Introduction to the Women in Archaeology Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to the Women in Archaeology Podcast, podcast about, for, and by women in the field.
Live from the 2018 Society for Historical Archaeology Meeting
00:00:12
Speaker
We're recording in New Orleans today, as several of us have been attending the 2018 Society for Historical Archaeology meeting. We'll be talking about some of the sessions we've attended and what we've learned over the past three days.
Conference Experiences Shared by April Bisaw and Jessica Irwin
00:00:28
Speaker
Joining me today are April Bisaw and Jessica Irwin, both women who've been guests on the show before. Thank you so much for taking time out of your conference schedule to be on the podcast. And it's always really exciting when I get to see people in real life rather than just over a computer screen. So to start off with, do you guys want to talk about some of the great sessions that you've attended or what's been really awesome and you've been happy to participate in?
00:00:55
Speaker
Sure, I'll go first. Generally, we're all kind of a little disenfranchised by what's happening politically in our country and what's happening to funding and
Advocacy Skills and Legislative Engagement
00:01:07
Speaker
positions. I attended this amazing session that was hosted by two different lobbyists who brought to us the skills that you need to actually kind of approach your legislators.
00:01:24
Speaker
they broke us out into small groups so that we could work with each other and kind of bounce different ideas off of one another about how to approach your legislature or what to say but then they also gave us these really fantastic tips about the etiquette and how to walk through it and who to ask for help and so that was really great and also the name of the session was fantastic which is if you're not on the table you're on the menu how to be an advocate for historical archaeology which i kind of think that's how a lot of us are feeling right now
00:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a phenomenal title. It was really good. And also, it was one of the few sessions that I felt like kind of gave me hope for the future that, you know, not all is lost in terms of federal funding and recognition of science and cultural heritage and, you know, cultural resource preservation. So that was a really great session. Awesome. April, what about you?
Exploring Power and Politics in Archaeology
00:02:19
Speaker
The first day was my busy day. I was a discussant in the post-industrial archaeology session. As part of my discussion comments, I pulled out some of the quotes from some of the presenters that I think summarize what we were talking about.
00:02:37
Speaker
in there which included things like archaeology and critical heritage will not solve the world's problems but it is a contribution and doing archaeology is actually a small part of doing archaeology and it's not about nostalgia it's about power and politics but also that archaeology can be part of the legacy of structural racism when certain paths are selected and therefore others are left out and then I
00:03:04
Speaker
presented on my research on contemporary Native American protests in a session on contested narratives that started with a protest camp paper from a German anti-nuclear protest camp. And he ended with an interesting quote that from the community that he works with that they said that they're not ready for their camp and them to be talked about.
00:03:30
Speaker
and brought to a museum because they're still in the middle of this anti-nuclear protest, right? That cause is not over.
Contemporary Archaeology and Living Communities
00:03:39
Speaker
And that goes back to something that I said in the post-industrial session that I'm a little
00:03:45
Speaker
worried about when we talk to people when we're doing contemporary archaeology and we tell them that we're doing archaeology, that to non-archaeologists, archaeology is about people who are dead and gone. And if you say, I'm doing the archaeology of you, we're kind of labeling people as doomed.
00:04:02
Speaker
and their places as doomed. So that's one of the things that I've been thinking about and playing with there. And then we had the tweet up after those two sessions on Thursday night. So that was my big day. And then I went to the SHA's Structural Racism Forum
00:04:24
Speaker
which was a discussion. There was also a workshop, an anti-racism workshop. I didn't go to that when I went to the structural racism forum. And it was great to see the diversity of people in the room of different identities. And it wasn't as productive as it could have been. It turned into more of an airing of grievances. But I think lots of people need to feel heard before we could move on.
00:04:50
Speaker
So hopefully that will be something that happens at future conferences, and then we could start moving towards solutions to things. And I was in another session where Michael Nisseni was a discussant. Then he just said something that I wanted to mention. He said that he's an old archaeologist, and he said that he's been around a long time. And he said that at this conference for the first time, he's heard the word collaboration more than he's heard the word archaeology.
The Role of Collaboration in Conferences
00:05:20
Speaker
So I think that goes back to what one of the presenters said in the session I was a discussant for, that archaeology is actually a small part of doing archaeology, the actual digging, the actual artifacts thing, at least for some of us. So those were some of the highlights of my conference. That brings up a really interesting point because one of the things that really stood out to me in another session
00:05:42
Speaker
which was the ACUA sponsored student session where they were talking about what different programs have to offer was that for a long time there has been this whole like, I go to this university so I do this and there might be students at another university who are interested in that but you're at that university so you can't come to my field school or you can't work in my lab and now they're for the first time is a really
00:06:06
Speaker
high interest in saying, yeah, you know what, like I'm going to send some students to you who are interested in since 16th century shipwrecks. Meanwhile, over here, we're working on 18th century shipwrecks. So you send some of your students over here and hey, Texas A&M, you have this amazing conservation lab and us up here at Rhode Island don't have access to those kind of resources. So, but we have this, you know, amazing
00:06:32
Speaker
Deep sea research Russell. So like let's like let our students Integrate and not be such kind of closed off clubs, which is really amazing because that's completely that's it That's a new thing. So yeah, and it's not just at universities. I was actually attended the Friday night evening function last night, which was really interesting and had a conversation with
Networking and Relationship Building at Conferences
00:06:56
Speaker
someone that I've never met before, who was a friend of a friend, and he was asking a lot of questions about, well, when you're at a conference, how do you break out of the group that you've been put into? I'm an underwater archeologist. I work in Latin America. I work in New England. I do gender studies. And when you are at a conference and you're talking to people, and one of the first things you ask at a conference is, well, what do you research? And you explain it to them,
00:07:25
Speaker
And you very often get, oh, well, have you met X? Or let me introduce you to Y. And they try and put you back into that group of people, into that box that they're kind of like the people who study this belong in this box. And that if you don't know any of those people, that's really useful to know those people. But it's also really useful to have conversations with people who work with different
00:07:51
Speaker
theoretical frameworks with different methodology in different parts of the world because some of the best collaborations that you can have are with people coming from very very different
00:08:06
Speaker
structural standpoints and different backgrounds. Because if the only people you ever talk to are the people who do the exact same thing as you do, you can end up in an echo chamber. And conferences are a place where you have people from all over the country, all over the world who study across, you know, thousands of years and all over the world. And there's this incredible opportunity to talk to people who may force you to think
00:08:32
Speaker
outside of the framework that you're comfortable thinking in. And I don't think that people always take advantage of that at conferences. And that it's just kind of like we need to do a better job even at conferences of just saying, you know, I study A, you study X. Most people would say that they seem to be worlds apart.
