spotlight: Decline of Atlantic Salmon
00:11:12
Speaker
Some of them, so when I was looking at this one, you know, I immediately ruled out some of them because I was like, I have never looked at DNA in my life, let alone know how to interpret it. So that's not, um, I did put in, it's funny. I put in like, cause we, they asked us to put in like little like interest things first. And then, you know, it wasn't like the full like application.
00:11:34
Speaker
And I put in for a couple of them, and I like, very desperately, because I really wanted to do the cod one, which my friend Lulu is doing, and like, but it's DNA, and I was just like, I said something like nonsense about like,
00:11:48
Speaker
Like an amateur's eye could help the blah-blah-blah. If it was like, yeah, no. They just laughed and were like, no. But yeah, so I had applied for a couple different PhDs within the network. And I was offered the one
00:12:12
Speaker
that I currently am on, which is on Atlantic salmon. So that's what my PhD is about. It is about tracking declines in exploitation of Atlantic salmon during the medieval period based around the North Sea basin area. So that's my whole project. That's awesome. That's so cool. I love salmon.
00:12:35
Speaker
I do too, although the more I research into salmon fishing and farming, the less I love salmon. Like wild salmon? Great. Farms? Not so much. Yeah. I've also been looking into microplastics a lot lately too, which is making me like ocean food a little less. Go vegan. Yeah. I'm sure there's microplastics in our vegetables too at this point. Oh, yeah.
00:13:02
Speaker
Yeah, so that's awesome. That's really cool. It's crazy how everything's so connected. Because our friend Theo was working with, what was his name in the Zuark department? David Orton. Yeah, I think she was working with him on his fish project while we were there. Oh, on the rat project?
00:13:23
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah, the rat. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So not fish. I was like, David hasn't done fit. Well, he did do cod. That was another another possibility. Yeah, I remember her talking about her tedious days in the lab, like sorting out bones. And yeah, sounds awesome. Crazy. All connected. That sounds really cool, though.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, also like every Zork like knows each other. Because although there's like, so it's funny, there's so many new people because there are now people who are doing like, like at York like programs that are, you know, specifically targeted towards it and Sheffield, which same Sheffield archaeology, that's my political statement there in Sheffield. Um,
00:14:08
Speaker
If listeners are not aware, Sheffield Archaeology at the Department just got basically like a super whiplash decision to basically be defunded and made redundant. It hasn't been fully decided yet, but they have one of the, first of all, best archaeology programs in the world, and then also specifically Zoo Archaeology. They have a fantastic program.
00:14:34
Speaker
But yeah, like places like Sheffield and York, which have kind of, you know, masters that are, um, you know, just zookeology that wasn't happening five years ago, 10 years ago. So now you just have this plethora of people who are zookeologists and it's, it's amazing. Um, whereas before people kind of stumbled into it, like, like even I kind of stumbled into it. I like.
00:14:59
Speaker
I was doing paleolithic, like, lithics work in archaeology in my undergrad and then in my last year I took a zuark course and I was like, well, this is my life now.
00:15:11
Speaker
But before that, it was kind of just like, I had a crazy old supervisor who had some bones in his closet, and now I'm a zoologist. Like that, that was kind of like the pathway. During the quarantine, were you able to, were you in York or were you in...?
Impact of COVID-19 on PhD Journey
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah, so during the lockdowns, I had been in York. I moved to York in September of 2019 with an auspicious start on the last Thomas Cook flight out of New York.
00:15:41
Speaker
Oh, my god, this book is a was an airline and an airline company in the UK, very famous for like cheap airline cheap tickets, packages, it had been going for like hundreds of years, and they like folded over a weekend. They declared bankruptcy on a Sunday at like 8pm.
00:16:02
Speaker
and I was supposed to be on a plane. So I was waiting at JFK and then we were all waiting and we couldn't check in and the people at the Thomas Cook check-in area were confused about what was going on. They were like, we've just been told we can't check you in. We're waiting. We're sorry. Hold on a few minutes. We'd been waiting there for an hour and a half.
00:16:22
Speaker
And finally people from the British Embassy showed up because it was mostly British people returning. They didn't care about me. They cared about the time I was going into Manchester. So there was a lot of Scots who were returning and they were just like,
00:16:37
Speaker
they came in this like very efficient British woman, like was just like, we're going to get you all home. I was like, what is happening? Like, I felt like a terrorist attack had happened. Like, I was like, I like looked on Twitter and it was like Thomas Cook to Claire's background. Like, Oh, cool. That makes sense. How am I gonna get to England? How did you get to England? Yeah, it had been like, super scramble last minute to get there because my program was starting on October 1.
