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That's So Raven with Raven DaSilva - Ep 9
387 Plays6 years ago
On this episode of A Life In Ruins Podcast, we revert to our previous format and interview Raven DaSilva! We found Raven through her Instagram/Youtube account (@digitwithraven and YouTube Channel "Dig it With Raven") and really enjoyed how she communicated to the public. Naturally, we had to have her on the show! This wide-ranging interview covers topics like ways to make Connor shut-up, Indiana Jones, science communication and post-graduate degree life. Give this episode a listen and mosey on over to her instagram and YouTube channel!
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- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 9 of a Life in Ruins Podcast. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and as always, I'm joined by my co-hosts, Konrad Janin and David Howe. Tonight's guest, Raven Todd De Silva, is an archaeologist and conservator who just finished her Masters of Science with a focus on conservation. She graduated with distinction from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts.
00:00:23
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:43
Speaker
She runs a very popular Instagram and YouTube channel called Dig It With Raven and is an excellent science communicator.
Interest in European Conservation and Archaeology
00:00:49
Speaker
Our co-hosts are familiar with conservation curation from an American theoretical stance, and we are really interested to hear more about European conservation and European archaeology from Raven.
Raven's Background and Online Presence
00:01:02
Speaker
All right, Raven, if you don't mind introducing who you are real quick and where you are currently.
00:01:13
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, good evening, guys. Thanks for having me on. So I am currently in Amsterdam and I just graduated a week ago, essentially, from my master's of conservation and restoration of cultural heritage from the University of Amsterdam.
00:01:32
Speaker
And I specialized in the conservation of ceramics, glass and stone, focusing mainly on archaeological objects. And so my bachelor's was more archaeology, ancients of based.
00:01:45
Speaker
moved over to Europe after a quarter life crisis and ended up with a master's of science afterwards.
Studying in Europe vs. North America
00:01:52
Speaker
So it turned out okay, I guess. And yeah, now I'm hosting a YouTube channel and an Instagram page based on archaeology, history, conservation, where I try and kind of give a kind of like an online free course on the basics of archaeology, making it accessible for everybody.
00:02:12
Speaker
Well, that's awesome actually. And like, sorry, I didn't mean to say actually, but what I'm trying to say is congratulations on getting your master's is the words I'm trying to say. Cause that's a huge, huge thing to do. Um, how do you, how do you feel? Um, not as excited as I thought I would. Yeah. We understand that. Mm-hmm.
00:02:36
Speaker
staring into the abyss of what life is after school. The existential crisis is settling in quite nicely.
00:02:45
Speaker
Which is great. It doesn't end. I think I'm I'm two years out. Conner's three years out. Carlton, you're a few months out. I'm still in school. Unlike you two, I pursued a PhD. Thank you very much. So don't try to throw me under the bus with that master's nonsense. I thought we were over that. I'll just say that you got your master's. But yeah. So what made you want to go overseas to Europe? If you don't mind, like us asking that.
00:03:14
Speaker
as opposed to staying over here in the States or in Canada?
Academic and Career Experiences in Europe
00:03:18
Speaker
Well, the biggest draw for me was that there aren't many schools for conservation in Canada. There's only one university that has a full-on program. In the States, you have a bunch. They're really great, but they're also very expensive for international students, which is no fun. And then, yeah, it's ridiculous. And then I can't work over there either. So I was looking over in Europe because I have an EU passport.
00:03:44
Speaker
And it's much cheaper to come to school here and they have really, really good programs and a lot of, it's a lot more central if you're studying more, you know, European archaeology, ancient Mediterranean archaeology. It's a little bit easier to go here and you have more access to the things that you want to study.
00:04:03
Speaker
Our last guest, Irina Bachi, she also went to the University of Toronto and was saying that it was really difficult to find a school that funds foreign students in the United States. That's why you went over there? That was one of the reasons, yes. I first went to Germany because for tuition there, it's only about 200 euros a semester.
00:04:26
Speaker
Whoa. What? Yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah. What am I doing at Colorado? Jesus. Older sheep, what are you talking about? Right. But they also have really good programs over here for what I needed to study, and they have a lot more opportunity than in Canada. There's only one school in Canada that I could have gone to, and the program wasn't really focused on where I wanted to
00:04:55
Speaker
be and what I wanted to do. So I kind of moved over to Germany, did an internship there, realized maybe I didn't want to spend the next five years speaking German in class. And so I moved over to Amsterdam and they have an amazing program, which is a direct master's instead of doing another bachelor's.
00:05:14
Speaker
So I kind of just kind of found my way through trial and error really. As a person who suffered through a master's degree, did you have to write a thesis as part of it or is it a little different? No, I had to write a thesis in our second year. We have a four-month thesis project and I did mine on
00:05:35
Speaker
So with the conservation department, it has to be a little bit more science-based, essentially, so very diagnostic. And they found these pre-dynastic, early-dynastic bowls from ancient Egypt, from one of the antiquities museums here, that had these very curious black spots on them. And my entire thesis was essentially, what are the black spots?
00:06:00
Speaker
So it's not the most exciting thesis, but it was, it ended up okay. I'm going to throw you a curve ball. What are the black spots? Manganese dendrites. Oh. So they're like these zero fossils, essentially.
00:06:17
Speaker
Oh, okay. There's some shirt out here that has like this weird blue, like speckling to it. And it like, maybe it has something to do with that too, but that's, it's really interesting. Yeah, there's a shirt that has a dendritic inclusions is what they call it. It's pretty diagnostic. Yeah. It's like they're growing, right?
