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A Discussion with Dr. Todd Surovell - Ep 107
540 Plays3 years ago
On this episode of A Life In Ruins podcast, David interviews his former advisor Dr. Todd Surovell. Todd served as an advisor to David and was a committee member for David and Connor‘s MA theses.
David begins interviewing Todd about what archaeology means to him, and a discussion of his early life. The conversation later turns into how Todd found his way into anthropology, and his work in graduate school.
And in the third segment, Todd and David discuss Clovis archaeology, Clovis and Folsom culture, and megafaunal extinctions. Todd also discusses what it means to be human.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/ruins/107
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- Instagram @Tsurovell
- Email: surovell@uwyo.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 107
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to, what is this, episode 107 of A Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm here with our guest, Todd Cereville. Connor is not here. He's currently in Colorado. Carlton is actually graduating right now, and Connor and I are flying out tomorrow to surprise him, so this will come out next week, and he doesn't know that yet.
Todd Suravel's Background and Research
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm here with Todd Surabell, professor and department head at the University of Wyoming anthropology department. He got his PhD from the University of Arizona in 2003. Todd was my advisor and a co-chair on my committee as well as Connors.
00:00:47
Speaker
If you guys think I'm smart, we did hear Todd. He also is cursed with big brain syndrome. Now I know that the kid really likes data, like a lot, does a lot of research on the peopling of the Americas, ethnoarcheological research in Mongolia, and his pastime is factually disproving preclovis with R and Excel and a lot of graphs.
00:01:05
Speaker
He's on multitudes of papers, which we can get into. He also has a dog named Callie, who is Strider's aunt or something like that. They're the same kind of dogs, but all right. So I'm gonna start this off differently.
The Puzzle of Archaeology
00:01:16
Speaker
I'll do like the regular interview here in a sec, but I want to ask you, I guess it's kind of deep, but what does archaeology mean to you? And you can like nerd out and rant. I didn't see that one coming, Dave. I can give you a few and warm you up with other questions. What does archaeology mean to me?
00:01:34
Speaker
It's a good puzzle. I mean, it's fascinating to pull something out of the ground that hasn't been touched for 10,000 years. The last person who touched it lived 500 generations ago. That's cool. It's fascinating to put yourself in a world that people lived in that's unimaginable. It's so different from the world you lived in where you had mammoths and ground sloths.
00:02:00
Speaker
People moving their home every week to imagine what that life is like. That part of, I think, putting yourself into the past is a pretty special and, I would say, romantic part of it. But what I love about it is it's a giant puzzle. The archaeological record is not kind. It only preserves certain things, and it preserves them poorly. It's disturbed. It's blurry. It's ugly.
00:02:30
Speaker
And yet we try to learn what we can from it and squeeze interesting information out of it. And it's a hell of a challenge. And I really like working on those puzzles.
Interpreting Archaeological Data
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah. That's a good way to put them in, especially when you look at like, let's see, like the data points of lithics scattered at a site and an excavation, like when they blow them up and you can turn them in 3d and whatnot. It's pretty cool stuff to look at. And then like refitting is like technically a puzzle in itself, but.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, just looking at the past with questions I think is...
00:03:01
Speaker
an interesting way to look at it, you know? I mean, lithics are a puzzle in and of themselves, you're right. It's like a 3D puzzle. And digging a site is a big puzzle, and we can collect data now better than we ever could. But I think more the kind of puzzle I'm talking about, if we're talking about lithics, for example. Yeah. This is maybe the least interesting, the least important part of people's lives in prehistory. And yet from our perspective, it's like the one thing that always gets through to the present. Sure. So we have to like,
00:03:30
Speaker
answer interesting questions about the human past from a rather mundane part of the human past. And those are really, really interesting problems to me.
From Zoology to Anthropology
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah. So like what kind of keeps you up at night when you're thinking about the past? Like what drives you to answer or ask questions?
00:03:49
Speaker
I think those are two different answers. What keeps me up at night are the, I would say maybe the political nature of the field that is not kind sometimes. It doesn't sit well with a person who's not, who's maybe prone to depressive thoughts. I know that game. But in terms of the big questions that drive me, I mean, fundamentally, I'm interested in why people do what they do.
00:04:13
Speaker
no matter where and when they lived. But, you know, I'm a little bit obsessive about the first people in the new world. Yeah. And everything surrounding their culture history and their ways of life, because that's devoted a lot of my intellectual efforts. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's get to that later on in the show. And I'm going to do like the regular here. I think you're an East Coast kid, right?
00:04:44
Speaker
I am. I'm a Virginian. Virginian, like DC area. That's right. Okay. I know Alex talks about that all the time and that provided me. So I know I was like a weird ass kid. Like I liked bugs and like picking up frogs and like looking at dead squirrels and stuff, but like what kind of kid were you?
Influence of Ornithology on Archaeology
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, also a weird ass kid. I mean, I developed an obsession with bird watching.
00:05:10
Speaker
I became a hell of a good amateur ornithologist. I used to sit at the window in my mom's house watching the birds come to the feeder and recording which birds showed up. I kept a life list. I thought I was going to be a zoologist and an ornithologist.
00:05:30
Speaker
was kind of ahead in math. My father brought us a Texas Instruments home computer sometime in the early 80s, and my brother and I taught ourselves how to program. But I wasn't entirely weird. I mean, I did sports, too. I liked the outside of running around and playing basketball and baseball. That's right. I forgot you were a baseball guy.
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, you do your own stats on baseball, right? I think that's a thing where you did. Not on baseball. I mean, I'm very familiar with baseball stats and saber metrics. Okay. In fact, I often see baseball as a metaphor for archaeology, at least the world I live in. How so?
