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aDNA and Stone Tools with Beth Potter - Ep 122
616 Plays3 years ago
On this episode, we are back with new content! We talk with Beth Potter, who is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. We talk about Beth first's archaeological conference at age 13 and her experience there. Beth then describes her experience going to a small state-school called Harvard University. We delve into her experience in French Canada and what brought her there. She then deep dives into her scientific research and how one gets aDNA from stone tools.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/ruins/122
Literature Recommendation
- Lithic Analysis by George Odell
- Ancient DNA analysis by Orlando et. al in Nature Reviews Methods Primers
- The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us By Robert L. Kelly
Guest Contact
- Instagram: @blpotter13
- Twitter: @bpotz13
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 122 of A Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I am your host, Connor Jonin, and we might be joined by our co-host, David Eenhaal. He thinks Starlink is the greatest thing on planet earth, and every time we try to record with him, it never
00:00:32
Speaker
never happens. So maybe he'll be here. Carlton is off doing adult stuff so we're hoping to catch him back one of these days once he's settled in and got all his stuff together from moving across the country. I do want to mention before we start an interview, thank you so much for bearing with us and allowing us to take a month off of not creating new content. We all needed a break. I needed to go to Hawaii and do nothing for like 10 days. David needed to do like stupid paleo Indian archaeology where they're finding like
00:01:01
Speaker
cool points and blah, blah, blah, blah. And Carlton just needed a break from a lot of things. So thank you so much. We will be back. We're going to be producing new content every week. But thank you for giving us the month off.
Meet the Guest: Beth Potter
00:01:15
Speaker
For this week's episode, we are joined by Beth Potter, a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas. Beth, how are you doing today? I'm pretty good.
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. We met through, um, and I know David met you through, uh, the La Prelle field school or the La Prelle site up in Wyoming. We'll get more into this later. The first time I met you, I think you were in like your full, I'm getting DNA costume, which is pretty awesome. All garbed up. Yeah. Yep.
00:01:49
Speaker
So yeah, no, it's great to have you on. We're super interested to hear about your research. And I guess David is here.
Beth's Early Interest in Archaeology
00:01:55
Speaker
So we'd like to start off with these interviews by just asking kind of where your first interaction with science, archaeology or anthropology was when you were growing up. I was an archaeology nerd pretty young, actually. I got super into Egypt. And then when I was in like middle school, I had a subscription to archaeology magazine because I was a nerd nerd.
00:02:19
Speaker
for my 13th birthday, the like archaeology Institute of America conference was in Boston and I lived in Maine. And that's what I asked for for my birthday was to go to an academic conference because I saw it advertised in a magazine. That's awesome. Yeah.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, it started with Egypt and then it kind of, I didn't go to college for it or I didn't apply to college thinking I was going to do archaeology though. I applied as a like pure math major and then I was like, I'm going to take introduction to archaeology because like I used to like that. That'll be fun. And then I got sucked back in real fast. Yeah. What was it like being a 13 year old at an academic conference? Whoa.
00:03:10
Speaker
Honestly, it was a lot more fun than conferences now because there were no expectations. There was no pressure. I was just there because I was like, these are things that I'm interested in. And I didn't know what I was listening to in the sense of what academic presentations were. I didn't really know what to expect in that sense. I was just like, people are going to be talking about these cool things that I already know I'm interested in. And they did. And they were cool. And some of them sucked.
00:03:40
Speaker
And I learned very quickly that some of the ones that have really cool titles are super boring. Yeah, I could just do what I wanted and nobody really, there was no expectations, which is kind of nicer than now.
From Math Major to Archaeology at Harvard
00:03:51
Speaker
Well, then you didn't have like those awkward interactions where you're like, I know you, but I read your paper somewhere, but I don't know how to interact with you. Cause that happens to me every single time I go. It's like, Oh yeah. Or like trying to like cold introduce yourself to somebody cause you like, I need to network with this person, but I don't know them, but I know I need to know them. It's the most awful and like awkward thing you can possibly do. It's terrible.
00:04:17
Speaker
Yeah. I'm like, you have to have somebody like help you and hold your hand to be like, who is, can you, can you introduce me to this person? But you can't do that. So you have to just walk up to them and be like, I'm Beth. It's like, I'm Beth. I want to know you. Do we know each other now? Thank you. Exactly. Uh, yeah, it's, it's super hard. Um, so what was like your, since you went at 13, like, what was your takeaway from it?