00:06:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're little, little, little fossils, like you were saying, little, are they seashells? No, they're just, they're pseudo fossils, essentially. So how they grew is that the burial site that they were in, they were, all the bowls were found in tombs and it was a very wet site. Like it's a lot of flooding from the Nile from what I was looking at with the spatial analysis. And it seems that there was a,
00:07:02
Speaker
super saturated solution of manganese and as the water evaporated or left, the manganese kind of stayed and formed on the bowls and kind of grew into these fern, almost mold-like patterns. Oh, that's really interesting. And kind of going off of that, what made you get into archaeology and, you know, keep going through school and ultimately into higher education?
00:07:24
Speaker
I've really always been into archaeology. I was that nerd in the library when I was like four or five years old, running around and getting the books on Ancient Egypt and the pyramids and getting the, you know, the movies about Balerophon and the Pegasus, all that crap. It was really bad. And I was just always really into history. I had some amazing teachers in high school.
00:07:46
Speaker
that really kept that passion alive. My best teachers I had were history teachers. And so it kind of kept it going throughout the whole thing. And I graduated my bachelor's. I got a job in a museum for about two years, realized this is not where I want to be. And I wanted to do more hands-on stuff, get back to my roots. And so that's how I ended up in Europe. Then you're from Portugal? Is that right?
00:08:12
Speaker
I was born in Canada. Canada. Okay. Yeah. I think you had said that, but you have an EU passport you had said. Yeah. So my dad was born in Portugal and they're just throwing them away over there. So I just had to show that, you know, he was born there and I'm technically sort of Portuguese and they just gave me one. That's dope. Yeah. I feel like I cheated the system a little bit, but I need to figure out how I could do that and go over there to school.
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, in the Netherlands, we have the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty because you guys helped out so much during World War II. And you guys can move here a lot easier than the rest of the world can. Just as a fun little note for you. And even international student fees are cheaper than American student fees.
00:08:56
Speaker
I don't think they want us to know that. I almost went to Utrecht for my PhD and I regret that decision. Well, I don't regret that decision. I love seeing a boulder, but like there is a moment in my life where I almost went to Utrecht for my PhD, but I found it to be
00:09:13
Speaker
leaving the United States to study United States Great Plains archaeology just did not seem like the best idea. No. So that's why I stayed in the
Fieldwork Experiences and Preferences
00:09:23
Speaker
Great Plains. But anyways, since you're familiar with both the Canadian and European system, what are the differences in the education systems between those two areas? It's a very broad question. The biggest thing that I can think of because, you know, the European education, sorry,
00:09:41
Speaker
The European education system is so different from country to country, right? So I only really have
00:09:49
Speaker
the knowledge for Dutch and German ones. And Canadian education systems also vary really greatly throughout the provinces. But the biggest difference I noticed, especially with a bachelor's, was that I did not have to write a bachelor's thesis to graduate from my first degree. And here you really always have to write a bachelor's thesis and the degrees are only three years long.
00:10:14
Speaker
That was the biggest difference for me there. Wow, I think I would have had a hard time doing that at the end of my bachelor's degree writing a thesis. Was it like an independent research project that you had to do as part of it? From what I've heard from friends that have done their bachelor's here, it's a real thesis, essentially, just on the bachelor's level. They can be up to 20,000 words.
00:10:43
Speaker
Oh my God. It's daunting. 22 year old me would have not done that. Oh, exactly. Oh my gosh. And like my thesis was only 16,000 words. So I don't even know how they were even able to do that. You know, four years ago for me, like when I was 22, it was really scary. Um, so that was the biggest difference that I noticed. The grading is also very different.
00:11:07
Speaker
as well as the kind of course structure. I find the classes are smaller here, even though I'm a little biased because my program was only accepting six people every two years. So that's very small, but other classes I had seen as well are also a little bit more on the smaller side where at the University of Toronto, I was having classes with 300, 400 people in them, sometimes 2000. So it can quite vary that way as well.
00:11:36
Speaker
Oh, that's really interesting. I had some classes in my, in my undergrad that was like, where those huge like entry level ones that are like 150 people and you, you know, you don't even know the professor cause you're in the very back of this huge lecture hall. And I think I would appreciate more of those kinds of, uh, closer interactions with your professors, um, having that ratio of students to teachers being much better. I do better in that situation. And I think a lot of people do as well.
00:12:06
Speaker
Oh, definitely. I've seen that a lot of people here have a much closer relationship with their professors and their teachers than I would or other people I know did back in Canada. So that was really interesting to see. You actually kind of treat them more as a colleague in the Netherlands. In other countries, no. That's a big no-no. I've learned that in Belgium.
00:12:27
Speaker
have to treat them very differently in Belgium. I got in trouble. And then it's kind of a more of an open conversation that you have here. So you are able to go further into ideas and express concerns, kind of go your own way a little bit more than the projected lesson plan, for example.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah. Like a Socratic dialogue more kind of thing. Yeah. Engaging in conversation. And I think that, I don't know, I really enjoyed that about grad school as well. I don't know if David and Carlton, you do that as well as you're just, you're fully engaged and you're, you know, having conversations as opposed to just reading wrote.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah. Like I liked, especially from going from undergrad to grad school, people in graduate school were there because they wanted to study that subject more. So the conversation was always more like engaged and involved or as an undergrad, you had people that kind of had to take the class and just wanted to get the grade and leave. So it was definitely a different, like a different social structure, I guess, and how it went. But so it sounds like Europe is just better for college.
00:13:37
Speaker
Better in a lot of ways in my opinion, but yeah, we're going to stick with that for now. Yeah, I'm just like, I can't even get my students to read the syllabus, much less discuss anything important in class. It's just absolutely brutal in terms of having to sit in front of like 30 students who are taking intro to archaeology as a gen ed science.