00:17:07
Speaker
my I defended my master thesis on September 12. And although it was kind of funny, because at that point, like, they obviously I worked extremely hard on my master's. And you know, it was a lot of work, but they couldn't really say like, No, you don't pass. Because I was like,
00:17:28
Speaker
on a plane to go to a PhD, which they had already started bragging about. Like, by the way, we're actually not gonna do this for you. And like, oh, because it looked very good to like, they were talking to like, you know, the wider school and they were saying, Look, we've produced, you know, people who are going to PhDs. And it was
00:17:48
Speaker
Melissa, my friend who was going to St. Louis and I was going to England and they were like all this stuff. And I'm like, you really can't tell us we can't. We've already been accepted. Like what's going to happen if you don't pass us? Yeah. Use us for clout.
00:18:04
Speaker
First of all, how dare you think about not passing? Yeah, but it was it was really funny because one of my committee members had read the wrong version of my thesis. So my entire like pop back afterwards, which like we had like so at UMass, we have like a presentation, which is supposed to be like 20 minutes. I went for like 35 because why not? I had a lot to say. And then then you have like a public comment in question period and then
00:18:34
Speaker
you go in another room and they chat about you and then you come back and you chat together, you go away and they chat again. And then they're like, hey, you did it. Or they're like, you suck. But I came in to talk with my committee.
A Thesis Defense Story: Humorous Blunders
00:18:51
Speaker
And like, I found out that one of them who shall not be named, but like, most people can probably guess who it is that they knew who was on my committee, had printed out the wrong version.
00:19:00
Speaker
And was like, well, I have some questions about there's sections that don't seem to be complete, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, what, what happened? Like, what did I, did I forget stuff? And then I noticed that the version he had, all of the figures, because I had done this on purpose, all of the figures were photos of cats and dogs. So I had done that on purpose so that like,
00:19:23
Speaker
if he who I thought would do that had done what he I thought he would do and just print out a random version it would be obvious but apparently that was not enough and so it was like one of my committee members just looked at him like utter disgust it was like I cannot believe you oh my god
00:19:44
Speaker
I would love to see those pages. If you could screenshot some of them, that would be great. That would be so fun to post. It was like my grandmother's cat and my dog. This isn't the one that you're supposed to be reading. But the thing is, they had the right figure.
00:20:04
Speaker
description. So it was like, figure one shows a comparative analysis of blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like a cute. That is a comparison comparative analysis. Yes. Yeah. I don't know what of but certainly not this. Yeah. So like that was like the hectic environment that led to me like coming to the UK. And then I got to the UK. I was like starting everything was great. It's going well. I had been back in January to like visit people.
00:20:33
Speaker
And then March, my partner would come to visit in mid-March of 2020. So we'd all been hearing this news, like, oh, there's this coronavirus thing kind of going on. Who is she? Yeah, who is she? We don't know. And then my partner was leaving on March 16th, I think. And that was when the UK was making their decisions about shutting down airports.
00:20:59
Speaker
And so kind of we were just like, okay, you need to leave. So he left and then the next week I still have like a smug satisfaction that I like took all of my stuff home because I got all my stuff and I left and everyone in my lab was like, what are you doing?
00:21:19
Speaker
March 18, like your computer home. And I was like, because I don't think we're going to be back for a while. They were like, I think that's a little, a little alarmist Liz, you're going to be catastrophizing a little bit. And then on March 19, I was like, hey, bucko, you need to leave now.
00:21:42
Speaker
Look who catastrophized it in the end. That's how my situation was too, because I was living in Cambodia right when the pandemic hit. And people in Southeast Asia obviously were freaking out because they could see what was happening.
00:21:58
Speaker
And then I was there on a research grant and the research grant people were like, no, it's fine. Like to stay there. You're at like a level zero risk right now. And I was like, no, you don't understand. It's like getting bad. And so they didn't allow me to fly home, but I did anyway. And then five days after I got home, they called everyone to come home. And I was like, I told you you did. What did I say? What did I say? It's like, we know better because we're like on the ground. We can like see what's happening.
00:22:28
Speaker
Yeah, it just like everything went from like, like I had like, five, five, six months to like make friends. And then boom, pandemic. And I was in York. So I've been I've been in York the whole time. This is the first time I've left England, because I'm currently in Belgium, I up until May, I hadn't actually left the city limits of York.
00:22:53
Speaker
In May, I took myself to a little cottage in the Yorkshire moors and locked myself away. That sounds so nice though. It was very nice. It was a nice writing retreat. But yeah, I was in York the whole time. I couldn't go into the lab. So I was supposed to have in spring and summer of 2020, I was supposed to have gotten all of my laboratory training done and all of my data collection. None of that happened.
00:23:19
Speaker
And so I was not like approved. I couldn't go into the lab. So I didn't get back into bio arc, which is our, um, our lab area until August of 2020. So from March to August, I was just at home and I had whatever I had with me. And it was not a great time because like many people fell into a deep depression.