00:04:46
Speaker
It was interesting how much more niche research could be than I had really expected, like how expansive it was and how really detailed people could get into things that were particularly interesting to them.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah, me too. I mean, cause I feel like your exposure to that stuff is like Nat Geo or History Channel, which is like those broad concepts, but you're looking at like site by site or data point by data point and kind of seeing it from like a whole different perspective. Yeah. And it was AI. So it was more like classical
00:05:30
Speaker
then obviously like classical in Egypt and old world stuff. And there were a lot of like more and more tie-ins with literature and stuff like that than what I do now. But it also made me feel like whenever I understood something, I felt so cool. And looking back on it, that's not cool. I was just a nerd, but I felt so cool. That's good. I mean, I think we all kind of like
00:05:58
Speaker
strive for that, especially as kids, because you're in that weird spot where you don't want to be outcasted for being a nerd, but also at the same time you're super into your niche interests and you wanted to pursue them. I assume that everybody that was there thought that my mom was an academic and that I was a tag-along child.
00:06:18
Speaker
It was the opposite. You were the academic? Oh, I'm the academic. So Beth, by the way, I'm back. We met at Laprelle as well for the people who didn't know. I think you're a really cool person. Also, Connor, I don't know if you know this. Beth ate 10 burritos. She beat Naomi's record. Yeah. I'm really proud of that. I'm super proud of you at Laprelle.
00:06:45
Speaker
Whatever's left over from dinner, Rich Adams makes into burritos and he makes a lot of them. And some people try to beat the record and Beth did it. Wow. Segueing from that burrito like episode though, like, did you learn how to crush burritos at the Ivy league school known as Hobbit?
00:07:07
Speaker
Yes, it's a time-honored tradition at
Graduate Studies in Canada
00:07:10
Speaker
Harvard. Actually, all of the freshmen gather and part of your initiation, you have to eat burritos that are shaped like John Harvard's foot. Wild. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if when we talked, because I sat next to you and I was like, you know, tell me your life story because you seemed really interesting. I don't remember.
00:07:37
Speaker
If you mentioned Harvard, you might've just said you went to school in Massachusetts. I think I just said I went to school in Massachusetts. Because I would have remembered Harvard. Good for you, Juan. And then what was that like? I mean, it was going from a small town in Maine to a very wealthy school was weird. Yeah. I thought I knew what Rich was and then I went to Harvard and I was like, oh, oh, that's what Rich is.
00:08:06
Speaker
Yeah, people like my grandfather came on Mayflower in 1641. I was just, I specifically remember being in line at a Starbucks and somebody was like, I can't go on the family vacation because I have to intern at my father's law firm. Holy shit. I was like, I'm sorry.
00:08:25
Speaker
What was all that? None of that confused. Was it legally blonde? Was she from, did she go to Harvard? She goes to Harvard blonde. Okay, that's like my only actual exposure to Harvard besides knowing that it's habit and fancy and whatnot. So you went there for mathematics originally. That's how I applied, yeah.
00:08:53
Speaker
What was your goal? Were you going to be a math teacher or were you going to do some Einstein calculations? What were you feeling? I don't know what I possibly had in mind afterwards, but I just wanted to do pure math. Damn. Yeah. And then I didn't.
00:09:10
Speaker
like the math department as much as I expected to.
Field School Experience and Research Focus
00:09:15
Speaker
And I loved my intro arc. Turns out I still loved arc. So I started as a combined social anthro and arc. At Harvard, we have concentrations. We don't have majors. We have concentrations. And so as an anthro concentrator, you can be social or arc as your focus.
00:09:38
Speaker
And I started as a combined focus on social and arc and then switched to just arc. Bio is separate. That's HEB and linguistics is also its own department. Wow. I guess that's kind of like old worldy. Like that's how like those schools are from the people overseas we've interviewed.
00:09:58
Speaker
It's no, the, the AGB human evolutionary biology is biological anthropology at Harvard. And that split was political from my understanding that people just didn't go along with each other.
00:10:16
Speaker
Bioanthropologists fighting with each other? No. No way. Was it UCLA that was the same thing? Or was that the social and art? Yeah, it was the schism. Yeah. I think most of the California schools are like that. Yeah, that checks out. What were your classes like? And what was your kind of, did you have any like hands-on classes where you like got to play around with artifacts or things like that?
00:10:45
Speaker
So like our tutorial, tutorials are like, they were like these little seminars that you took with everybody else who is an archeology person in your grade, in your year, whatever. And so we all had tutorial together and our art tutorials were small. And for one of them, we got to go through all of the Peabody Museum's collections and put together like an exhibit, which was really cool. And then they have a lot of mochi stuff.