00:13:59
Speaker
and try to talk to them about the consequences of proliferating different migration theories in the United States. And they're just sitting at me blank faced. I'm like, oh, sweet. Guess no one did the reading. Big surprise. So let me just kind of tell you why salutrion is probably not the best thing in the world.
00:14:14
Speaker
No, definitely. I've seen that for sure. And I find too that the discussions that you have here are less competitive than in North America. Everyone in North America from my own seminar classes was always trying to one up the other or dispel someone else's opinion. And here it was just kind of like a really nice, open, friendly conversation. Yeah, that was David.
00:14:39
Speaker
What's up? You're always trying to undercut me, telling me I'm stupid. I don't, it's definitely a different. No, I'm just kidding. It is competitive, at least from what I saw in grad school. Connor and I went through the same cohort and would just look at each other across the hall or the, I guess the table. I'd be like, what is happening right now? We're talking about some like in-depth theory thing we didn't understand.
00:15:07
Speaker
I think that's what you're referring to. Exactly. Yeah. But we loved it. And I guess as a last question, what did you do for fieldwork at all if you did any in your undergraduate?
00:15:21
Speaker
I wasn't able to do much fieldwork in my undergraduate because it was so expensive to do a summer field school, especially in the areas that I was studying. They always had one in Jordan or in Crete. It was $4,000 for the summer for the tuition, plus then you had to pay for your flight over there, everything else, and you couldn't work for the whole summer.
00:15:44
Speaker
So yeah, I was never able to actually do field work during my undergrad. But since moving over here, well, since graduating, I did some field work in
00:15:56
Speaker
Macedonia, I kind of, when I had my job, I used my vacation days to do some field work. And then I, when I moved over here in the Netherlands, once you paid tuition, it's covering the entire year. So if you want to go on a field school after, you know, June, when school ends, it's still covered. All you have to do is pay for your flight.
00:16:18
Speaker
Oh, which is very cool. Yeah. I think my field school was like six grand just to go to Nashville. Oh my gosh. It's ridiculous. And so it's, it's so much more accessible over here. So, uh, during my master's last year, I went to Italy in the, uh, Puglia region. And then this summer I went to Thessaly in Greece and I dug there, which was really great to actually finally get to do that field work that I'd always wanted to do. Yeah.
00:16:47
Speaker
Do you have a preference for fieldwork or lab work or a mix of both? So I really love being out in the field. It's something like I love getting my hands dirty being the physicality of it, you know, getting that pickaxe in your hand and just going out the dirt for eight hours. That was really nice to do. And the camaraderie you get there in the lab, you know, as a conservator, I'm always in the lab. So maybe for me, just getting out in the field for field season is just a good
00:17:16
Speaker
break and it's kind of my moment to go crazy.
Archaeological Interests and Career Path
00:17:20
Speaker
But I do prefer the field work sometimes just to kind of feel like I've accomplished something instead of looking at a minuscule retouch that I've been doing for the last eight hours.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely feel the same way because in my job, I work in the CRM industry and I do mapping. So I sit at a computer all day, but I really enjoy those moments of when I'm able to get outside and do work and not just stare at a computer blankly for hours on end. Oh, definitely.
00:17:51
Speaker
And on that note, somehow, the Royal amount of police have found us after last week's syrup and moose jokes. And we have to sort this out really quick. We will be right back, hopefully. Welcome back for segment two of episode nine of the Life and Ruins podcast. We're here with our guest, Raven. And so real quick, Raven, like what are you most interested in in terms of archaeology and conservation?
00:18:13
Speaker
Ooh, that's a tough one. For me, study-wise, geographically, I'm a big Egyptologist, for sure. You know, live and breathe till I die. That's one of the main reasons I went to the University of Toronto, was to actually learn how to read hieroglyphs. Big nerd. But other than that, my first field school was mosaics in Macedonia.
00:18:36
Speaker
I did conservation documentation of Roman mosaics there. And I thought that was pretty great because you're doing conservation on site. So actual like archaeological site conservation, it was a big thing. It's not it's kind of the best mix of both fieldwork and lab work just in one spot. So you're outside, but you're still doing the lab work, which is sort of like the perfect thing for me. And that's really
00:19:01
Speaker
a big interest that I have lately, now that I'm able to maybe go and find a job, if there's one available, then I would love to try and kind of push more into being onsite and being like an onsite conservator for the structures themselves. Because that for me is the biggest thing, you know, stabilizing the walls, making sure
00:19:22
Speaker
Everything is, you know, profiled, detailed properly, but also conserved because it's all exposed now, right? That's the whole problem with archaeology. You're destroying everything as you're digging it. So I would love to be the one to kind of step in there and make sure everything is okay. So I imagine you've done fieldwork in Egypt, right? I haven't. Oh my gosh. No, not yet. I really want to. I'm trying to find fieldwork that's available in Egypt. It's really difficult to find people that are willing to take
00:19:52
Speaker
me or unless you're paying for it, which is another thing I have to save up for. So if anyone's listening and they want to bring me to Egypt, I would love you so much because it's still like a dream I would have. I would do anything. I'll just be a wheelbarrow, you know, dumper. I'll just dump dirt. I don't really care as long as I get to Egypt to actually dig. It'd be great. I actually know a guy who's actually going to be a guest in two weeks, Dr. David Anderson. His wife is an Egyptologist.