00:06:09
Speaker
Did you see the movie Moneyball? I just went with Jonah Hill. I haven't seen that yet. Yeah, I've watched the movie several times and read the book. But basically, the gist of that movie and that movement in baseball was that baseball fundamentally misunderstood the game. And a couple of teams hired some nerds to analyze how you really win games and how you really evaluate players. And once they started looking at it systematically in a scientific way, the game changed completely.
00:06:37
Speaker
And I kind of feel like in archaeology, particularly in certain segments of archaeology, we have the way of doing things and the old way of doing things that's rather not scientific nor quantitative, and that eventually the nerds will take the day, at least that's what I want to believe, which ultimately is what happens.
00:07:00
Speaker
in that movie and in that book. Okay. It's on my list. I'll have to
Graduate School at University of Arizona
00:07:04
Speaker
check it out. Sweet. So all that being said, you went to undergrad. Was it for zoology at first? Or did you just do anthropology? For zoology. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And where'd you do that? At the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
00:07:20
Speaker
Okay. What took you there from Virginia? My father recommended it. He said you should, you should go at least a day's drive away from home. Um, every time I was looking for a place with a good zoology department and a place that had a crew team, cause I, I rode in high school.
00:07:36
Speaker
Madison met all those three criteria. I applied to several places, including Strangie, Colorado State. Anyway, I landed in Madison and I had a great time there. And I studied zoology. I ended up doing research in zoology with a classic ethologist animal behavior guy named Jack Heilman. And I did a study of black-capped chickadees, where I'd go out in the woods in Wisconsin and
00:07:59
Speaker
And all these birds have been banded, they've been trapped and banded too. I could identify individuals and he asked me to try to answer the question of whether
00:08:07
Speaker
the wintertime they'd already formed mating pairs because in the spring they mate. So I was recording who showed up with who at these feeder traps and it turns out they had formed mating pairs. Anyway, it was pretty interesting because I got to know individual birds and their tendencies and I'd get up at five in the morning and sit in the snow and watch these birds. Yeah. Anthropology was an afterthought. I took the intro to anthropology honestly because back in those days when we actually printed
00:08:33
Speaker
course catalogs, I'd flip through it, right? Which I always found to be like, a very eye opening experience because there were classes and literally everything in a school with 45,000 students and like, every department imaginable, right? There's like all this stuff, you know, nothing about and I see anthropology. I'm like, what the hell is that? I have no idea. I think I'll take that. Yeah. I know that's a common story that you guys hear, right? Pretty much.
00:08:57
Speaker
Yeah, everyone kind of stumbles into it. And then it has all the interests that they've had like into one place. So it's interesting you went for zoology because like at Wyoming, we kind of look at people zoologically. And I think that's kind of where like your research goes. And like, for me at least, like I think of humans on the landscape.
00:09:17
Speaker
like, occupying it and using it like it, you know, a zoological being. Is that kind of what led you to anthropology? Well, one, I completely agree with you, David. You know, I went to school to study animal behavior, and I think I still do. Just the animals are long dead and are bipedal primates.
00:09:34
Speaker
Some people find that idea very offensive. I don't. I see humans as part of the animal kingdom. Fundamentally animals, fundamentally behave by the same rules as other animals do. Certainly humans are unique in some ways.
00:09:48
Speaker
But we can say that literally about any species, right? So I don't really put us on a pedestal. So yeah, I totally agree with you. Honestly, I don't know what drew me to anthropology. When I took
Choosing Anthropology at Wisconsin
00:10:01
Speaker
101, which is a four field course, my TA advertised at field school. And I went to a field school in Western Wisconsin. It was like a Mississippian era.
00:10:11
Speaker
Pit House Village. I was only there for 10 days. I didn't have a great time. That's not common. Not common, no. But then I kind of forced myself onto a project with Doug Price who was studying the transition from the Neolithic to the Mesolithic in southern Denmark and I found myself
00:10:29
Speaker
in Denmark, digging up the coolest stuff. Yeah, both Neolithic, latest Neolithic and early Mesolithic context in Denmark, right? Living on the North Sea. I did that for two summers. And I think it was that experience that hooked me that like, being outside, digging up old stuff, being with young people, laughing, and kind of the combination of the physical labor and intellectual exercise.
00:10:57
Speaker
was very attractive to me. And the other piece of the puzzle was that I took a senior seminar at the University of Wisconsin, which used to be a requirement, probably still is, which is a topical seminar, you know, you don't get to choose what it is, it's just whatever it is that you're in the peopling of the Americas.
00:11:14
Speaker
And it was like, and that was like the first time I had seriously taken a deep dive into a subject. And I felt like I had developed some subject expertise and I could start to see maybe, and when I look back on it, maybe in a very naive way, the opportunity to make real contributions at the edges of knowledge. It was those things combined that made me choose anthropology. But I have to admit, like at the end of my college career, I wasn't entirely sure which way I wanted to go. But you ended up going to Arizona.
00:11:44
Speaker
at some point for your master's and PhD? Yep, for both. Was the stuff in Denmark kind of what led you there? No. No, okay. No. I didn't have much advice on how to choose a graduate school. What made me apply to Arizona was that Vance Haynes was there.
00:12:01
Speaker
Through this class, I had been obviously introduced to Vance Haynes. It was like a rock star at the time. Obviously still is a rock star and always has been, but I applied there because Vance was there. Also, Doug Price at the time was like, look in the AAA guidebook, you'll find that everybody who has a job today went to Arizona, Michigan, Berkeley, or Chicago. I think those are the places I applied to. I was only accepted to Arizona.