00:23:46
Speaker
Um, was, there was a lot of contributing factors, but like pandemic was the big one. And it was, yeah, it was like, I recently had to fill out this thing for, for our, um, for our grant manager being like talking about like our progress up to now. And, and obviously they were like, we want to know about how the pandemic has affected people. And there was another question, which was like,
00:24:10
Speaker
what issues have you had with your project aside from COVID? And I was like, I don't think I can separate any of them because anything- They're all related. Since March or honestly, February. Cause we were having issues like getting some in February. I was like, I cannot separate out the like, and like some of the way it was worded was like, now that the pandemic is over, I was like, it's not over. Very much not.
00:24:39
Speaker
I'm extremely fortunate that I'm fully vaccinated because I have preexisting health conditions. But my partner didn't have a vaccine, didn't have a dose up until last week. And I wasn't going to do anything that was going to put him in danger. I don't want to do anything that's going to put other people in danger. I've been following all the rules. I've been
00:25:01
Speaker
you know, following more than some of the rules in the UK because they've gone, it's gotten a bit lax at times. And people were just like schlepping across the country. And you know, then we had huge case rises. And I was like, well, I could have told you that I don't like saying I told you so because people are dying. But it's so it's just been like, unlike many have said,
00:25:25
Speaker
an under overwhelming time, but I have spent most of the time working on well, attempting to work on a massive review paper which has gotten more massive as the weeks go by.
00:25:44
Speaker
In a good way or bad way? It's definitely a good thing. It's just, I think, turned into a monster that neither of my supervisors knew it was going to turn into when they were like, we should do a review paper while you can't do any other work. And I was like, yeah, great.
00:26:04
Speaker
Now it's just huge. It's a book now, not just a paper. I mean, it's I just hit over a thousand. Well, I'm at 1200 sites reviewing data from and like, it's insane. I've never worked with a data set this big. I like want to cry all the time when I open up Excel.
00:26:27
Speaker
I have learned how to use R. As much as anyone ever learns how to use R, I use a ton of stuff and then cry. And then I'm really happy and I ride that high for like a week. I can relate so hard to that. I took my first R class last term. Most of it was just crying. And then I like made a map and I was like, oh, that's so cool. I'm never touching this again.
00:26:52
Speaker
Yeah, that like, elation when you make a map. And like, the worst part is not the worst part. And it's not his fault. David, my wonderful supervisor, he's just really good at R. He's very intuitively good at programming. So I don't think he always gets the like, when one of those of us who are dummies are like, look at me to map. And he's like, great.
00:27:18
Speaker
It's like, oh, if you would have done this, it would have been like two seconds. It's like, well, no. He's like, obviously like, no, good job. Just give me a bet on the back, please, please affirm me. And it was funny, because I was saying it to someone else who also who is like, unestablished bi, but also like,
00:27:37
Speaker
is very open about. She's like, I hate art. It's hard. And she was like, Yeah, it's like, hi, it's better than drugs. Good. Thank you.
00:27:50
Speaker
This is the mentorship we all need. I've never looked at R, never touched R, but I've just heard horror stories about it. And I'm okay without ever looking at it in my life. It's a great programming tool. Apparently, it's very useful to know how to do it. And I have gotten to a point now where I have found myself saying, Oh, I can do this easier in R.
00:28:19
Speaker
and then doing a thing and it was easier. So I've like crossed that part of that difficulty. There's still plenty of stuff that it's like, I don't freaking know what this is talking about. But it is obviously like, it's like learning a new language. Shocking. And we'll be right back after this break. And welcome back from the break. Something I've been curious about Liz is how did you get started in archaeology? What was your main interest that got you in?
00:28:48
Speaker
So I think one of the things that I, so I'd always been kind of interested in like history in general. I was like, you know, there was a post going around on Twitter a couple of days ago, which is like, all you kids who got this Egyptology book are all, you know, gay and into history. And I was like, true. It was, but yeah, I mean, you know, when I was a kid, I got all sorts of, you know, like ancient Greece and ancient Egypt books and, you know, all those stuff. I did really well in history, loved all of that.
00:29:17
Speaker
Um, and I, in high school actually, I, um, ended up, I had kind of a non-traditional end to my high school. I was in like an alternative school situation for, I had to repeat my final year, um, cause I had been sick.
How Did Liz Get Started in Archaeology?
00:29:32
Speaker
And so I had the opportunity to take like college courses at, at one of the local community colleges. So I ended up taking anthropology, like cultural anthropology and, and also like, um, I think one of them was like,
00:29:44
Speaker
quotidian life in the ancient Greek world or something. Um, and I really enjoyed them. I thought they were great. I was interested in kind of classic stuff, but also I really liked the anthropology. So, um, I decided at that point I wanted to, you know, either major or minor in anthropology of some kind, whether that be cultural anthropology or, or something different. Um, I kind of had, you know, some scattered ideas and thoughts, but I was also really interested in theater at the time.