00:20:19
Speaker
And they've popped me to go do fieldwork in Egypt. They just have to put your name on a list like a year in advance for the country. And I will definitely let him know. Oh, my God. Yes, please. Absolutely. OK. Yeah, I'm very excited now. OK. You can read hieroglyphs, though, right? Well, you know, you can't really sight read hieroglyphs, but I did a whole intensive on Middle Egyptian.
00:20:47
Speaker
So that's so cool. Well, from the historical documentary, The Mummy, I'm pretty sure Phoebe is able just to sight read hieroglyphs. Like, isn't that how the whole thing happens? That's another one that you should do for your YouTube. That's November. We're doing that one in November. We've already planned. Nice. I'm excited. It's so much fun. You cannot sight read hieroglyphs. That's a big no-no.
00:21:13
Speaker
I want to do a whole video on that as well, just talking about ancient languages, a whole series on it, and how to understand them, approach them that way. Perfect.
Challenges and Opportunities in Fieldwork and Media
00:21:23
Speaker
But you do have fieldwork experience, and it's in Macedonia, correct? Yes. Macedonia was my first, and then I did some fieldwork. I did more lab fieldwork in Italy, and then this summer I did fieldwork in Greece. That's awesome. What site did you work on in Macedonia?
00:21:44
Speaker
It was a late Roman site, so kind of early Christian. And it was a site called Stobi, and it's the Roman capital of Macedonia. So it's like their big, you know, archaeological site there in the country. You can even see some of the mosaic images, the big peacock mosaic on their currency. So they're very proud of this site. And the Balkan Heritage Field School runs both an archaeology excavation course there,
00:22:14
Speaker
have the mosaic conservation course and they also have a ceramic and glass conservation course there. So there are, you know, two or three weeks and it's really interesting sites but they've been digging there forever and you can actually go and see like it's a live dig. There's professional archaeologists there all the time willing to interact with you. Everything has been exposed. They have
00:22:34
Speaker
you know, an amphitheater. It was a huge city and it was really amazing to be able to kind of be on that site for the two weeks there because you're just living 500 meters from where you're working.
00:22:45
Speaker
That's awesome. I saw when I was in Europe this summer when I was in Croatia, I got to see a couple of the Roman sites. Of course, they didn't work there. I was just kind of there on vacation on my way back from Ukraine. But like to see those amphitheaters was just absolutely astonishing. And to see Roman archaeology, I thought that was like the coolest thing in the world.
00:23:05
Speaker
It's really cool to see it. My second major was Roman archaeology. To actually be on site seeing everything that you're studying, it made everything worth it, I guess. Oh, absolutely. I know here in the States, we learn about Greco-Roman history from a young age. To actually be able to see it for yourself after only seeing it in pictures and heard about in textbooks was definitely, in the realest sense, an awesome experience that it inspired awe.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, I was literally just going to piggyback on that and say when I was in Rome last year, like just having read all that in a book as a kid and like seeing pictures of it and then just walking around downtown Rome, I was just like what like in awe because everything's just so old and cool, whereas like.
00:23:48
Speaker
Here we have like a Walgreens and, uh, like a rundown seven 11. And that's, that's old for me, but it's like, it's nice over there to like, just, I could do like eat like pasta, whatever I was doing at this restaurant. And then like, you could just see the Coliseum right there. It was cool. I'm done there now, but you know, everywhere you walk, there's something there, you know, which is amazing. If you, uh, David, if you ever see an old rundown blockbuster, you let me know. Cause I want to use, send me photos of that bad boy.
00:24:18
Speaker
There is one on Long Island somewhere. It's probably been bought up by now, but irrelevant.
Role of Conservators in Europe vs. North America
00:24:22
Speaker
But yeah, I'll get you some pictures soon.
00:24:24
Speaker
It needs some historic documentation, some little photography. There was one in Captain Marvel, actually, but it was in the time. But irrelevant, Carlton. Sorry about that. So if you did field work, Romanside Macedonia, which is awesome, and then lab work in Italy, what did that consist of in terms of like what were the artifacts that you were curating? What culture was it? And kind of like this setting for, was it like a lab field school or just you were hired on?
00:24:54
Speaker
It was a field school through the University of Amsterdam. So for all of the archaeology students that need their field school credits, they went there. But a classmate of mine and I, we didn't know what to do for the summer for our elective.
00:25:09
Speaker
And we just kind of emailed the guy who was in charge of it and we said, hey, you know, we're conservation students and that we would love to just come and help out with the site. They've never had a conservator on site. They've been digging there for 25 years. And so what we were doing there was, well, first of all, the lab wasn't really a lab. We were in a little corner of an old school that we were staying in. We had little kids desks all set up.
00:25:37
Speaker
for our lab space. And we were cleaning and putting together all of the special funds. So anything that needed to be glued together, anything important that needed special attention that they didn't want to give the students with the really rough toothbrushes, they came to us. And then we were doing that for two weeks there. And it was another Roman site, but a little bit earlier than the one in Macedonia. So is that how it normally goes at sites?
00:26:06
Speaker
I don't think it's super common here in North America, at least from the stuff I've done, is that you have someone who's familiar with conservation techniques on sites, because we don't really have curation people who end up actually being out on site. We ultimately send our curation stuff to someone and they curate it. But it seems like in some places they have actual conservators, curators on site.
00:26:31
Speaker
Sort of. So when I was in Greece, for example, they had the special conservators that were from the government, right? They were kind of employed as the conservators of this region. So if there was anything that needed to be
00:26:50
Speaker
properly handled in the dirt, like on site, if it was in situ, they would have to be called in to advise and make sure that everything was handled properly. So it's not normal to have a conservator on site.