00:12:29
Speaker
And the funny thing is, when I got to Arizona, I walked into Vance's office. I had gone there like over spring break to visit, you know, like a lot of grad students do, prospective grad students do. I walked into Vance's office and I was like, hey Vance, remember me? He's like, no. And I said, oh, I'm Todd. I'm here. I'm your new graduate student. I'm here to work with you. And Vance said, I'm retiring. You're going to work with Mary Steiner. Gotcha. That's funny.
00:12:58
Speaker
And as disappointed I was in that moment, it was like the best thing that ever happened to me. I mean, I wasn't trained by a paleo-Indian archaeologist. I mean, I was lucky enough to take a class or two from Vance and I still work with the guy. But I was trained by Mary Steiner and Steve Kuhn primarily who are paleolithic archaeologists and amazing people and amazing scientists.
00:13:22
Speaker
That was not my intention, but was it a good thing? Yeah, that's cool, man. I think you went like went to France and you went to Israel and stuff doing that kind of archaeology. I've never worked in France. Certainly I've visited paleolithic sites in France. Yeah, I worked in Israel with Mary and Steve for one season. Okay. Was that like Neanderthal stuff?
00:13:44
Speaker
I mostly worked at Hyeneme Cave, which was, which is Middle Paleolithic, at least what we were digging in. I mean, that site goes from the early Middle Paleolithic through the Byzantine with everything in between, including beautiful Natufian houses and Byzantine glass furnace and origination, early Upper Paleolithic. I mean, it's a cool site. We were down in the deep Middle Paleolithic, but then Steve,
00:14:07
Speaker
was working in a rock shelter nearby. That was epi-pale, I think, about, I mean, we were looking at a Cabarin occupation.
00:14:14
Speaker
I can't remember, but it's about 20,000 years old, about probably LGM-ish. All these little micro blades and little retouched bladelet projectile points and things. Cool. Yeah, it was good. Yeah. That sounds like it's like just casually saying that it was epi-paleolithic through Byzantine is like not something we do here. Pretty cool. It's not something you do there. Like we don't, like we have what? Woodland, Mississippi and then historic and then like, yeah.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, you got like Alexander the Great and the Mongols like taking over everything over there. We're going to wrap up segment one. We'll be right back with Dr. Todd Surivel. Welcome back to segment two of episode, what is it? 107 of a life endurance podcast. I'm here with my former advisor, Dr. Todd Surivel.
Dissertation on Lithic Technology
00:15:00
Speaker
And I guess we're going to talk about your dissertation and your PhD research. Seriously? I guess you could just give us like the elevator pitch of what it was. God, I didn't see that coming.
00:15:15
Speaker
That's the kind of thing I did 20 years ago and then put it aside and never touched it again. But yeah, I'd be happy to talk about it. Because this turned into your book, right? My first book, yeah. Okay. I just published another book, you know? Right. The Atari Art one. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So the dissertation. Well, look, I started working on a fulsome site called the Barcode Bulge. And the lithic assemblage there looked nothing like what
00:15:40
Speaker
I expect it for a fulsome assemblage or an early paleoindian assemblage. You know, if we're going to stereotype early paleoindian lithics, there's not many of them, slow density, dominated by lithic raw materials that have moved huge distances, tends to be sort of centered around bifacial technology, whether we're talking about big bifaces, thin bifaces, bifacial projectile points, et cetera. Barger Gulch was none of those things.
00:16:06
Speaker
Don't get me wrong, it had beautiful thin bi-faces, beautiful fulsome points, and non-local raw materials. But it was like 99.8% materials from within a kilometer away. It was mostly non-bi-facial reduction. The artifact densities were insane, like up to 4,000 artifacts per square meter. And really, I was trying to put that assemblage into context and understand how the hell does this happen in the paleo-indian period.
00:16:37
Speaker
That's not to say that that Barger is unique among paleo-Indian sites. There's other paleo-Indian sites like this, but it really got me thinking about why the stone tool assemblages vary from from site to site. And certainly a lot of people had done work on that before, but I think the
00:16:56
Speaker
the real difference between my work and prior work is that I was trying to develop sort of formal models of understand why lithic technology stone tools vary from place to place. So using kind of mathematical models in a human behavioral ecological framework to understand variation in stone tool technology. I can give you
00:17:16
Speaker
examples if you want a longer story here. I think a question I've always had for you that I think would be appropriate now. To me, Folsom and Clovis are different based on obviously their typological point. But as paleoindians, how similar are they in culture? Is it just the same thing? In terms of how they broke rocks, I think they're pretty much the same. We could talk about some differences that I don't think are very significant.
00:17:45
Speaker
like Clovis people in the southern part of the United States made a lot of blades. Nowhere else did they seem to do that and Folsom people don't seem to do that. Folsom people made prettier projectile points. Clovis people made bigger ones. But, you know, fundamentally I'm working on a Clovis site now and I see a lithic assemblage. There's nothing unusual about it that I haven't seen before after having looked at 45,000 pieces of Folsom chipstone or more.
00:18:13
Speaker
I mean, to me, the biggest difference between Clovis and Folsom is that Clovis was first. And being first affords you opportunities. For example, Clovis sites are full of mammoths. Yeah. Folsom sites are not. Clovis people undoubtedly walked among giant ground sloths and camels and horses. And it's not clear that Folsom people ever had that opportunity. I imagine they talked about it.
00:18:38
Speaker
because the memory of those animals was still alive and well in Folsom times. But between Clovis and Folsom, you have a massive extinction event of large animals. And yet, I feel like the basic life way of highly mogul hunter-gatherers lives on. Folsom people are still focusing their efforts on large game, although the largest ones that are left are at that time bison. Bison and tickless, right.