00:08:54
Speaker
Let's have a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think for me, that was one of the great things about a few of the other meetups. So I had, you know, now I do underwater, but I had a terrestrial reunion for one of the sites that I worked at.
00:09:10
Speaker
which had people that now are doing, you know, we all started at the same place, but now we're all doing completely different things. So it gave a nice kind of unique opportunity to like talk to people that I definitely wouldn't have talked to before. And also to be in a setting where the introductions aren't happening because, oh hey, like you do this and the other person does the same thing, like you guys should talk, the introductions are happening because like,
00:09:32
Speaker
Hey, you did this in 2012, this person did it in 2013, and now you guys are both doing these two crazy different things. Like, you know, have chat. And so that was that. It needs to happen more. I think it's slowly starting is starting to. But I feel like that the vibe of this conference, this is my eighth time coming to SHA. So I feel like it's definitely different than husband in the past.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I think one of the great ways that you can accomplish that, April, you had mentioned the Twitter meetup that we had Thursday evening, I think that was.
The Shift Towards Collaborative Conference Dynamics
00:10:06
Speaker
And I've had, again, going back to conversations I've had with this individual as well as others of, I'm the only person from my university here. I don't know what's going on. I want to meet people, I want to go to the networking events, the happy hours, I want to develop relationships.
00:10:25
Speaker
But if I don't have someone here who's already keyed into that network, how do you integrate yourself into it? And I'm a big proponent of the archaeo Twitter and like you'd call it to April for organizing the tweet up, Twitter meetup. That was great. I met a bunch of people who I interact with online on a fairly regular basis in real life. I'm still not sure I could tell you their real names. You definitely know their Twitter handles.
00:10:53
Speaker
That was the strange thing about it. I just picked a day in time and I figured let's get everybody to meet each other at the beginning of the conference. That way you could network with them and meet their friends throughout the conference instead of waiting till later. And then it's just like, hello, goodbye, I'm going home.
00:11:10
Speaker
But it came out very clearly about halfway through. We had 20-something people there. But I was the only one who knew everybody. Nobody showed up who I didn't already know in real life.
00:11:27
Speaker
But then I was able to introduce everybody to each other, but there was a moment where nobody was talking and everybody was just looking at me. And I had to just stop and explain how I knew all of these people. And then the conversation started up and it was great fun. I didn't even get to talk to everybody that was there because I had relationships with them. So I'm sure there were people who saw it on Twitter and still felt like they weren't welcome.
00:11:55
Speaker
So I think there's a little bit of people need to take that leap, reach out, and take advantage of opportunities when they come up. One of the frustrating things for me is that our lunch periods at this conference were only an hour.
00:12:10
Speaker
And there was no way to organize people to go to lunch unless you had already had something planned. And I wound up never going to lunch because I could never get back in time for the things that I wanted to if I had waited for people and went out for things. So we need a little bit...
00:12:26
Speaker
bigger of a lunch break, and it would be great if the SHA just had like, okay, graduate student lunch, everybody meet over here and like different categories, and it doesn't have to be anything that they pay for or organize in any other way, but just designate it.
00:12:45
Speaker
bulletin board where you would put things up like that. But that in the past few years has kind of just disappeared. I don't really know what happens to it. So maybe, you know, like Twitter or Facebook or something, like maybe there's a way to create a digital bulletin board to say like, hey, let's meet up. But I mean, I think the other thing that like us, the three of us as we've been around for a little bit kind of forget is
00:13:14
Speaker
And sometimes, you know, it's on us to go up to someone who looks lost or who looks confused or who looks like, you know, standing just outside the circle because I definitely remember feeling as, like, the first SHJ I came to, I was a senior undergrad.
00:13:30
Speaker
Didn't know anyone and you desperately want to meet these people that you admire and at that level you kind of forget that they're just people That they're not and not only are they just people but they're just as excited to talk about what they do as you are to hear it and so
00:13:45
Speaker
I had a few experiences with that with some undergrads from University of Rhode Island where I was a graduate student who were just like, oh, how do we meet people? Because none of our professors come to this conference, and it's on them to kind of figure it out. And so that was also kind of like, for me, a different perspective. I guess I have switched over now.
00:14:07
Speaker
from being the desperate student to like kind of knowing a little bit more about what's going on but yeah and so after that you know what I did take them around and drew some new people but it can be I think we forget that it can be really really intimidating and so to kind of like take it on ourselves to
00:14:23
Speaker
I always do that at the AAAs in November. It was the archaeology division had an award ceremony and a happy hour and I never stay for the awards but I went to the happy hour and this woman had introduced herself to me and then she wound up standing on the side
00:14:41
Speaker
And I gathered a bunch of friends and we're all going out to dinner and I just said to her, do you want to come with us? And she was so happy. She sat next to me. We talked the whole time. I still have no idea who this woman was, what her name was. I don't care. Like she needed people to hang out with. She's an archaeologist. Let's hang out kind of thing. But at this conference I've had
00:15:00
Speaker
A lot of people come up to me and say that somebody said that they should meet me. And they say, I'm so glad to meet you. So-and-so said I should meet you. They don't tell me their name. And then they go, OK, goodbye. And I was like, but like.
00:15:16
Speaker
So if you do want to go up to somebody and you do want to talk to them, you should have something to anchor that conversation a little bit. Tell me why so-and-so said we should meet. And then I could start figuring out. And don't run away immediately. I don't think I'm that intimidating. But I'm not about to chase people down and be like, no, come back. I want to talk to you. So I think it goes both ways. Don't be so nervous that you make it awkward.