00:30:13
Speaker
Um, so actually when I did my undergrad, the first place I did my undergraduate degree, I, um, I was there for about three months first and then, um, left because it was not a place for me. Um, it was Marist College, New York, and it, um, up the street from Vassar. Uh, so I could have been at Vassar, but I wasn't. Um, it's a formally, it's a Catholic university that is secular now, ostensibly.
00:30:43
Speaker
Um, and there are definitely some very good parts to it, but like when I got there and I found out that like the campus Democrats group was like two years old in like 2011, I was like, Oh, I don't think this is the place for me. Um, but yeah, it was some, but there I was majoring in, um, theatrical, uh, play in playwriting and in cultural anthropology. Like those are what I was studying, but I started,
00:31:10
Speaker
kind of becoming really interested in archaeology at the time. I was very active on tumblr and I was interested in anthropology and I was interested in like the anthropology. I was in there was a thriving anthropology and archaeology community on tumblr of all places and I kind of started to like you know talking with people and learning more things and I was like I really like archaeology because
00:31:39
Speaker
it means I don't have to go out and do ethnography and deal with a lot of people. So that was kind of like my, I was like, you mean I can deal with just bones or like just like stuff. And of course, there's way more complex things. Of course, you know, doing archaeology, we're also dealing with modern populations and descent communities and stuff like that. So clearly, my my views on the subject have evolved. But you know, when I was like,
00:32:10
Speaker
a little shitty 18-year-old, I was like, I don't want to deal with live people. Which is insane considering the fact that I do so much science education work and I love it. So many alive people. Yeah. So that's kind of how that happened. Then I was looking at a couple of different places for archaeology. And I also really wanted to get as far away from Boston as possible.
00:32:39
Speaker
it wakes up without going to California, because I just didn't really want to do that. No offense to California. So my little sister did that. So I couldn't like do that as well. Like I couldn't, I couldn't both be in California. Um, so I went to Toronto. Um, and I went to University of Toronto and I did my undergrad. Um, I got an honors bachelor's of arts in
00:33:04
Speaker
anthropology, but it was an archaeology specialist with a minor in sexual diversity studies. So that was my undergrad education journey, like how we got back there. I was going to ask them, how was it going from US to Canada and then back to US? But if you had majored in anthropology in Canada, because I thought it was going through, is archaeology and anthropology separated in Canada?
00:33:31
Speaker
No, it's the same. It's, it's, it's, it's North America still. So like the four field approach, like is very much, um, yeah, a thing. And like U of T has always been very like, cause it has a very old anthropology program. It's always been kind of like on the same wavelength as like Chicago and Stanford and, and Harvard and stuff in terms of like changes in the field. But yeah, it was anthropology. Although I found out actually that I could have switched to an archeological or archeological sciences BSC, but
00:34:00
Speaker
I didn't know that. I didn't have a very good undergrad advisor, so I didn't know because I was taking most like archeological science courses, but I just, I did take a smattering of, I did take a couple more anthropology focused courses because it was required for the degree because you, you couldn't just do archeology. You also had to have this balance, which I think is really good. And that's something that I do find that UK undergrads are missing.
00:34:28
Speaker
It's a thing and I teach UK undergrads and through my work I try to change that and there are definitely people who are trying to inflect more theoretical grounding and anthropology type stuff into the work, but they're also limited by the programs. So yeah, it's an interesting thing to have gone from undergrad in Canada, which honestly the really only difference between Boston and Toronto is like,
00:34:55
Speaker
the weather a bit and, you know, that there's not a lot of cultural, there's some cultural differences, they have better Indians, but like, that kind of, it's not like, you know, going to Siberia, it's not a big cultural difference. There's definitely more of a cultural difference between the US and the UK. Although I still find myself like, because Boston
00:35:23
Speaker
And growing up in Boston and being in New York quite a lot, I have like a very like Northeast upbringing, and that's like my cultural upbringing in the US. And now I live in the Northeast of England. And it's a very similar vibe in that, you know, like my family comes from like a history of kind of like working class Northeasterners. And a lot of people I'm surrounded with in the countryside in Yorkshire, same deal. So I get the politics of here, I get the
00:35:53
Speaker
the values and the cultural values of the area. So that hasn't been as much of a change, but there's definitely some insane things that English people do that I'm like, are you like this? Yeah, my next question was going to be about the integration of going from the US over to England.