Comparing Clovis and Folsom Cultures
00:19:08
Speaker
And of course, another big difference is that you have Clovis peoples in Florida, California, Maine, Mexico, Washington State. You don't have Folsom people in any of those places. Folsom is like a Plains, Rocky Mountain thing and mostly like a Western Plains and Rocky Mountain thing. At least that's where most of the Folsom occurs. I mean, it has a bigger range if we're looking at the Folsom points, but like the really
00:19:34
Speaker
well-documented folsom sites and most of the folsom stuff comes in like right up against the Rocky Mountains in the western plains and like in the Rocky Mountains. Okay. So it's not a clear answer but I mean similar lifestyle but like all those animals are gone probably mostly gone. Yeah that's interesting I don't think we ever like established that on the show yet but so I won't bore you with asking more questions about your dissertation because I've had to talk about my thesis one time I'll vomit or one more time I'll say.
00:20:04
Speaker
So with you being interested in people in like the Rocky Mountain, like plains area and how they lived their daily lives based on like their tools and whatnot, what, or I guess I know what brought you to Mongolia to do that ethnoarch research, but like, can you speak to that and like why you were asking those questions? Sure. A lot of people go into ethnoarchaeology because they, they observe something in the archaeological record that they don't understand.
00:20:32
Speaker
And they see an opportunity to study living people, and they think they can maybe gain some insight into that phenomenon by seeing it happen in the real world. And that was certainly the case with me. I mean, for me, working on Barker Gulch, again, this incredible fulsome site, shallowly buried, we opened up these big areas where we got over 75,000 pieces of chipped stone. And the focus of our work there, mine and Nicole Wagesbach's work, was
00:21:00
Speaker
looking at the spatial distribution of human behavior through the spatial distribution of chipstone, and also the social organization of people. And when you're looking at all these incredible patterns in chipstone, I found, because I like math, and as you said, I'm kind of data obsessed and like analyzing data. Nothing makes me happier, in fact.
00:21:21
Speaker
Spatial patterns are just like jumping out at me, like all these interesting patterns and where bifacial thinning flakes are, where core reduction flakes are, where non-local raw materials are, and whatever. And here I can see houses in the spatial distribution of stone and heart features. But like trying to take all those spatial patterns and turn them back into interesting observations about human behavior in the past, I felt like we hadn't developed an understanding of theoretical models to translate
00:21:51
Speaker
patterns and stone tools on the ground to human behavior in the past. And this is sort of the classic kind of bent 48 middle range theory observation, right?
00:22:01
Speaker
We want to understand how human behavior in the system, living system, translates to spatial patterns in the archaeological record. Well, how do you do that? One way to do that is to go study living people who are still living in a nomadic lifestyle. And for me, I had some really simple questions about how do people use space in nomadic contexts and what
00:22:25
Speaker
what factors are sort of governing how people use space and how they make spatial decisions about where to do things that I really didn't have any good answers to. And no matter how much spatial ethno-archaeology I read, I wasn't finding the answers there. And I was like, I got to go find some people and go study this in the real world.
00:22:47
Speaker
And that's how I ended up in Mongolia. I mean, there's lots of places where I can study people using space, starting with my own house or my own place of work. But I really wanted to study people living a nomadic lifestyle on a temperate environment. And at the time, and even today, there aren't many places in the world to do that. Mongolia was kind of a place of convenience for me because I had friends and colleagues who had worked there politically
00:23:12
Speaker
It was easy to work. Paracractically, it was an easy place to work, like, you know, Russia, a little bit challenging. The stands, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, especially at the time, politically iffy, you know, so I got to Mongolia. So what you were doing, I guess I'll explain, was like, you had cameras strapped to the, I guess, big poles, like near camp.
00:23:36
Speaker
and you were just taking pictures of people occupying space throughout the day and mapping out where they most concentrated in the different seasons, right? Yeah, that was one. There were two major data collection efforts. That was one using a time-lapse camera that was just taking photos every three minutes to map the location of people from those photos. And it's not just mapping their location, right? It's like, who are they? How old are they? What's their gender? What are they doing? What equipment are they using?
00:24:03
Speaker
There's a huge amount of data in those photographs. And from that, you can start to understand what's governing how people are using exterior spaces. But those cameras are limited in what they can see, right? And a lot of activity in Mongolia, because it's a cold, cold place, happens inside. So for interior spaces, we were simply using a paper form. And we'd go into people's houses for 20 minutes and record what they were doing to try to understand what was governing
00:24:33
Speaker
how people use interior space as well. Yeah. And one of the things I remember in one of your lectures was that you recorded that somebody was like smoking and playing Candy Crush. And that was like part of the ethogram or something like that. Stuff like that. Like when I asked what keeps you up at night was like, I always wonder what the hell people were doing because it's freezing out like in Clovis times. Like what are they doing in their tents? Like to keep
Ethnoarchaeological Research in Mongolia
00:25:00
Speaker
occupied? I'm assuming like stories and
00:25:03
Speaker
Whittling. Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a terrific question. You know, one thing I noticed about Mongolia, living in Mongolia, it's not only like how I used my time when you take away the cell phone and the laptop and the television and the podcast. Like you got to fill your time, right?
00:25:25
Speaker
I tend to fill it in a much more productive way, taking notes and reading books or going for hikes or taking photos, doing things that are, you know, kind of... Outlets. Yeah, outlets that are better use of your time than scrolling through social media, right? And in Mongolia, you know, these folks living in tipis in the Sion Mountains in the middle of nowhere, they had televisions, they had satellite televisions.