00:27:03
Speaker
normally there because of funding. Yeah. They always have fine processing people or people that are sort of in charge of the fine processing. So during the afternoon curation, so you guys call it curation over there. Is that what I'm I had to Google this when you were talking about it before because I would, we don't call it curation. So I was really confused with that at first.
00:27:23
Speaker
It depends on like what industry you're in. So like I'm technically a collections manager, but I'll call it curation. Honestly, it's just like, it depends on where you are, but curation is like the, I guess the technical term for like the subfield, if that makes sense. Okay. Okay. So it's, cause when I was looking at it, it seems a lot of like either collections management or preventive conservation essentially. Right.
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah, preventative conservation sounds way cooler. So I'm going to go with that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we do have somebody, usually someone that is in charge of making sure all the fines are processed correctly, put in the correct spot, numbered correctly and kind of stored as well as they can be at the time. Um, it's not always,
00:28:13
Speaker
someone who's employed, it can be a volunteer, but like a higher up student who has a lot of experience that way, things like that. But there is usually someone dedicated to make sure that there's a special process happening and that nothing really gets lost in the mix. Oh, that's, that's really cool. And I liked that at least you mentioned earlier that they're like state sponsored or locally sponsored.
Employment Challenges and YouTube Expansion Plans
00:28:37
Speaker
That could avoid a lot of problems that we have in like, uh,
00:28:40
Speaker
the cultural resource management industry in North America, where we have people who just kind of don't use proper conservation techniques to get stuff out of the field or blow through bone beds and stuff like that. And having someone on staff and someone who could help with that would be a huge help. But I think it would be, I'm not sure that would completely work in our field.
00:29:05
Speaker
It would be super interesting. I really like the principle of it. Yeah, it's a little bit of a difficult thing to make happen because even with the conservators in Greece, we called them in and they came on a special day and they said, okay, well, we need, maybe we'll come back in two weeks to help you with this one thing that we needed a little bit more care to take out of the ground. And then once they left, I kind of said like to our field supervisor, like, I'm a conservator. I can get this out for you. And then they were very happy that I could do it and kind of step in.
00:29:33
Speaker
without having to wait because it was this little layer that we needed to get rid of earlier than two weeks from now. So I kind of spent the next three days very carefully working away at that. And it was a little bit nicer for them so they didn't have to wait for it. So you have a lot of experience and you've done a lot of work. Now that you're graduated with your master's, what are the fieldwork opportunities for you on the horizon coming up?
00:30:01
Speaker
So far, nothing really, I'm still trying to come down from the whole handing in the thesis thing. But I am starting to kind of look more into field opportunities that can be that will be available for next field season. Again, if the more experience I can get, the better I would love to go to other parts in the Mediterranean or North Africa, Middle East kind of areas, definitely going to, you know, where I
00:30:30
Speaker
I studied with my bachelor's kind of go back to those roots and get more into archeology. Cause I had my little two years of science and lab fun, but now I want to go back and get dirty a little bit. So I'm still looking if anyone, again, if anyone wants to bring me along for the ride, that'd be great. But other than that, it's, you know, just staring into the abyss of post-grad life, which is always fun. Come join the party. It is, I wouldn't say it's fun, but it is pretty fun.
00:30:59
Speaker
I wish I could say it gets better.
00:31:02
Speaker
but I most likely be lying. In the States here, we usually like, I mean, I'm employed, like I have an archaeological job right now and I kind of got it through word of mouth with like a project that I was working on. But for other people, they can go through like shovelbombs, I think it's .org or archaeologyfieldwork.net. In Europe, are there any networks like that for people like in your position to find archaeological employment?
00:31:30
Speaker
Not really like every country, every sort of area has their own specific website. Sure. And because there's so many languages in Europe, it's a little bit difficult to find them and navigate through them. So that's kind of a challenge. You know, like my Dutch is not the best. You know, I can order a beer, I can, you know, ask for directions, but that's pretty much it. The important things. Definitely. But, you know, we're trying to get a job,
00:32:00
Speaker
doing, for example, CRM in the Netherlands can be a little bit tricky now for me, right? Because I don't speak the language and it'll be a little difficult becoming a freelance conservator in the Netherlands as well. It's already very competitive and throwing in the fact that I don't speak the language. You know, no one's going to want me over the Dutch person, right? So it's one of those things. So right now I'm just kind of working
00:32:24
Speaker
at the job I had to get through school, paying off the student debt, which is always fun, and just kind of seeing if there are any more field work opportunities. And eventually, I'm sure I'll land into something eventually. But of course, I really want to grow my YouTube channel, because that I think can kind of become my little baby. And yeah, maybe be a full time thing. Who knows if it gets big enough.
00:32:51
Speaker
So that's- I mean, you're killing it. Yeah, it's looking like you're gonna end up that way. Yeah. Well, I have the time now for it, right? So now I like, you know, the graduation happened and it's just full, you know, full speed ahead with the YouTube channel, making sure I can get content once or even maybe twice a week, maybe come January to make sure it's growing the way I want it to.
The YouTube Channel Journey
00:33:13
Speaker
Well, let's keep the listeners on the edge of their seats and let's take this in the next section. We'll talk about your YouTube channel.
00:33:20
Speaker
Okay. So we're back with session three of episode nine of a life rumors podcast with Raven, also known as dig it with Raven, which is your YouTube channel. So I'm going to let you start. Um, would you like to explain to our listeners who probably haven't seen your channel yet, or if they have what your channel is about? Yeah, of course. So my channel, I guess I started it almost two and a half years ago now and it's a.