00:15:46
Speaker
the other person has to also make it so that they shouldn't be nervous and they could be calmer. Yeah, I mean, April, you are a remarkably socially adept human being. I'm constantly impressed, seriously, with the people that you know and how you can manage multiple conversations and bring people in. It's very skillfully done. We'll have a workshop on that. I mean, please, let me tell you, could benefit from it. But it can be,
00:16:13
Speaker
difficult to figure that out. And I've certainly invited people to think, oh, is that weird? Did you actually mean it? I'm like, yeah, I invited you. I'm enjoying your company. I would like you to come meet my friends. I think you've got important things to say in this pity or not. And I think that there's work that can be done on all sides. People who are more established need to make a point of going and finding the person who's standing alone.
00:16:40
Speaker
saying, hey, if you are wandering alone or wandering around looking for a group to join and you can't seem to finagle your social way into a group and you don't know someone, there's probably somebody else in that room who's also standing around looking at their phone or at the conference program desperately trying to find something. Trying to look busy because they don't want to be
00:17:03
Speaker
the person who's alone, who's weird, like, go find that person. They're fascinating. And then there's two of you. And then someone else might walk up to you and be like, oh, hey, here's two people. And I can walk up to them and invite them into the conversation. So there's some need for people who are already established to invite undergraduates or people who are less certain into the area. There's also the need for people to be more willing to put yourself out.
00:17:32
Speaker
Go say, hey, do you mind if I join this group? You can't wait for someone to come up to you and say, hi, my name is Chelsea. But I think that the, the SHA and organizations could do better. They could have the brown bag lunches. They could, um, set up something where when you get the thank you for registering for SHA.
00:17:54
Speaker
We're setting up a private Facebook group for the event and just have someone to manage it. And you go, here's the link to the group. You ask to join. There's someone who, you know, once a day goes on, checks, allows you to join. And then you've got a kind of digital bulletin board and not that everyone uses Facebook, but having a conference provide space to have those sorts of interactions.
00:18:20
Speaker
I think would be really beneficial and would help some of the people who are like, where do I go? How do I fit in? How do I meet people? The organization has provided a space for you to make connections, figure out if someone else needs to share a hotel room because you don't want to burden the entire cause. SAAs has a student SAA Facebook group that every year
00:18:49
Speaker
I'm applying, no one from my department's going, are there another person or three or four people who'd be willing to share a room? And you know what? Some of my best friends in anthropology are people who were coming to a conference in my city and needed somewhere to crash, or I was going there and needed somewhere to crash, or I met up with a group of three or four people and there were two beds and it's a hotel room and you just get friendly and it's not weird or anything.
00:19:15
Speaker
But you have great conversations and because you live with them for three to five days, you get to know them really well and you see them at future conferences and they'll read your papers and give you comments. They're really, really productive relationships. Sometimes they'll invite you to be part of their projects. You know, so don't overlook those opportunities. They may not be what you think of as like traditional networking opportunities, but they can be really useful.
00:19:41
Speaker
Well, and there's also something to be said for not just networking with people that you admire or would like to work with, but like people that are your age from other universities because you're all going to move up together and you're all going to be at the same level together. And so you're all starting out at the bottom. And then, you know, like right now, like for me, you know, we're all getting real jobs and
00:20:01
Speaker
then you know but maybe like 20 or 30 years from now like we will be the top people in our field and it's nice to kind of like build that history but you know it starts at the bottom with the people i'm sharing a room with this year are people i met at the conference last year who this is the only time we really see each other we're sha friends like that's just what we do when we keep up with each other through the year and send each other drafts of papers and stuff but this is how we met this is why we're fun so
00:20:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's really great. So we are actually just past the 20 minute mark. So we're going to go to a quick commercial break. And when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about maybe some of the things that we would have liked to have seen be done better, shall we say, in some sessions.
00:20:46
Speaker
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00:21:05
Speaker
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Effective Presentation Skills and Time Management
00:21:22
Speaker
Hi and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. As mentioned, we are currently recording at the Society for Historical Archaeology 2018 meetings in New Orleans. In the last segment, we talked a little bit about what some of the highlights for the conference were. I think we're going to transition. I know that there were a couple of sessions that could have been better, shall we say, and things we would have liked to have seen.
00:21:51
Speaker
shift our focus a little bit. I'm looking at Jessica because I know she's like sitting over there like, I've got something to say. For me, because this has happened to me before, you get 15 minutes to give your paper. I don't care who you are. Sorry, how important you think you are, how amazing your research is. When you have been talking for 30 to 40 minutes,
00:22:16
Speaker
and your session was 15 minutes long. It's not just disrespectful to the other presenters, but it's just disrespectful to the audience members. It's disrespectful to the other researchers that couldn't be there because they're relying on you to contribute your fair amount and
00:22:35
Speaker
I don't know about you guys but I'm definitely like a session hopper where I don't necessarily look at like the session as a whole but there's like different papers I want to see and sometimes a really interesting paper gets thrown into a session that kind of doesn't necessarily conjoin with the theme and so you're like yeah like this is really interesting but this one is specifically my research interest so I want to make a point.
00:22:59
Speaker
to get up out of this session and leave to go to another session to watch one paper and come back. And when the, when presenters go over, you know, you don't want to open the door and interrupt what's going on. You don't know what's
00:23:14
Speaker
The whole timeline kind of goes off and so then you end up missing things that you want to contribute to or things that you wanted to see and it's the most frustrating thing in the world. Personally, I had someone who spoke in a session that I presented in for 45 minutes and I was the second paper.
00:23:31
Speaker
every one of my friends and colleagues who came to see my paper, which is on my thesis research, ended up having to get up and leave because, you know, it's a two and a half hour session and this person just took up half of it. And it's the last session of the day and we all know how this day goes. And at five o'clock, it doesn't matter how many papers are left, like people are going to the bar. So it's so disrespectful and it just makes me so angry. Yeah, I mean, I would second that. There was a paper that I really wanted to attend that
00:24:01
Speaker
I showed up and it was really busy in the room. You know, you kind of peek in through the three-inch crack in the door and you can see there are already people standing there and that the topic is clearly not the paper that you're waiting for. And it turned out, after listening for a minute or so, that the paper that was currently being given was the paper that was supposed to be from, you know, like 845 to 9.
00:24:30
Speaker
that had started at nine, right? And I wanted to listen to the 915 paper, so I already knew that there was like 15 minutes off there. And you don't know whether that's tech issues that could very well be that there were technology problems. But this person started 15 minutes late through no fault of their own.