00:25:53
Speaker
powered by batteries charged by solar panels. Those would come on in the evening. But they spent a lot more time doing things like crafts. And it reminded me of sort of classic Appalachian culture, and I have roots in Appalachia. And, you know, things like bluegrass and music and singing and the way that
00:26:14
Speaker
People used to spend a lot more of their time embroidery, making clothing, repairing things. There's plenty to do if you live in a world where you can't go to Walmart and just buy something that's replaceable or melt your brain in YouTube. And also consider in the Paleolithic,
00:26:37
Speaker
or in Clovis times or whatever. When the light goes out and you just have a fire, you're probably sleeping a lot more. You're probably going to bed. You don't have this long nightlife that we have today. When you're in camp, when you're not out doing things, not out foraging and gathering firewood, there's still plenty to do. Repairing shoes, repairing clothes.
00:27:00
Speaker
repairing weapons, making crafts. I often think about all that amazing craft work you see in the Upper Paleolithic of carving ivory and stuff, making beads. It's a lot of time and effort that goes into that stuff. But forging peoples of the past, I think, had a lot of downtime. They filled it with those kinds of things. Yeah. It's weird we don't see much of it here in the Americas, but I'm assuming it's just probably going to have epic looking elk
00:27:29
Speaker
you know, dresses or like jackets and stuff that are all bedazzled, but it's just rots away. So like, we can't see it, but we do find it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, certainly in the Clovis period, we don't have a lot of that stuff, but I mean, we, when we do have well-preserved sites, we do find it. There's a lot of beads. I mean, when I'm, when I'm working in the archaic, for example, shell beads are not hard to find. I found a nice partially drilled piece of steatite or soap stone or any site I was working in recently.
00:27:58
Speaker
At La Pral, we have a bone bead, bone needles. If you're working at mammoth and bison kills, obviously you're not going to find it. If you're working at sites where bones are not well preserved, organic matter is not well preserved, you're not going to find it.
00:28:13
Speaker
But I think there's plenty of it. I think the reason why it's maybe so abundant and upper Paleolithic of Europe is because you're looking at, you know, 35,000 years of time piled up in these caves where you have incredible preservation. That's true. Whereas in the Paleontian period, right, let's say in Wyoming, where it lasts longer than it does almost anywhere, you're only looking at about maybe 4,000 years of time, like one-tenth of what you have in Europe. And our sample was nothing compared to what they have.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, and they're spending most of that time exploring and figuring out the landscape and stuff. Interesting. Okay. I will say related to that, we just had a master's thesis defense by Molly Herron who was looking at all these tiny little pieces of bone from a prowl and she found evidence of ivory working from two hearth areas there. So they're doing something with ivory. We don't know what they're making. We have clear evidence of Clovis people working ivory at two different heart centered activity areas there.
00:29:10
Speaker
I saw she defended, I just didn't know what it was about, but that's awesome. And obviously they were painting or doing some kind of like staining or something with the ochre. Yeah. And ochre occurs in almost all of these domestic sites anyway. Yeah. Since I've been like messing around with that, am I, it just, it gets everywhere so I can see, I can see why it's all over that site. Yeah. Like it's, my arms are covered in it, but making handsprays and it's like, it's very messy.
00:29:37
Speaker
So I think I'll wrap it up, uh, this segment right here, but after this, I want to ask you just like everything about Clovis and paleoindians. So we'll be right back with Dr. Todd Suravel. Welcome back to episode 107 of a life nerds podcast. I'm your host, David Carlton and Connor are not here. Remember that you know that. So I'm here with Dr. Todd Suravel and the question that most of you guys are probably wondering and what I would love to pick Todd's brain about and have him say on air on the record. Uh,
00:30:06
Speaker
Well, first, can you take me through, like, Paleo-Indian history into the Americas? And what are your opinions on pre-clovis? And I will let you just sing. David, what do you mean by Paleo-Indian history in the
Paleo-Indian Migration Timeline
00:30:21
Speaker
Americas? You're talking about the history of the discipline or what? Or the history? Coming from Siberia into the Americas, like, what does that look like? What's their lifestyle?
00:30:32
Speaker
Well, people cross the Bering Land Bridge sometime between 15 and 14,000 years ago. They get into Alaska and sometime around, I would say, 13,400 to 14,000 years ago, probably closer to the younger end of that.
00:30:49
Speaker
They breached the continental ice sheets by some route or routes. And once they get into the contiguous United States, they spread through the remainder of North and South America very rapidly. That's a short answer, huh? Yeah. So they're coming in and the precon... Like I took a Peopling of the Americas seminar with Dave Anderson at UT and we read Meltzer's book. That was like our textbook and along with a bunch of articles. Which book?
00:31:18
Speaker
uh, first peoples in a new world. Okay. And I always thought they were just big game hunters, only hunting mammoths. Cause that's like, you know, what you see in the artwork and stuff, but like, I didn't realize the breadth of like their tool set and like the just sheer amount of stuff they were doing and how fast they were moving until grad school, like learning more about it through like the tools and, and things like that there, which I've always found fasting. So I guess, what are your opinions on all that?
00:31:46
Speaker
Well, the simple answer is we don't know. And I mean, nothing I've said today in my last answer is not controversial, right? Yeah. Especially whether we're talking about where they came from, the route by which they moved, the time they arrived, all of those things are debated. And if we're going to talk about their lifestyle, whether they were primarily big game hunters, whether they had a very diverse diet and
00:32:12
Speaker
You know, he used a wide range of plant and animal species, killed anything they encountered. All of those things continue to be questioned in their areas of research. If you ask me, you see evidence for a more diverse diet in Beringia, eastern Beringia, Alaska than you see in North America. North America, at least from the record we have, to me it suggests a pretty clear pattern of preferential targeting of the largest and rarest animals on the landscape.