00:11:15
Speaker
So it's, Harvard's collections are, there's a lot of like South and some Central America stuff. Actually a lot of Central America too. There's a ton of mochi stuff. And so we got to like use different like mochi pots for our research project and stuff, which was, that was pretty neat. Mochi pots are interesting. They are interesting.
00:11:38
Speaker
We've had this talk before on, I think it was a 20 minute rant one time. So if the audience is not familiar, Moche Pots are also known as Moche Sex Pots because they have a lot of phalluses and like non-phalluses on them. But I'm assuming the ones you were working with weren't just those, right? It was mostly those. That's a lot. I was hoping you would say something like that. Cool. Yeah.
00:12:06
Speaker
And I think most of the cool Mayanists and Mayan archaeology stuff does come from Harvard, from what I've understood. So that checks out. Yeah. Honestly, undergrad access to collections in the Peabody Museum is phenomenal. That was a really cool thing. Didn't they take all the stuff from Machu Picchu? That was also a Harvard thing? They took a lot
PhD Research on Ancient DNA
00:12:29
Speaker
of stuff.
00:12:29
Speaker
We took a lot of stuff. There's like an entire staircase and the repository that's just chilling. There's a whole ass staircase. That's insane. That's really cool. Somebody put it on a boat and creates and put it on a boat in 18 something and now it's at Harvard.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of like repatriation issues and things like that that probably need to be discussed at some point. Yeah. Anyway, besides concentrating on Mochi sex pots and burrito championships, what was your like, like obviously you did what you're doing now as a concentration, but like what was kind of some stuff you did as an undergrad?
00:13:10
Speaker
I mean, so my field school was in the Northeast and it was, we were looking for paleo and de-incites, which nobody at Harvard does. Like nothing that I was doing was what anybody there did. There was one lithicist there at the time, Ofer Barjosef, but he was trying to retire.
00:13:28
Speaker
He wasn't taking any undergrads on to advise. So like when I was trying to do like my senior thesis, there was like nobody who knew what I was doing. So there was one person who worked in North America, Matt Liebman, who was phenomenal. He was like, I don't know what you're doing, but like, I know how to write.
00:13:57
Speaker
And I can get you in contact with people. So at your field school, you worked with Heather and Nathaniel, correct? Her Heather, Heather, Heather was my, yeah, she was my crew chief. Um, my field school. She was a while. I didn't realize that. Yeah. That's awesome. Connections. That's how you found out about Wyoming, right? Yeah. Cause I think, well, I think she was still at Tulsa at that point. Cause Jesse Boyd came up that year as well.
00:14:27
Speaker
All the connections. Yeah. Yeah. I work with Jesse every, every day, most days. Nice. Oh yeah. Right. Cause they, they met each other here probably. Anyway. So after that you went to graduate school and that was in Canada and I think we're at a good spot where we can pick that up next segment so people can hear about that transition. Life in Ruins Podcast 122. We'll be right back.
00:14:54
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 122 of Life in Rules podcast. I am live from my school bus that I live in because my life is weird in the middle of Wyoming. We are here with Beth Potter and she is going to tell us about why she made the critical life choice that we all somehow make of going to grad school.
00:15:11
Speaker
that we regret immediately, but also don't regret. And why in Canada? That was a lot of question. Yeah. Why did I go to grad school? I missed research. I liked doing research. The little taste of it I got as an undergrad and then I missed it. I was teaching high school straight out of college and I loved it, but
00:15:39
Speaker
I was really ready to leave that school and I missed research and I just felt like the right timing. So. Okay. How long of break did you have? It was just like two years. Okay. So what like brought you specifically to the university that you went to? So it applies to a few places. I wasn't sure if it was like the paleo Indian or if it was the Northeast that I had really enjoyed more because I knew I like, I enjoyed my undergrad thesis work.
00:16:08
Speaker
But I wasn't sure which part of it that I had really liked. And so I applied to places that was like what there were one or the other. And Montreal had some collections that I could work with that were from a Southern Quebec site. And I was able to get in-province tuition, which was a major factor as well. In-province. That is a term I haven't heard before, but it makes sense because we have in-state.