00:33:49
Speaker
kind of a public access channel, I would say, for archaeology, art conservation, history, like visiting historical sites and museums, things like that to kind of make it accessible for
00:34:05
Speaker
everybody and I first started it because well I was living in Germany and I had no social life so I had to be productive somehow and I realized that when I was a bachelor student with archaeology there were all of these things that I would have loved to have a quick little YouTube video about to explain it better or to understand it
00:34:27
Speaker
So when I remember going to school and not having this resource and I realized, well, I could be that resource. I can explain things in a way that can be a little bit better understood and so on. And to make it maybe more exciting and fun for people to get into. So people that are maybe unsure about getting into the field or are afraid of the science behind it or anything like that, I can make it more
00:34:52
Speaker
exciting and not so stuffy or as I call it on my channel, you know, making it, make it sexy.
00:34:59
Speaker
teacher from, he was from New Zealand. He was one of my history teachers and he taught history of Hellenistic Greece, the most fascinating class I've ever taken. And this is an aside, but he would call everything sexy as like, and he would say it in terms of being like right at the end of a sentence and he'd be like, sexy. And he'd say, and it's just like stuck with me. And when people say like, I got a big archeology sexy, I hear it in that guy's voice because it's honestly the truth because
00:35:23
Speaker
There's a lot of people that talk about archaeology that are great archaeologists, but it's the most dry thing I've ever heard, or it's just 45 minutes of a camera shaking in the background. And you know, it's just not accessible. So I really like that you use the word accessible too, because it's
00:35:42
Speaker
It's really hard to find that. So I commend you for doing that. It's super good. I know Carlton and Connor and I were a huge fan of your recent video. Carlton, do you want to take that one?
00:35:54
Speaker
I have to say you beat us to the punch. Those videos that you have produced, for years, when I was in undergrad, I had the same thought about having a YouTube channel that talks about archaeology in an accessible and fun way. I've always kept her eye on it. Then over this past summer, I think is when we ran into you, I had this realization of
00:36:18
Speaker
We got beat to the punch, but not in like a bad way because everything you've done on YouTube and your Instagram, which is also called dig it with Raven is really well done and really informative and really engaging.
00:36:30
Speaker
And the your last video, it wasn't your last video, the Indiana Jones one. Yeah, yeah, it was my last one. That was a goal for our listeners. It's archaeologists react to Indiana Jones. And it's is it the last? It's not the last crusade, right? It's no, it's Raiders of the Lost Ark. They like the good one. And you did that with a friend of yours, right? Yes, I did a friend, my friend Jude. And I will not pronounce your last name because I know I will mess it up.
00:36:59
Speaker
Uh, but, uh, she is also an archeologist. She's an osteologist, just finished her masters as well. And yeah, we were realizing that everyone's doing these reaction videos. And when we're, you know, I'm talking about archeology to people.
00:37:15
Speaker
that have only experienced it through popular culture, it can become a bit of a headache or very misunderstood. So we're like, well, let's do it ourselves. So we made some food, very themed food for Raiders and themed alcohol. And we just kind of had a really fun time.
00:37:31
Speaker
watching it and pretending essentially to watch it for the first time but through the archaeology lens and it was really fun. What's your favorite segment from that video? Oh gosh, probably half the stuff that I cut out and that's not actually in the video.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah I made a behind the scenes thing for my Patreon and that's when I had the most fun kind of going through all of our bloopers and just every time you know they were eating dates we'd be like eat a date and we'd eat a date and dip it in the tahini and you know pretend we're there at the
00:38:03
Speaker
I'm trying to convince Jude to dress up as Marianne for Halloween because she could make a really good one, things like that. But just kind of going through it and screaming at the television about ruining all of the archaeological sites that he's going through and just destroying everything. It was kind of fun to kind of really finally call that out and explain to people, like, this is not OK.
00:38:28
Speaker
So I know there's a part in that video where you and your friend get a little upset over a part. And I think we can insert that to this podcast right about here. I've told you not to be premature in your communicator, Berlin. I have so many things about this. This is not what it looks like.
Creative Challenges and Collaborations
00:38:47
Speaker
That is just a chaotic sight.
00:38:51
Speaker
They literally just hired people to dig and there's no documentation. No order. No order. Where's the pressure's walking on site? So the video is absolutely phenomenal and your Instagram is also really engaging and you have a lot of followers. This archaeologist, React Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was published about two weeks ago and it already has over 2,500 views.
00:39:15
Speaker
And another thing we noticed when, how long ago did you get your logo for your stuff? I got it just before I launched officially. So that would have been late July, early August, 2017.
00:39:34
Speaker
I believe. So a friend of mine, she owns a tea store in Canada, but she also used to own with her husband this marketing company and their logo designer or their, their designer had owed them a favor. And so she kind of called in that favor for me and he designed it for me.
00:39:54
Speaker
We've been struggling for months now for our own logo and we finally got one that we liked and then we realized how similar it was to yours.
00:40:04
Speaker
I spent hours on this and then I looked at the, like the me version of the cave art that's on that. We all decided, okay, cool. We're going to do cave art. We're going to make it simple and it's going to be like personalities of us. And then I saw that I'm holding the shovel in the corner and I kind of like took it from this like cave art thing that we found. And then I saw yours today.
00:40:25
Speaker
When I was talking to college before we did this and I was like, Oh no, it's literally your logo. So we can't use it now. So we have to keep beating us to great ideas. And we're just trying to play catch up. So now we're like, all right, back to the drawing board. Cause that's what happens when the three of us get together to do something. Do you outsource to Fiverr at all?
00:40:49
Speaker
for things. No idea everything myself. Okay. Yeah. Maybe we need to do that because I've, we tried to outsource to Fiverr a few times. And that's the benefit of just being, I guess, on your own, like this, the three of us trying to argue over what we think would work and not work. And then we'll send it to Fiverr. And when you spend $20 to someone to do that on Fiverr to make you a nice logo, you get a $20 for the logo.