00:32:41
Speaker
Not to say they exclusively use those things, but it's kind of strange, you know, on the Clovis record, the most common species in it is mammoth, which is, would have been one of the rarest animals around.
Clovis People's Diet and Mobility
00:32:53
Speaker
It's pretty clear to me they were not taking lagomorphs or, you know, rabbits and hares, at least not very often. It's pretty clear to me there was not much investment in the use of plant resources, and that's not to say they didn't use them. They almost certainly did.
00:33:07
Speaker
but they weren't intensively invested in it. They weren't intensively invested in small animals. Over and over again, we see a very clear pattern of preferential targeting of large animals. In terms of mobility, in the Clovis times, we see raw materials moving huge distances. We don't tend to see many intensive occupations, which suggests you have people moving frequently and over large distances.
00:33:32
Speaker
which, by the way, really only makes sense if you're hunting large animals. And you tend to see people appear everywhere instantaneously. When I mean instantaneously, I mean sort of within the dating era of radiocarbon dates, Clovis dates very tight in the narrow range across the entire continent, which suggests a rapid expansion of people across the continent. Or the Clovis wasn't first, and it's the spread of the technology.
00:33:59
Speaker
In your recent paper that came out, you're essentially like, if I remember the conclusion correctly, it's saying like, just at Clovis time, you see like pretty solid stratigraphy, pretty solid, like evidence of like occupation.
00:34:15
Speaker
But before that everything is just like scant and like you got like Paisley Caves with shit and you got Monteverde with like three organic tools or whatever. But yeah. But yeah, so like I'm a person and I think I get this from Dave who like tries to qualify and like in my position.
00:34:36
Speaker
And like, as a social media dude now, people are like, well, what do you think? And I don't want to just like be a dickhead and be like, God, it's not real. And then I don't want to be like, how do I say this? Like, I'd like to show both sides. You don't want to be close minded. Yeah. But I do swing like a certain way on a lot of topics.
00:34:57
Speaker
You don't want to be partisan, yeah. I don't want to be partisan either, although I assume everybody views me as a super partisan. We set out to test the hypothesis, and it was a very simple hypothesis. Well, the hypothesis is as close as first or not. And if it is, it has a very simple prediction. And if it's not, it has a different prediction.
00:35:21
Speaker
And the way we looked at this was stratigraphic integrity. So the basic idea is we're asking, when do you see a discrete archaeological occupation in the record? And what I mean by discrete is stratigraphically discrete. So I have an occupation with nothing above it and nothing below it, like a clear definable stratigraphic cultural unit.
00:35:41
Speaker
So if you think about laprel where you've worked, right? I mean, this shit has exploded 50 centimeters vertically, but there's nothing above it and there's nothing below it. It's still like this stratigraph of a discrete Clovis occupation where we can say, yeah, this is an event that shows that people were here, right?
00:35:58
Speaker
And the question is, when does that show up in the archaeological record? It's not a complicated question, right? And if Clovis is first, you expect to see it first in Clovis times. Clovis isn't first, you expect to see that before Clovis times. If Clovis is first, you expect to see it before Clovis in Alaska. So that was the basic idea. And in fact, this study was inspired by the observation that some of these recent pre-Clovis sites, like Coopers Ferry and Deborah Friedkin,
00:36:25
Speaker
and gold don't seem to have these stratigraphically discrete occupations. And the reason why that might be a problem is because there's multiple ways to get artifacts into old deposits, right? If I have 16,000-year-old sediments and artifacts in them, one way to get those things to co-occur is where people have lived there 16,000 years ago. Another way for that to happen is people to have lived there, say, 13,000 years ago, and then pocket gophers dig through a site and move artifacts into older deposits.
00:36:55
Speaker
Okay, so that's kind of the basic idea. So what we did was just compile data from about a dozen sites across North America and look at these patterns of stratigraphic integrity. And what we find is that the Beringian sites, the classic ones, and I'm not talking about bluefish caves, we can talk about that if you want. But sites like Swan Point, that's over 14,000 years old and Broken Mammoth,
00:37:22
Speaker
Poultsman South, Owl Ridge, oh, it's the last one, Dry Creek. What you have in these deep levels is these very beautifully definable occupation surfaces that are older than Clovis. They have chipstone, they have bone, they have hearth features, and you can define them clearly. When you get south of the ice sheets, you don't see anything like that until the Clovis period with a large number of artifacts and a stratigraphically discrete occupation.
00:37:50
Speaker
Lapprell wasn't even part of this study, but it has it. We use Shawnee Minisink, which is a beautifully preserved, intact, discrete Clovis occupation, but other Clovis sites have it too. Blackwater Jaw, Murray Springs, Laner, Naco, Miami. I shouldn't say Miami. I don't know that that's the case because the data aren't very good. But all of these classic Clovis sites have these very definable occupation services.
00:38:15
Speaker
When we look at Friedkin, Cooper's Ferry, Galt, they don't. And we can talk about other pre-clovis sites, Cactus Hill in Virginia, the same thing. We don't have a discrete identifiable pre-clovis layer, at least as far as I can tell. Madocraft, sufficient data haven't been published to even address that question, in my opinion. I'm sure Jim out of ASU would disagree.
00:38:38
Speaker
Monteverde, some people would say, definitely has that. And sure enough, if that's an archaeological site, it is stratigraphically discrete. And if it's that old, maybe Monteverde is the exception. But in my opinion, there are very few items in there that are clearly artifacts.
00:38:52
Speaker
So what you see very clearly, what our study shows is that, look, the archaeological record clearly shows humans are present in Alaska between 13.5 and 14.2. South of the ice sheets, it doesn't show that humans are clearly present until around 13,100 years ago.