00:24:49
Speaker
And I stood outside of that door for 35 minutes until the next paper that I desperately wanted to go see was going to be starting in, you know, two, three minutes and I needed to run. And I later found out that that person spoke for another five or seven minutes. So you're already 15 minutes behind.
00:25:11
Speaker
And then you decide to take 40 minutes. It's really disrespectful to the other people on the panel, to the people who are listening to you, to people who are trying to session hop. And I think, and it's a really hard thing to do, and it's certainly not a skill that's very often taught. And I see a blog post in my future, but about,
00:25:36
Speaker
what chairs or audience members can do in that situation or even fellow presenters. I've seen other presenters who, you know, I was supposed to start a minute ago and they're still talking and they will literally just go and awkwardly stand at the other presenter's elbow.
00:25:51
Speaker
until the person becomes uncomfortable enough to stop talking. I've seen session chairs say, you're done. I've also seen presenters being told verbally in front of a room of 30 people that they're done. Ignore their chair and keep talking. I've seen audience members just like get up and say, hey,
00:26:09
Speaker
No one's interested. I think that's the thing that I would take a little further from what you guys are saying is that once you've gone over your time, nobody is listening to you anymore. They don't care what you have to say because you're disrespecting everybody. So when you keep talking, you're devaluing yourself and your research. There's nothing else that you should be saying because I have five more slides I want to get through. I'm going to quickly run through these maps.
00:26:38
Speaker
But a lot of people are taking too much time because they get up there and they say, before I'm going to start talking, this is my dissertation research that is an extension of my master's research that I started with when I went. And it's like, we don't need all of that context. And I was in a session that every paper was about the same site. And every presenter got up and gave the address of the building and the whole history of the site before they got to their research.
00:27:07
Speaker
Be aware of I have 15 minutes. What am I going to get across in my 15 minutes? And if you can't get it across in 15 minutes, then it's not a good paper. And one of the things that we could do is I've been doing this longer than you guys.
00:27:21
Speaker
If it's time for you to go in that room, go in the room. Don't look through the crack and stand outside because one of the cues for people to realize they've taken too much time is that people are getting up and leaving and other people are coming in. A lot of people are reading a script and they're not looking up. So the session chair is waving like your time is up and they're not singing. But that's the other issue that I have is that, so for me personally, when I give a talk, I don't read off a script. But you know what? I have practice and I have time for myself.
00:27:49
Speaker
but we're archaeologists and anthropologists, like we all know that we are a socially awkward bunch and not everyone can just jump up in front of 30 people and speak. But one of my friends who has a ton of anxiety about public speaking, he reads his paper and he times himself every single time because a lot of his work is like deep statistical analysis, which is very valid, but he knows like
00:28:13
Speaker
It's data heavy and if he just talks, he's going to talk for an hour and if he doesn't time himself, he is going to go over. So as a respect to everyone else, he times himself and gets his paper down to where he's, you know, he tries to do it where he's 16 minutes because he knows that he reads really fast when he's in front of people and ends up being 15 minutes. But at the same time,
00:28:37
Speaker
I went to a different session about the Highborn K Shipwreck, which was all day long, like 8.30 to 5. And their session chair did a really good job. They did not have, after the first presentation that was an introduction to the site, everyone presented on something different at the same site, but they weren't like, this shipwreck say gun da da da da da da da. Like, yes, I get it. The last guy said the exact same thing and the guy before that.
00:29:03
Speaker
the whole last slide. I have to get through this because I have to thank all the people that helped me. They did it in the very first session and the very last session and that was enough. But that's just a chair who's done a good job organizing. If you have a session that presumably you've put together as a session, not individual papers because you're all talking about the same site, plan to have
00:29:24
Speaker
a 15-minute intro paper and tell everyone that you're doing it and that they shouldn't, that they don't need to. Actually, other than 16 minutes, I always say aim for 13 because you've got to walk to the podium, you've got to pull your slide up, there may be tech questions, something may come to you in the middle. If you're going to have a laser pointer that you haven't practiced with because not everyone has laser pointers, looking at your slide, identifying what you're going to be laser pointing at,
00:29:53
Speaker
It's always better to be a minute or two under than a minute or two over, but also know how long things take to read. One 12-point font double spaced page of paper takes an average person two minutes to read. If you have 15 minutes, you have seven pages. I have talked to people here.
00:30:17
Speaker
Oh, my paper is 12 pages. You're never going to get through it. You need to cut that in half. Oh, no, no, it'll be fine. If you can read 12 pages in 15 minutes, no one can understand what you're saying. Saying, I have to read this really fast. Nobody could understand the 15, 20 minutes. You're going to read something really fast. We can't process information that quickly. One of the other things that I have discussed with some people at this conference is
00:30:42
Speaker
the whole measurements thing. Like, okay, we're all archaeologists. Like, if I am so interested in your research that I want the inches, centimeter measurement of the structure or the building or the units, I will come up to you afterwards and ask you. So if you want to just kind of breeze through that part, no one is going to hold it against you. Or if it's in your slide,
00:31:07
Speaker
You don't have to read your slides. Your slides are your visual representation of the words that you're saying. So if you said, this is the area that we dug and the slide has the measurements, you don't have to then repeat. We dug 13 cubic feet of dirt per day. We started on March 22nd. On March 23rd, you can leave those details out because if anyone needs them, they'll come to you to get them. I did go to a lot of papers that unfortunately really
00:31:37
Speaker
read like site reports and it is important for people to know that your site is out there, but I don't need to listen to you sit there for 15 minutes saying, I dug in California in 2002 and I was a student then and my professor never published it, but this stuff exists and we have X number of burials and we found this
00:32:02
Speaker
feature it's more like a resume or a diary diary journal not what I did over my summer vacation right yeah like if I want that information I will go find the great literature or I will email you and ask me you to send me your excavation notes
00:32:35
Speaker
C, which is gonna take five minutes, that's not part of their timed paper. Like, if you have to apologize for anything during your talk, just take it out. Right. Because it's a waste of time, and it just, again, makes you look like you're unprepared. And you can also assume that everyone who is here has at least taken introduction to archaeology.
00:32:37
Speaker
Why is this important? What does it mean?