00:41:15
Speaker
And it is, yeah, her 36 year old. I don't know. We wanted to have a trumpeting mammoth holding a microphone, which we thought would be easy enough.
00:41:25
Speaker
But, oh my good God. Some missions we got, like I guess we'll put them in on as links for the episode and throw them up on Instagram. Words can't explain. It was just like, we told them like, hey, can we have like somewhat similar to the Jurassic Park theme, but like not blatant. And the first one we got would have gotten a straight up legal trouble with Universal Studios, because that's all he did was copy the Jurassic Park font. We're like, we can't.
00:41:54
Speaker
Even down to the colors, we can't use this, dude. And we went back and forth with this guy four or five times before finally we just ate it. We're like, sorry, dude, we don't want any part of this anymore. We're just going to do this on our own. Well, I have someone who can possibly help you out with that. Well, he's my boyfriend, actually. So he helps me with my thumbnails now because he's the Photoshop expert. Nice. And he's also the one holding the camera whenever we do one of the field trip episodes.
00:42:21
Speaker
which is really nice. He just took it one day and became my cameraman. So it's excellent. But he can definitely, if I can convince him, I probably can to help you out with your logo. Cool. Perfect. What's your favorite video that you've done so far on YouTube? For me, it would have to be the archaeologists trying to be sexy. The pickup lines video I did.
00:42:44
Speaker
Oh yeah. That one came out like this summer. Yeah. I filmed it while I was in Greece. I still have so much footage from there, but we were hanging out one night just talking about archeology themed pickup lines. And we made a whole list of them and I was like, guys, we need to film this. We need to put this, you know, on the internet. So somehow I convinced them all to try to be sexy and see their lines. And it was so fun to make. And everyone, because we were all so close during the day and I finished filming it there.
00:43:14
Speaker
and editing it. So just showing everybody firsthand and seeing their reactions to it and how much they loved it was very rewarding for me.
Favorite Projects and Future Content
00:43:22
Speaker
That was like, I think my favorite one to work on. Good. I actually saw that when it came out and I was still in Ukraine and I showed it with my crew in Ukraine and they loved it. I loved it and we thought about doing it, but there was, they wanted to do it in Ukrainian. I'm like, guys, I don't know any Ukrainian. I'm sorry.
00:43:42
Speaker
I do want to do a part two. People keep asking me for part two and we did make enough to do it. So part two might come soon. My undergrad professor like wanted our motto for the field school to be archaeologists always looking for good dates. And it was just like funny the first time, but not, you know, for the whole summer and to be put on a t-shirt. And we did a mustache Monday thing and I had shaved just to have a mustache.
00:44:06
Speaker
And there's a picture of me like leaning on a pole and someone made a meme of it. And it's just like me looking creepy as have like ever. And it says archeologists looking for good dates and I'm going to find it and I'll put it on our Instagram. It's terrible, but it belongs in a video like that. It's bad. I think I'm like 22 moving on. Carlton, didn't you just do a pun about dates on your presentation at planes?
00:44:33
Speaker
All of my publications and presentations so far have been puns. So there's, what is it? It's like dating apps and archaeology, matching the radiocarbon record with indigenous world traditions.
00:44:47
Speaker
And then the other one is recovering from bad dates, like moving forward with radiocarbon. Like, yeah. The first one, I think I'm a genius and like people are generation love it. But then like when I'm at a conference, like at planes and I'm sitting in front of mostly a crowd of 50 to 60s who are definitely not part of the online dating scene. Like it just goes right over their heads. And I'm sitting up there giggling like an idiot after I like
00:45:12
Speaker
say the title of my talk and they're just like, this kid's a frigging moron. Like, why is he laughing at the presentation? And I'm like, well, I think I'm clever. Speaking of dating and dates, uh, your next video that you're, you're working on is on carbon dating, right? Yes. I've been editing that all day. Yeah. Do you, you guys use like final cut or do you use Adobe or how do you mind explaining like how you guys do that? Or?
00:45:38
Speaker
I use Adobe Premiere Pro. Okay. So I learned how to do that. I used to use Lightworks because it was free. And then I was able to get a Premiere very sneakily, but I was able to get Premiere. I learned from it. Yeah. I did a bunch of Skillshare videos on how to do it. So I had to learn it all myself. And so I've been kind of going, you know, whenever I need to add a new effect or try something new with the video, I have to kind of learn it myself and do it as I go.
00:46:08
Speaker
That's why it's been taking a little bit longer, but now I'm getting into a really good rhythm with Premiere, which is nice. And it's a very, very cool program to use. Yeah. I like it when it doesn't crash on me, but it takes so much bandwidth from my computer. Like it's just, it's overheating constantly. Like I need a desktop to edit all the videos. I do because they, when they export, it just heats everything up so quickly. And I've, I've lost a couple of hard drives from it because they heat the hard drive up.
00:46:38
Speaker
It's ridiculous, but I do like it. I don't think I will change it for a while because it's a, it does everything I need it to do. And it, you know, I'm not the most computer savvy person. And so for me to be able to kind of, you know, cause I'm doing this all by myself. So for me to actually be able to learn it and put out decently, call decent quality videos, it was really nice to have that resource.
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. YouTube and Skillshare has been a really good source of information for, I guess, us and for my stuff personally, but it's been helpful. I wouldn't be able to, well, I guess we wouldn't have done the podcast. I couldn't do ethnosynology without YouTube. Big resources for sure.