00:39:12
Speaker
And again, we could go through all of these sites, like you mentioned Paisley, and go through all of them and kind of pick them apart. But that's not really what I want to do. What I want to do is, you know, use the scientific method, develop hypotheses that are testable to try to distinguish between these different possibilities. And repeatedly, when I've tried to do this, I always come to the same answer, which is it seems that Clovis is first, and if it's not first, it's damn close to first.
00:39:37
Speaker
And I think you and I have discussed this but like I like especially with the footprints coming out now and like there's a critique to that which we should probably talk about like another time but like if people were here before Clovis like it just seems like they were exploratory little bands of people like there's no
00:39:55
Speaker
Like you were just saying, there's no like concrete stuff. But when you see Clovis, it's just like big boom of culture, like across, like you were saying, like Maine to Mexico. Like it's pretty like distinct. And like, that's why I like that paper because it's just kind of shows the data for that. Yeah. I mean, I think what you're getting at is that the pre Clovis record is fundamentally different than the Clovis record, which some people would say, so what? It shouldn't be the same.
00:40:19
Speaker
But I mean, I would say the pre Clovis record is not only different than Clovis, but it's different from everything that follows Clovis and is different from everything that precedes Clovis in the old world. I mean, how many how many old world sites where do you have where you have footprints? You know, we can talk about Laetoli or whatever. Sure. But then like no other archaeological record at that time.
00:40:42
Speaker
Or not like an abundant archaeological record at the time at the time of the late totally footprints. How old are those? Well, that's, that's like, Lucy, right? Yeah, so we don't even have certain tools at that time. But we have to invoke something like that to make these footprints real, right? Like,
00:40:58
Speaker
People who are living a completely different lifestyle where they're not using stone tools, you know, where they're not leaving behind hearts and activity areas where they're not leaving behind stratigraphically discrete occupations and it's not just the footprints right i mean we have the footprints from.
00:41:17
Speaker
White Sands, we have the copper lights from Paisley Caves, which are associated with basically no material culture of very little. We have the footprints from Chuket Island. We have a footprint at Palauco in Chile. We have a pit full of crickets in the Great Basin. I mean, this is a weird archaeological record. This is weird, right?
00:41:39
Speaker
I mean, you have dug in lots of archaeological sites. I have dug in lots of archaeological sites from hunter-gatherers and later, right? And we know what archaeological sites seem to look like. They have chipped stone, a lot of flakes. They have heart features. They have spatial patterning. They have bison bone beds. I mean, those things occur from Clovis and tell them the late prehistoric, right?
00:42:02
Speaker
None of those in pre clothes you couldn't mistake a bison bone bed for something else human bodies right human body show up in the clothes period and persist to the modern day there's no human bodies in pre clothes pre clothes record is qualitatively and fundamentally a different thing why is that is that because pre clothes human behavior was different people will say like.
00:42:25
Speaker
People are living at really low population density, so the record should be sparse, harder to identify. I don't believe that. I don't think there's any reason to believe that, but that's the argument that's made.
First Culture in the Americas Hypothesis
00:42:36
Speaker
It's an argument that's made, but it's a very, very different record. And when you ask, when do you see clear, unambiguous evidence of humans, to me, you always get the same answer.
00:42:48
Speaker
Okay, that was very well said. Another question I have that is related and I find this interesting and I know there's like caveats to it with like climate and all that, but like overkill. People show up in the Americas and we could argue it's the impact or whatever if the impact's real megafauna go extinct. And like I could say to myself, yeah, okay. Like if there was an impact, humans didn't help it, climate didn't help it. But then also you think about Australia.
00:43:16
Speaker
as soon as people get there, all the megafauna disappear. And that's like 40,000 years ago. So like, it's just to me, it's like the evidence is kind of glaring for overkill, but there's so much critique to that. The circumstantial evidence is glaring, right? I mean, yeah, there's this correlation between human arrival and animal extinction. That's true in North America and Australia. It's also true in South America. It's also true in New Zealand. It's also true in the Pacific Islands.
00:43:44
Speaker
It's also true in temperate Europe. It's also true in Arctic Europe. It's also true in Arctic Asia. All right. You could determine human arrival.
00:43:56
Speaker
and anywhere on the planet without doing archaeology, you just have to look for an extinction, a wave of extinctions within the last 200,000 years, and it would signal human arrival. Now, if this was a question of, say, somebody is a serial killer, and every time they go to a town, 40-year-old dudes with mustaches die in large numbers,
00:44:27
Speaker
And if they don't go to a town, 40-year-old dudes with mustaches don't die, and they've gone to 50 towns, and we see this pattern happening over and over again, you wouldn't have any question about their guilt. But in the archaeological case, we do question whether humans are responsible for this. And I don't really see this as a new world phenomenon. I know that's your question. I see this as a global phenomenon and a human phenomenon.
00:44:55
Speaker
Now, in my mind, the reason why archaeologists are so hesitant to take this possibility seriously is because the evidence for it, the direct evidence, if you want to see, you know, the smoking gun, the gun with the fingerprints on it, the bloody knife with his fingerprints on it or whatever, the evidence is crap. I mean, in the Clovis period, we can show that people maybe hunted five of these extinct genera that suffered extinction.
00:45:22
Speaker
In Australia, we can maybe say that people interacted with Jenny Ornis, the giant flightless bird, and yet there was a massive extinction event that happened there.