00:32:54
Speaker
So you don't need to explain basic concepts. Don't waste your time doing that because we know. If you want to say we did a survey and we dug 25 STPs, perfect. You don't need to say I dug 25 shovel test pits, a shovel test pit is such and such and such and such. You're at a professional conference. Trust in your peers intelligence, just a little bit more. So that's my puppy.
00:33:23
Speaker
That's valid. I would say, I don't mind a little bit of, here's what's on the slide. I had an interesting conversation at the AAA is actually about accessibility and you've put a slide up and it's interesting and wonderful. But if it's really important, if you say the photo on the slide,
00:33:45
Speaker
It takes five seconds. What I'm speaking more to is a graph that has numbers and columns and things. And you can't read it because it's so far away. And then they spend so much time explaining it and it's not part of the paper.
Diverse Voices in Academic Panels
00:34:02
Speaker
So it's a separate thing to kind of prove that you had data you have to have a chart up. Like we trust that you have data. Right.
00:34:12
Speaker
And even if you put a chart up and it's got like a lot of things that you don't understand and like sometimes I get it It took you 29 hours To make whatever program you were using to make that chart or that map and you're stupid proud of it And you want people to see it. Yeah, I get that but you say here is this thing that I did and
00:34:33
Speaker
based on the results we learned. Because sometimes you make something pretty and you just want to share it with people. And you're super proud of it. I've done the things where I'm like, oh, look at this map. This is a great map. I want other people to see the map. But I'm not going to stand there and say, this little dot is this. And this little dot is this. Maybe you should make a handout.
00:34:54
Speaker
Well, just on a separate note, I also have a pet peeve of just like unrealistic expectations from panelists. So I went to a panel that was aimed at helping students figure out how to navigate this as a career and just kind of
00:35:15
Speaker
you know, taking the temperature of the room, taking the temperature of the political climate and the world. So we had people going on and on and on about how we're only preparing students for tenure-track faculty positions and academic jobs and it's kind of like
00:35:30
Speaker
What are you talking about? Where are all of these millions of elusive 10-year track faculty positions that you're supposedly preparing students for? For me, it's a pet peeve to sit there and listen to people just talk about things that are so just unrealistic and never going to happen as opposed to having professional collaborations and giving actual advice and bestowing your knowledge, not your presumptions.
00:35:58
Speaker
No, I mean it's valid in 2006 there was a paper that came out last year that looked at data from 2016 there were a hundred tenure-track anthropology jobs that were advertised in 2016 there were 600 PhD anthropology graduates that's
00:36:22
Speaker
One out of six, that's just shy of 17%. For that year alone, that's not to say for the hundreds and eight thousands of anthropology PhD graduates from previous years who have been adjuncting, who have been term professors, who may be looking to leave their university, who you are also competing against. The odds are unrealistic. Well, and then I just don't understand that idea that
00:36:51
Speaker
You're trying to prepare people for CRM positions or you're trying to prepare people for, you know, positions outside of academia. But your perspective is that only the academics are worthwhile. And so also, you know, we've had a lot of discussions about
00:37:09
Speaker
your professor has had no, the only field experience that they had before they came to their university was what they did as an undergrad straight into a master straight into a PhD. And now they're trying to explain to you section 106 when all of the work that they did was in Cyprus. And you're just like, okay, like that's fine. Like there's just kind of this real world disconnect. And I think that
00:37:32
Speaker
We all could do a better job to kind of get around that but also that if you're gonna organize a session That's supposed to be a panel like make it a panel like this is all white men Okay, well, you know more than 50% of graduate students are women So like where are the women representatives for the minority representatives? And that's just there was a few different sessions that were like that where I was like, where are the other voices because
00:37:58
Speaker
I've heard your voice, I've been hearing your voice for a while now, so like, give me something new. Like, where are the other voices? And I don't know if it's because people don't know how to reach out to other people, or if they don't want to, but it's just a puppy of mine.
Retaining Diversity in Archaeology
00:38:13
Speaker
And I know it's not just SHA, so...
00:38:16
Speaker
I could talk about the tenure track thing, but I think that'll take forever, being that I'm a tenured professor and I know any year that I was applying for tenure track jobs, I could only find between eight and fourteen jobs that fit me to apply for. So that's instead of a number of a hundred, you're never going to be suitable for a hundred, but let's put a pin in that for another day or time.
00:38:41
Speaker
But going back to both taking the temperature of the room and having diversity on your panels, going back to the structural racism forum, a lot of what people were saying in there is how do we attract new people of diverse backgrounds to historical archaeology, and how do we attract diverse audiences to historical archaeology as far as doing community outreach and stuff.
00:39:08
Speaker
I raised my hand twice and nobody ever called on me, but that's fine. But what we never did was we never acknowledged the huge amount of diversity that was in the room and we never talked about, hey, all of you people who are in this room who care about structural racism and you all have very diverse backgrounds, how do we retain you?
00:39:31
Speaker
How do we make you guys become CRM managers, CRM company owners, tenured professors? We will have a more diverse historical archaeology if we keep all of those people and make them feel valued and then they go on and be role models, they be anchors, they be mentors.
00:39:51
Speaker
So I think sometimes we think too far outside of ourselves and nobody on the panel was sitting there and taking the temperature of the room that everybody kept saying, well, on my project, I do this, which isn't relevant to everybody else in the room. Like let's talk about the people in the room, but not be like, raise your hand and ask the entire room to help you solve your personal problems. Find the commonality. What in that career forum
00:40:19
Speaker
What was the careers of people who showed up and wanted to go towards? Did they want to go to academia? Did they want to go to CRM? Start your panel with that and not your prepared comments of who you think is going to show up. Yeah. I actually saw a tweet from, unfortunately, I can't remember who tweeted it out, but it was a quote from one of the papers that she went to and it was paraphrasing here.
00:40:48
Speaker
It doesn't matter how many diverse participants you attract. If you do not deal with the structural racism that exists within archaeology and cultural heritage management on a broader scale, they will not stay. And that's on us.
00:41:10
Speaker
And on that end of our second segment, we may take this conversation a little bit into the next 20 minutes and we'll be back after the break. Hey podcast fans, if you want to check out some great designs and we're going to be adding more as you probably hear this, depending on when you're hearing it, but we've got a new association and I say new as of January, 2018 with T public and T public is a pretty great outlet for designers, which we've got our own designs for the archeology podcast network.