00:36:17
Speaker
a little same little normal is having it kind of like having that like kind of bond with like this working class being in the Northeast and then being in England. Does that help like any? What's the word I'm looking for homesickness of any sort? I mean, it probably would if I experienced any homesickness for the US. Um, I don't. Yeah, well, not even that I don't really have a home in the US. So both my parents are
00:36:46
Speaker
all of my grandparents are dead. Um, most of my aunts and uncles are gone. It's kind of me and my sisters. Um, and they live California, Virginia and Massachusetts. So when I go visit, I have to like pick two states or like pick one. Um, and so I don't really have like a place to go back to, um, which is fine. Like people get kind of weepy about that, especially English people. They get very weepy about the idea that I'm not going home for Christmas. And I'm just like, it's not,
00:37:13
Speaker
a big deal, man. And I'm not into it. And I'm not Christian. And then they're like, what? They're like, ah, you're an atheist. And I'm like, no, I'm not. They just can't comprehend. That's not fair to all English people. But in York-specific,
00:37:36
Speaker
find it. So I'm not Jewish. My partner is and like I tried to find a Hanukkah card. I looked at every card store in York. Not a single one. Not a single one. So like, it's just it's so like, they're like, Oh, you're white and you're not Christian. What could you possibly be? An atheist. It's like no England. Did you meet your partner out there?
00:38:07
Speaker
No, so my partner is from Pennsylvania originally. We met in the States. We met in November of 2018. Yes, that seems right. He's been following you around as you hop. Yeah, so he's been in Boston for quite a while and we met on OkCupid. I met on Tinder, so I understand.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah, I like, I have no shame about dating apps. I was like, I had gone on like so many first dates before I met Dan, like, and I was just so sick of it. And I, to be fair, and I tell him this, like, I kind of just like was like, fuck it. And like, went on a date with him, like, he probably wasn't like, his profile wasn't the greatest. He knows that.
00:39:00
Speaker
But I'm really glad I did. And it gives us a lesson like ignore preconceived notions of whatever. Don't judge a book by its profile. Yeah. Don't judge a guy by his weird profile pictures. Although there were dogs in them, so I was like, OK, he's not terrible. Not all that. Yeah. So yeah. So he was living in Somerville in Massachusetts, and I was living down in Brockton, which if anyone is familiar,
00:39:29
Speaker
it's it's far away. But I was working in Cambridge at Harvard. So um, so like, I'd usually like after work, I'd like go hang out. Um, so that that wasn't that hard. Although it's really funny, because like, if anyone's familiar with Boston traffic, I always said I found out that the drive from his place to my place at
00:39:52
Speaker
like two in the morning was 37 minutes. But if it was any other time of day, it was like an hour to two hours. Oh my gosh. Traffic. Because Boston traffic is a nightmare. Oh no. It's like LA traffic. Yeah. See, except LA, it's like you're just like flat on a highway like and you could just like see everything. Boston is just like
Personal Life: Moving with a Partner
00:40:15
Speaker
you are losing your soul on 95.
00:40:19
Speaker
and just wish you had never been there. I was like, why am I doing this? Like, I had more breakdowns on like 93 South than like anywhere. I should make a diary to 93 South. Which will be, yeah, it'll be way too relevant for like anybody. Like, yeah, that stretch there.
00:40:41
Speaker
that's a good place to have breakdown of just crying in your car, stuck in traffic. So yeah. Make all your life choices on there. Yeah. Like, yes. Should I do this? Terrain that back in. Yes, we met in the States. We had been dating for like, a couple months, like six months when I applied for this job. And I was like, I'm not gonna get this. And then I was like, Oh, shit.
00:41:09
Speaker
like and it was weird because we were like oh crap like okay we've been dating for eight months that's like like that's it's not a year it's not like what what's happening so we we just kind of were like all right I guess we'll keep seeing how it goes and then we had started talking about him potentially coming and moving over here because he was doing a masters at the time at Johns Hopkins online and it was in
00:41:34
Speaker
applied engineering and he was not really happy with the program. Um, he would take in a couple of interesting courses, but it was just really not happy with it. Um, so he was interested in looking at some other things. And, um, he actually ended up, I was helping him like research, you know, stuff. And, um, he ended up applying and he's doing a master's at Sheffield in solar cell technology. Um, but that's like, and it's like exactly what he wanted to do. So it's funny cause people are like,
00:42:02
Speaker
Oh, did you just move to follow your girlfriend? And he's like, yeah, but this program is also like, exactly what I wanted. But yeah, we live together in York because like, still pandemic. So there was no reason for him to be in Sheffield. He can only go in like once a week. So he's, he is
00:42:30
Speaker
at, he's still in York right now working on, he's writing up his master's stuff now, which is so cool and so much going to save the world. Whereas like, I'm like, archaeology isn't doing shit. Let's go. I'm like, he's trying to improve the efficiency. He's trying to improve the efficiency of organic solar cells. And like, it's doing like, all sorts of cool spectroscopy stuff on perovskite solar cells. And I'm just like,
00:42:59
Speaker
I looked at a bone today. Hey, we are we are useful. We can make change. I go through that mental crisis very often. It's like, what am I contributing? Oh, so are you in your second year then of PhD? How long is it supposed to last for?