00:45:30
Speaker
If humans drove these extinction events, they had to kill millions, literally millions of animals in the process. And the critics will say, where's the evidence? And it's actually, I think, a legitimate argument. It's a good question. But again, as I said when we started, the archaeological record is crappy, poorly preserved, and biased. We don't have big samples, especially from these time periods when extinctions happened. So we have to ask, is the record that we have truly
00:45:59
Speaker
falsifying the overkill hypothesis. And I don't think it is, but it's a really, really interesting, interesting problem. And yeah, Dave, I would agree like the circumstantial evidence that humans played a major role in this is pretty damning. But the direct evidence is pretty weak. Yeah, I could go on about that.
00:46:18
Speaker
Like I always wonder, like maybe dogs came in and gave everything rabies that would kill everything real fast. But that's the whole episode and there's no evidence for it. But we got to wrap up and I want to ask you, and I've kind of always wanted to ask you this, but never really had a good time.
What it Means to Be Human
00:46:32
Speaker
So last now, in your opinion, this is going to be tough to answer probably.
00:46:37
Speaker
What does it mean to be human as a zoologically interested anthropologist? God, I didn't see that coming either. I mean, I think the fundamental nature of being human is being a cultural being. And what I think being a cultural being means is that we're incredibly phenotypically plastic. And what that means is that our genes give us the ability to learn and to adapt
00:47:06
Speaker
and to take on many, many different cultural varieties, whether we're talking about the language we speak, or the form of a social economic organization, or whatever, our religion, our personalities.
00:47:21
Speaker
These things are very, very, very much detached from our genes, as opposed to a clam or a black cap chickadee that they certainly can learn, but to a much lesser extent that we can. So we respond to environmental stimuli, whether it's a natural environment, a social environment, or whatever. And it means that humans are capable of incredible
00:47:50
Speaker
incredible diversity in behavior and in culture that is unlike any other animal on the planet, although some animals are arguably getting close. Dogs are very phenotypically plastic as well, but nothing like humans and other higher primates. I think that's what it is, which raises a really, really interesting question, which is,
00:48:15
Speaker
You know, if that's the fundamental nature of being human is this sort of, our genes have coded us to be incredible learners and incredibly plastic and they can adjust our life way. And this is a really successful adaptation. Why is it so rare in nature? And it makes you, it makes me think that there are probably serious costs to this kind of lifestyle biologically, like it gives you the ability to up and make stupid decisions.
00:48:41
Speaker
something you and I are both very familiar with. Yeah. That's a great way to end it too. But I think that's a wonderful answer, dude. Like, I think we asked Spencer that the first episode. I think we asked Bob. It's a little biased because we only asked Wyoming people that I guess, but yeah, cool. So we're going to have to wrap it up now. I know you're not the biggest social media guy, but where can our listeners find you? Like academia or LinkedIn.
00:49:11
Speaker
I have an Instagram account that I don't care if you look at it or not. I have a Facebook account. I have a secret Twitter identity that's not hard to find. You know, just Google me. I'm everywhere. But yeah, I really don't like putting myself out there. I'm kind of an introvert, which is often misinterpreted, I think. But look, if anybody wants to talk to me, my phone number's online. My email's online.
00:49:40
Speaker
And I'm happy to talk. Sweet. Yeah, you take some great pictures on your Instagram. I always admired that. Actually, I think, yeah, I had called you one day and I asked you, how do I use a camera? You were like, is it mirrorless? And then you like broke it down for me. Okay. Before we end, are there a couple sources, like books, articles, videos that you'd recommend to anybody? That is a great question. I mean, Dave Meltzer's book, I think is the Bible.
00:50:07
Speaker
on New World Colonization, First Peoples in the New World. Dave and I have a lot of disagreements, but a guy is a hell of a scholar and a hell of a synthesizer. That's a really, really good book on the peopling of Americas.
00:50:21
Speaker
No, you know what I would recommend to all the young archaeologists out there is take some math, take some statistics, enjoy it and don't fear it. It can really open your eyes to a new way of understanding the world. That's a very you answer.
00:50:40
Speaker
But yes, I took a coding class from Todd and it was one of the most challenging classes I've ever taken because I can't understand numbers, but I saw the value in it. And if you guys also did that, like you'd probably have a really sweet career because coding seems to be behind everything. And my other friends who code for a living have 401ks and children. So they seem to be doing all right. Cool, man. All right. Before you go, I got to tell you one thing.
00:51:07
Speaker
I'm really proud of you guys for this. You are bringing archeology to the world. You're reaching far more people than I ever would by publishing in the Journal of Southwestern Wyoming, Middle Archaic and Scraper Technology. You're doing it in a really entertaining and thoughtful way. You're bringing positive attention to our program, that being the University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology.
00:51:37
Speaker
And yeah, I'm really impressed with everything you guys are doing and I hope you keep it up. I appreciate that, man. Yeah. I guess I might've mentioned this on the show before, but like before I left school, Wyoming, I got a beer with Todd and I was like, how the hell do I do? I guess what I'm doing now. And you were like, you just got to do it. Also my sister works in Hollywood. Here you go. But she just said to make a YouTube. So.
00:52:04
Speaker
I appreciate it, man. Yeah. We, uh, we have fun with the podcast. I didn't expect it to go this far. And like our network is just massive with it now, which has been pretty cool. Like we know a lot of people, so.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah, you're doing good things and you're bringing archaeology to the world. And I feel like, you know, one way to do that is to bring pseudoscience and crackpot crazy things, ancient alien style or whatever. Oh, but you guys are serious and you take on serious issues. I mean, you're also kind of jackasses and crack a lot of jokes, which I enjoy too. But I mean, ultimately the goal is to bring archaeology to a public audience. And I think you guys are doing a terrific job of that. Awesome. Well,
00:52:42
Speaker
I appreciate it. I'll pass it on to the guys, but I'm sure they'll hear it when they listen to the episode. So yeah, thanks, dude.
00:52:58
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer.
00:53:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster and 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.