00:41:40
Speaker
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Navigating Conference Spaces and Etiquette
00:41:42
Speaker
A lot of places, they give you just like a dollar or two on a $20 t-shirt purchase, but T Public actually gives us a lot more than that, and it's a really great deal for us, and it's a good deal for them, and it's a good deal for you because we can have stuff in stock all the time. Check out our site. Go to arkpodnet.com forward slash shop, and you'll see a link to the T Public store where you can get t-shirts, sweatshirts, smartphone cases, laptop cases, pillows even, tote bags, all kinds of stuff.
00:42:09
Speaker
over at that site. So check it out at arcpodnet.com forward slash shop. Now back to the show. Hi, and welcome back to the women in archeology podcast on today's episode. We have been recording from the society for historical archeology 2018 meeting in New Orleans. In the last 20 minutes, we talked a little bit about some of the things that we would have liked to have seen
00:42:31
Speaker
done better at the conference. In the break, we talked a little bit about things that we would like to say that didn't necessarily fit into either of the previous two sections. So we're going to just talk about those things. I would actually like to start going back to talking about people getting up and leaving conferences or walking into doors for 15 minutes for one session. I saw
00:42:59
Speaker
a lot of people coming into a session and there may have been five or ten chairs at the front of the room. People wanted to sit at the back of the room because they wanted to be able to duck out if need be. But people would come in and they wouldn't go sit in those seats.
00:43:17
Speaker
And I don't know whether it's a fear of disturbing the presenter or not being able to get out. But when I look at the back of the room, and one of the rooms I was in had a room capacity of 34 people, and I was a session monitor. And at one time, there was 67 people in the room, which is almost double the room capacity.
00:43:38
Speaker
And granted, I'm pretty sure there were more than 34 chairs in that room, but about half of them were stood kind of down the aisleways and right in front of the door. And there were a couple of seats left. Go find the seats. You're not going to distract the presenter that bad. They are so engaged in their own paper and hopefully trying to hit their 15 minute mark. And what they're saying, they're probably not going to notice that you walk down the aisle.
00:44:04
Speaker
If there is a session like that going on and it's something you really want to go to and you open the door and notice that, don't go in. I know that it really sucks to not be able to go to the sessions that you want to attend, but that's a serious fire hazard. If something happened to get those people out, April, you told a...
00:44:25
Speaker
A story of someone who had done a similarly egregious thing. The room that my paper was in on Thursday afternoon was so cold people were tweeting that it was the meat locker freezing in there.
00:44:40
Speaker
chair of the session and I were standing outside the room waiting for the previous session to finish and we weren't going to step in that room one minute before the previous session was finished because it was just so cold. But it was already that session was running over. And there was a young woman, presumably an archaeologist, she had a badge, who was outside the room
00:45:03
Speaker
in the hallway sitting there in the floor leaning against the door of a session that was already late coming out. So she was basically locking everybody in. So just being aware of your surroundings in general and then keeping your face in the program looking for things to go to at all times is not necessarily the best way to spend your time. Yeah. What I actually
00:45:29
Speaker
Go to things you wouldn't. I was a session attendant for two sessions, one of which I may have attended anyways. It was about contact and colonialism and was very interesting and was something that I kind of starred as something I might be interested in when I first looked over the program that they put out. The other one was a session on transferware ceramics.
00:45:56
Speaker
I'm a bioarchaeologist, and I get to archaeology through forensic anthropology. So I took the standard archaeology class, like, here's a portrait, and you can put them back together, and you can identify them. And it is not my area of expertise, or dare I say it even necessarily an area of interest. I think it's useful. I think it's important. I would very much like it if someone else would do it. That's not to say I won't.
Unexpected Insights from Conference Sessions
00:46:25
Speaker
I would, but it was great. And I learned a lot. There was a methodological paper. They were talking about resources that were available if you do this kind of work. So if I ever am in a situation where I have to, I now feel like I have at least an idea of a starting point of where I would go to look to try and figure this out. There were some really interesting papers that looked at the importance of choice of patterns and transferware for creating
00:46:55
Speaker
identity or for escaping kind of the life that you lived and buying this really exotic pattern. And that it's not all just about economic means, that there's also choice and identity in there. And I really enjoyed that session. And if I hadn't been the session attendant, I would never have attended it.
00:47:19
Speaker
So if you don't know what to do, or if sessions are starting and you haven't figured out, go open a door to a random room and sit down and learn something. Carefully one that is warm, not cold. Yes, and one that isn't already over capacity. Right, right. And I will give you that too. I think that one of the things that I was in a room that was overly warm. And I've been wearing my jacket around all the time because it's so cold. And then just absolutely sweating because it's so warm in the room.
00:47:48
Speaker
But it always blows my mind that there's these papers where you look at the title of them and you can clearly see this paper is going to be popular and then they stick it in a room with 20 chairs, you know? And like, why isn't this in one of the bigger rooms? And then you go in the big rooms and there's 10 people in there. And we're just like, who plan this? Who organized this? And that's one of those things where I'm like, maybe I need to join a committee and like solve this problem.
00:48:13
Speaker
When they have session attendance, part of their job is to report how many people are in the room. I don't know how long they've been collecting this data. But at some point, you've collected data from a bunch of years. Why haven't you analyzed it and used it to figure out what type of topics people are interested in? And, granted, the conference attendance will vary from year to year.
00:48:32
Speaker
I get it. But yeah, sometimes. Well, they tend to put sessions of the same topic back to back or against each other. So one will draw people away from the other so that if you have the data today on how many people go to a historical archaeology talk on
00:48:53
Speaker
historical archaeology of Native American reservations, it's not necessarily going to be the same if that conference is in New Orleans versus Denver. And it's not going to be the same if there is a session that is about decolonial archaeology during the same time as the session on Native American reservation archaeology, which isn't a big thing. So is it going to be a lot of people because it's new? This afternoon, there were two sessions at the same time
00:49:21
Speaker
on schoolhouse archaeology. I started doing schoolhouse archaeology 20 years ago. Nobody was doing it at all. Elizabeth Peรฑa was the first person to do schoolhouse archaeology in 1994, and now there's competing sessions.