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm in my second year. Um, it is a 36 month appointment for my job and a three year PhD. So in the UK, the PhDs are three years. Because ostensibly, you've done all your coursework and your master's. Although I still find myself going, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. And I've taken a couple like, I took a couple like master's courses and a couple because I can I can just take them if I want to. And yeah, but like the ideas that we're supposed to just kind of like
00:43:54
Speaker
start, well, if you don't already have a project, you're supposed to be using the first year to like define your project, and then you start. Or if you're like me, they're like, you already have project go. And yeah, and then it's like, Oh, just kidding. Here's a pandemic. I just had my like 18 month review, which went
00:44:14
Speaker
Not great, but it is what it is. Things are going significantly better now. Yeah, and I have my next check-in in September, and then it'll be my final year. Does having a bad review impact anything, or is it just to see where you are and what you mean? No, no. It's not necessarily like it wasn't a progression point or anything.
00:44:42
Speaker
it's all complicated by the fact that like, because I have a contract and I'm a staff member, it's not like the usual kind of like student progression. But yeah, it was because, you know, I had not been doing as much work as I thought I was going to be able to do and I was still like really impacted by pandemic stuff. Yeah, and it was, so it was kind of like a jolt
00:45:12
Speaker
to my system and I've been, you know, really throwing myself into collecting, like the reason for this whole trip is collecting a bunch of salmon bones that I am going to be taking back to York and doing the archaeology by mass spectrometry analysis for species identification and confirmation on, and then also some which I'm going to be bringing back to do
00:45:38
Speaker
kind of a wider isotope analysis study on some of the bigger sites. So the major thing with salmon is that Atlantic salmon, they don't preserve very well in the record. And there's like, as many different opinions about why that is, as there are sew arcs. Like, some people are like, it's the fattiness of the bone, but there's other really fatty bones that like, are fine. Yeah.
00:46:06
Speaker
So, and then you'll have sites that have excellent preservation. Otherwise, like Copper Gate, which is in York, which is a site that, it's my major large site that I'm looking at. It has excellent preservation. All of the fish look great. Even the salmon look great, but there's just so few, like they're compactionally, Copper Gate has a ton of salmon. Supposedly it has like over 300. I've been only able to verify 280.
00:46:35
Speaker
And I think it's because some may have gone missing or are like in another box and I just didn't have time to really track all of them down. But for the most part, I'm working with sites that have like under 10 salmon bones or salmonids. I am working from the opinion and assumption that you cannot tell the difference between salmon and brown trout based just on morphological identification.
00:46:59
Speaker
there are people who disagree with that. And I'm basically doing my whole project, a component of my project is kind of narrowing down identification protocols. I originally was going to be having a section that was about geometric morphometrics analysis. So using photographs and using a bunch of statistical analysis to tell whether there are significant
00:47:25
Speaker
differences physically between features on vertebral sections of the salmon and trout. Unfortunately, that's the first thing we had to cut for my project because I was supposed to be sourcing 10 wild salmon and 10 wild trout last summer, and none of that happened. So we cut that, but I'm saving it for later. I might fold it into
00:47:55
Speaker
postdoc or something because like my rationale is, hey, you wanted me to do this in the first place, pay me to do it. My whole postdoc application. But yeah, so basically most sites have like one or two bones, maybe 10, maybe 20. And then there's some anomalous sites that have like 100 or 200, but they're super rare few and far between.
00:48:25
Speaker
Like I said earlier, I was talking about this review that I've been doing. It's a review of North Sea salmonid remains. Basically, I've reviewed about 230 archaeological sites that have salmonid remains present.
The Complexity of Identifying Salmon Bones
00:48:40
Speaker
When I say salmonid, I'm really only referring to salmon and trout. Grayling is one of the other salmonids, an arctic char, the other salmonids that you would find in the area. They're distinctive and you can ID them.
00:48:52
Speaker
those I kind of, I'm looking at undetermined salmonids. So 230 or so sites that have it, and I'm up to almost a thousand sites that don't have them. Of those 230 sites, the grand total of salmonid bones in all of Europe, in all of Western Europe, because this review covers Scotland, England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark,
00:49:18
Speaker
Norway and somewhere else. Maybe not. But it covers like this whole arc of the North Sea basin area. So within that whole arc of the area, there are 1600 some on it bones.
00:49:36
Speaker
which is insane. When you say review, how are you finding which places have these sites? Like, are you just going through papers and searching someone in or like, how does that work? A lot of it is going through papers and searching. But I have been very helped by the fact that so one of our project partners on the sea changes network is James Barrett, who formerly of Cambridge is now in Norway, I think.
00:50:01
Speaker
And he, over the past couple of years, has been working on this. It's not published yet, so I'm not officially doing this work. I am, but it's a survey of the North Seas, and it's basically he's gotten together a bunch of fishbone experts and animal bone experts from countries that are around the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Norwegian Sea.