Public Archaeology and Community Engagement
00:47:22
Speaker
Um, is there a, uh, you can be quiet, Connor. Um, is there, I'm so sorry. So sorry. I don't know. Okay. Um, it's, I love your Instagram, by the way, still dig it with Raven. Is there, um, another Instagram profile? Like, is there like, do you have like a, uh, a profile that you like to follow it on Instagram? Like another archeology based one that you find like really interesting or competitive?
00:47:53
Speaker
The most recent one that I found that I love is Amelia. Amelia, that's her girl. Yeah, she's so cool. And we chat all the time now on Instagram, both on her personal and her archaeology one. So she's someone I really want to meet in person. She seems really like such an amazing
00:48:16
Speaker
you know, human being. So I've been loving following her in all of her videos. And another one I've been following is called Mummy Stories. I haven't heard of that one either. I'm gonna have to check it out. I'm gonna do that right now. It's not quite archaeological, but it's, it's run by this woman called Angela Stein. And I just met her when I was in Italy last month, and she studies human remains and their
00:48:41
Speaker
display the ethics in displaying them, the conservation, all this stuff. She wants to bring out these public stories about human interaction with human remains, whether they be mummies or bones, things like that. It's actually really interesting to read people's first interactions with them, how they
00:49:02
Speaker
view human remains, what their opinions are about them, things like that. It's really nice. Yeah. I know with Amelia, I met her in person. She actually came to one of my talks here in Boulder and she was absolutely phenomenal. And it's actually because of her, we're getting all of our podcasts transcribed on YouTube. So that way audiences who are, um,
00:49:26
Speaker
Deaf or Deaf Plus can have access to our content because that's something she brought to light to us that, you know, this is purely audio and there's a segment of the population that just can't, that isn't privy to it. And it was really awesome to meet her and then have those discussions. So I'm like really glad that you're talking with her. Like I think that's awesome.
00:49:46
Speaker
She's super cool and she also kind of sparked that for me whenever I do an Instagram video now I make sure I have I use the app that kind of subtitled it. I want to make sure that it's accessible to everybody and kind of you know it was one of those things where on Instagram especially you don't really think about it. My YouTube videos have always been closed captioned and I've always made sure that
00:50:09
Speaker
It's correct. I always go through that, but I never thought about it for Instagram stories, for example, because they're just so quick. So it was really nice to make sure that that was taken care of, essentially.
00:50:21
Speaker
Well, with everything you've learned in school with both your degrees now and with doing this YouTube, what have you learned about public archeology? What do you like most? I love when I get emails from people. I know sometimes people don't really like when they get pestered all the time from the public and from random people emailing you. But I love getting emails from younger students, like high school students I've been getting a lot of or early bachelor students kind of saying,
00:50:49
Speaker
You know, I've seen your videos. I was thinking about going into archaeology or even art conservation, and I was a little unsure. But after seeing this, I'm really interested in it. It's something I want to pursue. How can I get there? You know, this is what I'm doing. These are my limitations, my interests. You know, what can I do to kind of follow this path? And I love getting those so that I can actually help people get into the field, have them understand what
00:51:18
Speaker
they need to do because I didn't I didn't have anything especially with conservation it's such a weird field to try and get into you need all this extra prep work all these internships before you even apply extra chemistry classes everything so being able to share that and kind of help people
00:51:35
Speaker
get to that point is really nice. I think that was the best thing that has come out of this for me.
Aspirations and Future Plans
00:51:40
Speaker
And then also meeting really amazing people online too, you know, with public archaeology on social media especially is such a
00:51:51
Speaker
a beast in its own way in comparison to normal public archaeology essentially. You can have a lot more conversation and you can explain things. You can take the time to write things down and talk to people individually, get that one-on-one information to make sure that people are
00:52:07
Speaker
understanding it but also appreciating it and walking away with something that they can also come back to because they can save a post they can rewatch a video things like that yeah exactly yeah so i have to say real quick with like getting feedback from the public i definitely have to give a shout out to uh katie ibson she sent us i guess it was like
00:52:24
Speaker
email support earlier in the week. And I definitely have to say, well, it was a week ago that getting that email from her actually made my week because I was so stressed about the conference and like wondering if I'm not prioritizing right and like getting that email from her to our podcast Gmail was awesome. So we actually read that stuff. And second, do you follow archaeology gains on Instagram?
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah, we've had some good chats. Perfect. Oh God, we love him. He is one of our favorite people on this planet and I absolutely love his Instagram. But on that note, I have to say that it's been phenomenal having you on. We've really followed your social media and I'm a fan of all the work that you're doing.
00:53:06
Speaker
And I know we're trying to aspire to get to that point with the YouTube channel and engaging with the public. So thank you for what you do and engaging with the public. I think it's extremely important. It looks like Archaeology Gains is in another battle over evolution. So we're going to have to cut it short. So we just chatted with Raven Todd De Silva. She's an archaeologist and conservator that runs the popular and informative YouTube channel.
00:53:35
Speaker
dig it with Raven and her Instagram by the same name. So Raven, thank you so much for your time. And we look forward to seeing what comes next in your career. Carlton, you forgot the mega question. Absolutely. And if you had the second chance or if you could do this all over again, would you like to, would you continue to live your life in ruins? Oh, definitely. And I would do it sooner. I spent too much time kind of
00:54:02
Speaker
trying to find myself or do my own thing. I would definitely do it years ago instead of doing my first field experience this year.
00:54:15
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So a conservative falls down clutching his chest and people run over him and try to help. The ambulance comes and tries to take him away, but other conservatives won't let him go. What is their reasoning?
00:54:44
Speaker
He belongs in a museum!
00:55:12
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.