00:49:37
Speaker
How do you figure out the trends? I think it's more elaborate and the explanation people have given to me is why those sessions that are similar wind up at the same time is because the software programs that they use set it up so that no person needed to be in two places at once, so it's all mutually exclusive.
00:50:00
Speaker
that it actually tends to create these clusters because if you're giving two different papers in two different sessions, they have to be at different days and times. But yeah, so it is an elaborate process, but I think it's great to get on one of the committees and see what you could contribute, especially if you're newer and therefore know the trends now.
00:50:23
Speaker
Well, that's also something I was talking about with I'm on the UNESCO committee, which is their goal is to help facilitate the ratification of the 2001 UNESCO convention. And the committee chairs on a few other committees. And she was saying that like, there is one person under 50 in every single committee. Like, where are all of the younger people? Like, why, why, why were people intimidated to become part of these committees? And so,
00:50:52
Speaker
I mean, it's not actually a huge commitment to be on a committee, but I do know it's intimidating to walk into a room and to make a year-long commitment to help with something or to do something. But it's one of those things that just not good or bad, but if you feel like you're here and you want to get more involved,
Getting Involved in Shaping Conference Experiences
00:51:10
Speaker
All you have to do is email the committee chair and you are on the committee. There is no entrance exam. You're not an imposter. If you want to participate in a committee, even if that committee has nothing to do with any experience you've had, you will be welcome with open arms. That's not true for all organizations. The SAA has an application system.
00:51:33
Speaker
I've had really bad experiences with the Society for American Archaeology committees and I'm potentially not on them at all.
00:51:42
Speaker
and the American Anthropological Association, it's all by election, and then the chair gets to pick who's on it. So it turns into kind of me and my friends are on the committee and things like that. So if that's how the SHA is doing, I've never been on a SHA committee, then that's great, but that's not how all the orgies are doing. There's just not as many as us, and we're just not that, we're not that cool, I guess. But in addition to,
00:52:09
Speaker
If you want to represent, it's great, and great organizations do things differently. It's a great way to network. If you want to get to know people in your area, the people on the committees are the people who care. So join a committee in an area you're interested in and get to know the other people who are interested in that area. And the other thing is, if you're someone who
00:52:33
Speaker
goes places and likes to have a role in order to feel like you have a job so there's less of the awkwardly like, I'm standing around waiting for someone to come be friends with me. More of like, yes, I'm here by myself, but I'm the session attendant or I'm volunteering or I'm like the community member who's paying attention.
00:52:50
Speaker
It does change your body language and it can make you more comfortable. And it can also give you something that if you're at the conference, that's something to talk about. And you can say, I'm on the committee and I'm interested in your impression of how the conference went. What did we do well? What could we do better? I'm in a position to make changes. And even if that position is just, I happen to know someone that I can email directly rather than drop into an anonymous comment box.
00:53:19
Speaker
You can help the organization. You can also help yourself a lot. Well, another way to help yourself just to like take us off in another direction. Sure.
00:53:29
Speaker
is like business cards. So I will say I ran out on the first day, which is like is on me. However, if you want something from someone, like don't give them your business card and expect them to email you. You need to ask for their business card
00:53:50
Speaker
and then follow up with them. It's just, I mean, I totally understand that people get excited and they need things, but if you're like, wow, your paper was so great, I'm really interested in your research, here's my card, please email me a copy.
00:54:04
Speaker
you know, maybe that person had like 20 other people do the same thing. And so then you have this stack of business cards and you're like, oh my gosh, like I don't remember who wanted what or whatever. But if I want, you know, Chelsea's paper and I say, Chelsea, can I please have your card? I want a copy of your paper. I'll follow up with you in a couple of weeks when things have wind down so that we can really talk about it. That interaction will actually happen. Like that interaction has followed through.
00:54:31
Speaker
but also just throwing business cards at someone and being like, help me, help me, help me, is not the way to network. So I actually carry a pen around because I have business cards.
Post-Conference Networking and Professional Growth
00:54:41
Speaker
I've unfortunately been in this situation before where I've really wanted to connect with someone and I'm like, do you have a business card? And they're like, no. And I'm like, oh, can I get your email? And they're like, well, my university one just closed and I'm not giving my private one. And so then I have ended up in a situation where I'm like, here's my business card.
00:54:59
Speaker
that you've literally provided me no way of contacting you, but if you have a pen and you can flip the business card over and write, wants your AAA presentation on the back of it, then if you have 20 or 30 business cards,
00:55:10
Speaker
at least when they get to yours, they're like, here's like an actionable thing. I'm not saying that that always works or that that person always... But you could do that when they give you theirs too. You could flip it over and say, this person wanted this. And then when you get home and you have your stack of 20 business cards, you could go through them. And I tried to do it like this.
00:55:29
Speaker
On the flight back home, I tried to go through all the paperwork and make a list of what I said that I was going to do. Several of my colleagues that I, you know, were friendly but we don't see each other often have asked for copies of my books and I made a list at lunch. I sat there and I was like, okay, I'm sending this person this, I'm sending that person that. So you don't want to be the person who said you were going to do something and then forget.
00:55:52
Speaker
So everything you said you were going to do, write it down because you forget everybody you've talked to. You see them day after day and you don't remember who wanted what and how you were going to help each other. You're not going to grow your network if you're unreliable. Yeah, definitely.
Professionalism through Attire at Conferences
00:56:09
Speaker
Another kind of conference etiquette, personal impression thing that I have seen a lot of at archaeological conferences
00:56:19
Speaker
is a tire. And I get it. We're archaeologists, we work in the field, in the mud and the dirt. Sometimes you don't get to shower for a couple weeks depending on where you're working. I get it. This is not the field. And if you want to run around in jeans and a t-shirt for the entirety of the conference, that's fine. You are presenting yourself in a certain light. It may not be perceived in a positive
00:56:47
Speaker
way by some many or all people, but you know, for the love of whatever you believe in, if you are giving a presentation and you walk up to the podium in socks and tevos that look like they're 20 years old, add a pair of jeans that have
00:57:10
Speaker
20 stains of unidentifiable substances that I don't even want to guess at and a shirt that's got a bunch of holes in it and you haven't brushed your hair or if you're a guy that's super scruffy, I don't have a beard, I don't not have a beard, I just kind of look like I haven't shaved in a couple of days.