00:50:26
Speaker
and basically asked them to do these big, and they've been working these big reviews of literature, pulling in sites that have fishbone remains and collecting them into a standardized spreadsheet framework. So in some countries that is easier. So in the Netherlands, oh my God, I love the Netherlands. Everything is so well
00:50:51
Speaker
organized everything's uploaded to the central database or if it isn't you can like email someone and find out like it's been super great Belgium less less so but there's only like three people who work on fish bones in Belgium so you can just email one of them England is a clusterfuck because uh even like the whole of the UK because there's two so there's very few English sites that had been put into this northern sea synthesis um review
00:51:22
Speaker
And then Scottish sites, there are quite a lot, but it's only the sites that Jen Harland has really been working on. So it's been scattered. So I've had to fill in a lot of blanks and especially England. So I've used two databases commissioned by Historic England. One was by Matilda Holmes, which is on southern fish bone or southern animal bone. And then I had to obviously extract fish bone information out of that. So that took quite a while. And then the other one is Albarilla and Pyrenee.
00:51:50
Speaker
which is on central England. And that one, I had to do the same thing of extracting fishbone information out of it. So those were less, they're organized, but less well organized than being able to just kind of like go through and, you know, highlight and copy and paste some information from the other ones. Recently, what I've been doing is finding sites to fill in the blanks, basically, because I'm missing a lot of Northern England, I'm missing a lot of France, I'm missing
00:52:16
Speaker
some of, because unfortunately the French sites, the only ones that have been uploaded to the NSS folders that I have access to are the Roman ones. I don't need Roman. Um, I need medieval. Um, so I've been doing a lot of my own searching through French fishbone reports and, um, just, you know, control F salmon, um, see if they're mentioned that I've got like,
00:52:44
Speaker
30 or 40 sites that I've manually gone through the, um, actually more than that, because I had to do it for a lot of English sites too, but like 30 or 40 or 50 sites that I've manually gone through and basically like recorded all of the fishbone information into the same type of spreadsheet. And a lot of this, I'm actually, I'm doing it in the same spreadsheet, like the standardized spreadsheet for the, for the Northern seed synthesis thing.
00:53:10
Speaker
so that eventually when I am like, I would like to publish a review with this technically unpublished review data, I can be like, I did things. I did the review. And now I'm part of it. You need to learn how to write a code that just automatically searches for these things. I'm sure there's ways. There's some I could do it with, but the problem is that so many of them are just tucked into PDFs
00:53:37
Speaker
or like photocopied instead of digitized. And they're mostly just digitized, hard copied. And everyone records their fish in different ways. Everyone does everything in different ways. Some people use different species names. Not the Latin species, but some people will be like, I'm just using common names. But common names are different. Depending on where you're at.
00:54:06
Speaker
thing. Yeah, I came over like one of them. I came across one of the most unhinged like methods I've ever seen the other day I sent like 14 Snapchat videos about it because I was just like, I cannot comprehend this. Like why would you do this? And like, at first I was like, was this because it was like punch card recorded because I've come across punch card recorded stuff, which obviously because you were punch card recording and
00:54:33
Speaker
you had to feed it in and use a program to read it, it comes out a bit wonky. No, this was in 1986. Excel had been invented. No excuse. It's just awful. It's plain news. How dare. I'm like, I bet this analyst is dead or retired, so I can't actually hear him coming for you. But if they're alive, in front of them, a strongly worded email.
00:55:03
Speaker
Snarky footnote. Dear you, you know who you are. Why? Why? No, I don't know. It's like, please does everyone use the scientific names that are listed? Go on Wikipedia if you don't know. There's ways to get this.
00:55:22
Speaker
Well, the problem is that there's like debate between a theologists and stuff. So I have learned this. So, um, my colleague Katrin, uh, who I mentioned earlier is working on flatfish. She's like a trained theologist and biologist. Um, she's like named a fish. Um, like, um, it's really cool. It's like some, I can't remember what it is, but, um, it's some kind of like maybe a chick lid. I'm not sure. Which like.
00:55:51
Speaker
Yes, it is. It is. I just googled it. It's it's protomelis crampus. She named it after the crampus. Like the like, um, like child eating like Christmas story, because they're because they eat children, they eat babies. Like the fish eat their babies. That's such a good name. Oh my god. So she named it. Yeah, so she named it protomelis crampus, and it's a petophages chiclet.
00:56:17
Speaker
Um, from like Malawi. Um, so I'm like hyping up her research. It's very cool. Um, if I think her master's research, um, or like earlier, but like I have learned from her the nightmare that it is about like fish taxonomy and like how people just don't agree about it. This is why there's so few fish specialists who are zoo arcs because fish are just horrible because no one can agree. Like the species, no one can agree. Like.
00:56:47
Speaker
any of it. Like, for even for salmonids, salmon is samosailar. Brown trout is samotruta. Some people decided, have called sea trout, which is a morph of brown trout that are anadromous, so they go out to the sea and come back. Some people call them by a different species name, but some people just call them samotruta. So like, there's like a bunch of
00:57:16
Speaker
disagreement. So another thing that complicates my like review collection is that I have to have a category for every single like reference to in the literature of like, so I have like columns that are just like Samo Salar, Samo CF Salar.