00:57:31
Speaker
The only thing that people are going to remember you for is the guy who couldn't be bothered or the girl who couldn't be bothered to respect the people in the room that he's talking to enough to look presentable. No, it's definitely true. And also just, you know, I get it. Like, I mean, today is the last day of the conference. I'm in jeans today. But, you know, like, I took a shower this morning. I put on a clean shirt. Because, like, SHA is not necessarily
00:58:00
Speaker
As I feel like as formal as other conferences are I think we're of the big national conferences like we're on the more casual side So I get it like you're gonna drink you're gonna go to the bar. We're in New Orleans also. So that's like a whole other
00:58:16
Speaker
But if I saw you last night at the bar and you're still there this morning, before you come up to my session, please drink some water, be respectful, slap on some deodorant maybe, wash your face.
00:58:32
Speaker
People you might not think people remember the people will remember and if when it comes time when it comes down to it and you're trying to get a job and someone remembers that like you were the person who was Standing on the bar like you know Hooten and hollering like that might be the deciding factor And so like we're still in a professional setting despite being in New Orleans and SHA being like a slightly more casual conference than other conferences and
00:59:00
Speaker
For those of you who can't see, she's actually very well dressed. This isn't like bad ratty jeans. I had to check to see that she actually is wearing jeans because I did not recall that, but yes. Well, I did bring a dress for today, but it's so cold that I just was like, I can't, my legs can't take it. I've worn jeans every day of this conference. They are dark jeans. They're nicer. I did have a beignet this morning. I got powdered sugar all over them, so they're not so nice now.
00:59:25
Speaker
Even though we had Twitter conversations about avoiding powdered sugar on your conference. No, no, no, no. Embrace the chaos. Embrace the chaos. Yeah, and as we've been talking to them, we just emailed and asked me to join an SAA committee that seemed like
00:59:42
Speaker
We just brought that forward here. So yeah, the world works in mysterious ways.
Significance of Restoration Projects and Cultural Memory
00:59:48
Speaker
But before we end, Chelsea, tell us about your paper at the conference. So it wasn't actually a paper I presented. It was a paper I co-authored with three other individuals.
01:00:00
Speaker
There's a project going down on in Bogota, Colombia. It's actually finished now at the San Ignacio Jesuit Church. It's actually one of the largest, if not the largest restoration of a colonial era building from
01:00:18
Speaker
in all of Columbia. The building was built in 1610 and has had a somewhat checkered past as many buildings do. But they undertook 13 years of renovation, structural renovation to make sure that the building was sound. And then they decided that they wanted to do some
01:00:41
Speaker
being a more decorative work, one of which was bringing the floor down to the original level. And when they started digging through 400 years of floor and four different floors in 400 years, they unsurprisingly found bodies. So I was, I went down after the excavation where excavations were complete and worked with.
01:01:01
Speaker
the human remains in a lab setting. But it was an overview paper of where the church was, what we did, why it was important for Colombian heritage, the importance of memory and remembering and commemorating the dead. Colombia has had one of the longest running civil wars in modern history for, you know, 50 or so years.
01:01:31
Speaker
And as a result, there's been a lot of death and they don't necessarily want to commemorate that. But the importance that these sites can have as places to remember history and everything that's going on. We're still doing the analysis, so expect more conference papers and journal articles. And we were in a session that was on
01:01:59
Speaker
The importance of burial locations and cemeteries in commemoration, in memory, in negotiating current political issues. There were a couple papers on, or at least one paper on Confederate monuments. There was paper on World War I monuments. There was a paper on a cemetery in Florida. And just the point that cemeteries in places where the dead reside are very tangible.
01:02:28
Speaker
thing that connects people to their history and the heritage that they have and shared history and heritage. I mean, if you spend a lot of time in cemeteries around dead people, it reminds you that everybody kind of ends up in the same place. I hope to take some people down a peg or two. I'm not going to get too political there.
01:02:53
Speaker
Are we all doomed? Is that what you're saying? We can't take it with you. That's the lesson here. Yeah, pretty much. I'm not sure what I have to take with me anyway. My extensive faunal collection. I want to be buried with the 175 animal skeletons that I have in my lab. Make sure they stay in their taxonomically organized boxes.
01:03:15
Speaker
That would be cooler than King Tut's tomb, right? Find me in all my categorized- The ritual interpretation of that burial. Probably all along. Yeah, I mean, when people die, they commemorate their family, you know, loving wife, husband, father, daughter, you know, whatever it is. Those are the things that I guess are important.
01:03:40
Speaker
I'm going to admit a little plug for an episode that's going to be a little bit after this episode. We're having someone from Kiribati come in to talk about archaeology and climate change, who I had the pleasure of being on a panel with at a conference last year. And the phrase that he ended his presentation on, which apparently is a very common phrase in Kiribati is, family is everything and everyone is family. And I think cemeteries can help people
01:04:08
Speaker
recognize the importance of family and recognize that we all end up in the same place so we are all more closely interconnected than we may otherwise think. But we are at the end of our podcast, so if anyone has any final thoughts,
01:04:22
Speaker
Come to SHA, it's really fun. Yeah, I think I'm going to skip the next two, but I'll be at SAAs in a couple of weeks back in Washington, DC, where we just were for the AAAs, so yeah, more conferences to come.
01:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, so thank you as always for coming and being on the show and I certainly enjoyed the conference, I hope you did too. It was nice to finally meet you in person. Wow, you guys haven't met before, that's cool. No, it was definitely very exciting. They definitely act like they've known each other for a long time. That's what happens when you spend hours talking with people over Skype, you know. But yeah, just thank you so much for being here.
01:05:08
Speaker
As always, expect a new episode two weeks after this one. If you have any comments or questions, you can reach us at womenandarchaeology at gmail.com. We always love to hear from our listeners, and thanks for listening. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Women in Archaeology podcast. Links to the items mentioned on the show are in the show notes. You can contact us at womenandarchaeology at gmail.com or at womenarchies on Twitter.
01:05:37
Speaker
please like, share, and subscribe to the show. You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. Support the show in the APN at www.arcpodnet.com slash members. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
01:06:00
Speaker
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.