00:57:33
Speaker
samosalar slash samo truta, samo truta CF samo samosalar, samo truta fario, something, something. And I'm like, what the hell? Sounds like you're trying to like summon some demon or something. Yeah, and when I'm like, in our like melting and casting all of that data to try and like make it into a readable format, I have to include all of those as ID variables.
00:58:03
Speaker
I'm going to summon something. I don't know what. A giant salmon comes and just slaps me in the face. There's a gif that I use on Twitter quite often, and it's like a salmon jumping out of the water and slapping a guy in the face, and I'm like, this was my first PhD.
00:58:25
Speaker
We have so much good content for your Instagram. Oh yeah. Can't wait. We can animate you getting slapped by a salmon too, if you want. We'll just post your face on that. Have like a dramatic photo. Like, Oh no. That's a little, like a little thin. I love it. Amazing. Can't wait.
00:58:48
Speaker
All right. Well, I think it is time we wrap up. That was such a great conversation. And thank you so much, Liz, for joining us. I never knew I wanted to hear so much about salmon, but I'm glad I did. And that was super exciting. I'll say that a lot to me. And I think that I am very negative about the salmon, but I'm glad that I'm coming off. You make it very entertaining. I've learned a lot about salmon and how to, I'm going to put that on my TV, is entertaining about salmon.
00:59:16
Speaker
And how to summon Sammons as well. Can we use that in the next D&D game? Yeah. Oh, good idea. Oh, I've got an idea. Oh, I've got an idea for a character. Sammons. Yeah, we all have to summon some of those.
00:59:39
Speaker
We gotta draw it and make it come to life. Now what circle would that be in the druidic circles? Because they're like a circle of fish. Instead of casting fireball you can cast salmon ball and it's just a giant ball of salmon.
00:59:52
Speaker
Or they're like little sushis. And then when you're like in combat, you're just slapping somebody with the fish. Yes. You know, okay. Side note, in Brussels, they're obsessed with poke.
01:00:13
Speaker
I don't know. There are 40 pokes across the country. I'll say should be. Poke is amazing. It was like four years ago.
01:00:24
Speaker
I wonder if they're like Japanese run or Hawaiian run at all, or if it's just like random brussel people. Random brussel sprouts. I was looking for, I was on like Deliveroo, which is the delivery app here, and I was like looking for
01:00:44
Speaker
I was looking for specifically African restaurants, because I was like, oh, I want to have a Cameroonian restaurant or something. That would be really interesting, because there are a lot of people here who are from those areas of the world. And it was just like, poke, poke, poke, poke, poke. It was like, OK. I could get this back in Harvard Square in Cambridge. There's four poke restaurants.
01:01:08
Speaker
amazing. I wouldn't be complaining. Which poke place am I going to? And especially considering that I'm coming from like, the relatively food, okay, no, York is not a food desert, but it is like, it's a rough place. It's definitely gotten better in the last couple years. But like, there's a couple places, like, usually, I've got like a list of places that I go and like,
01:01:32
Speaker
That's kind of it. And then even going to Sheffield, there's so many more options.
01:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, like safety, like delivery. We would go to Leeds a lot for food stuff. Yeah, sushi. Yeah, I and that's like what's been killing me is like not being able to travel just like in the area. Yeah, like, I'd like to just like go to Leeds and have like dinner, go to Sheffield have like, you know, whatever, but we're just in York, which is great. Love York. It's you know, if I have to be stuck in a city. Great. I'm defended by needed evil walls if I need to be. It's good.
01:02:09
Speaker
But it is not the capital of England in terms of food. All right. Well, so now you're talking to Liz. Do you have any social media that you want to plug and any lasting? I guess. Yeah. So my Twitter is at archaeoliz. So A-R-C-H-A-E-O-L-I-Z.
01:02:37
Speaker
And I also have a Instagram under the same name, but I don't post on it as much. That I am not good at Instagram. But yeah, and then I think, just thank you. That's my parting thought. This has been a very nice way to spend a night. It's finally dark outside. Yeah, it's finally dark outside.
01:03:05
Speaker
especially because I've just been locked in this hotel room for multiple days. I hope you're able to get out. Getting judged by the concierge. They had just ordered fries and chocolate milk. And the concierge kind of laughed at me. Like, are you OK? I was like, oh, is that all you have to say? That's all I want.
01:03:31
Speaker
Don't judge me. What if I just wanted to supplement it? No. I'd do some fries. And this economy? Fries. Only fries. This economy? Fries. Alright, well thank you all so much. Thank you for coming and we'll see you or we'll talk to you all another time. Bye!
01:04:03
Speaker
The show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. 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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.