00:16:34
Speaker
When I was writing, it was like $500 a semester. Yeah. And it came with a, no. No, and it comes with an automatic, the visa comes with a work permit automatically for up to 20 hours a week. So like I was fully able to just work part-time and sustain myself. That's awesome. I made all the wrong decisions in life. It was a really great deal.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah. So what was like a grad school like for you there? And like, what did you do? We'll talk about that first. We can get into what you researched after, but like, yeah, everyone's grad school experience is quite interesting.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's not like a huge department. It wasn't like a thing where there were classes that were offered like every semester that every grad student had to take or anything like that. And so, but it was very focused on like hunter-gatherers and landscape use and niche exploitation was like a lot of what my coursework focused on, which I didn't really know going into it.
00:17:41
Speaker
what that all meant, like what the coursework available necessarily meant to a degree, but it ended up working out really well for me. It was definitely weird not being a native speaker and trying to be part of a grad program because it's also, university culture is like very different in French Canada. People are more likely to go places that are like closer to home and live at home.
00:18:07
Speaker
So it wasn't like the department is all encompassing in the way it really can be in the US. Like you said, you're going into the heart of French Canada. Did you have to learn French to kind of get by and meet people and whatnot?
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, my classes were in French. My advisor was bilingual. I worked with Adrian Burke, and he speaks English, which was nice. And I ended up writing my thesis in English, because I knew that I wanted to apply to PhD programs in the US. So the university just offered me an exception for that. Cool. But yeah, the courses in French, that was like,
00:18:53
Speaker
Exhausting. It was really exhausting to be trying to function at that like academic level in a second language. Was he a tall dude with black hair and glasses? Yep. Tall dude, black hair. I met him in Rome. Probably glasses. Yeah. Sounds right. We were at a conference and I remember he spoke French with everybody, but he was one of the only people that spoke English and I was like, Oh, thank God.
00:19:20
Speaker
Good duckling. Cool. Yeah. No, he's wicked nice. I can't imagine taking advanced degrees in other languages. It was hard enough in English, in my home language, you know, reading. So you did like, you read like Bordeaux in like Bordeaux language. It's convenient because so much lithic stuff comes out of France.
00:19:47
Speaker
So it's, it has continued to work out in my favor somehow. Does it make any more sense? Like in its natural French, or is it still kind of. No, no, it still hurts. Okay. Okay. I think it hurts more because French is so like indirect compared to English. Yeah. And like of the romance languages, French is like the hardest for me to like pick out anything.
00:20:18
Speaker
Like I can understand Spanish and like some Italian, but then French, I'm like, I have no idea. So like props to you for going into that. Everything sounds the same. Everything. Like all of the words just sound the same. It's just, it's a pile of vowels.
00:20:35
Speaker
That's the name of the episode. So as part of your thesis, you wrote on lithic raw material usage in the archaic Northeast. What did you find out about lithic raw material usage in the archaic Northeast as part of your research? Such a generic title.
00:20:58
Speaker
I, yeah, so I was really just trying to identify like an area of archaic occupation at this one site and then see if there was anything to be discovered from the deputage basically. And I did end up identifying some like activity areas that there was a very clear area where people were like finishing tools because all the deputage there was just like pressure flakes and stuff.
00:21:26
Speaker
And then otherwise it's pretty much what you'd expect. A lot more like big chunky stuff out of the local materials and bunches of teeny pressure flakes and stuff from farther away, which is not surprising, but now it's written down. Uh, I'm going to interject really quick because I don't think we've ever defined Devotage to be honest listening. So like when you're making stone tools, like you pop the flakes off and then there's like tiny little flakes that come off in later stage reduction, but also just break in half.
00:21:55
Speaker
And like that would be called debitage, which is French for visit trash. So when you say debitage in French for like lithics, actually, if you're talking about debitage, it's the process of flaking. Really?
00:22:07
Speaker
So that's annoying and confusing. Yeah. Okay. Well, for the Americans listening, debitage is the stuff you find at an archeological set that's on the ground, small flakes. Well, and it can be things that turn into tools beforehand. So like a flake that you knock off is technically debitage, but once you start creating into a tool or thing like that, it becomes something different.
00:22:34
Speaker
Yeah, we can get into the weeds on that too, like a chorus to Devotage. This is jumping ahead, but there is absolutely a video of Erika Blecca defining Devotage in a Valley Girl accent as like a small potato chip like saying that you can use to cut material. It's so good. We have to talk about her and Brian because they're fantastic people, absolutely fantastic people.
00:23:03
Speaker
The Devotage was about what you expect, how you expect people to be using different materials. I was able to define some activity areas, which was kind of neat. I didn't think I was going to be able to. It's nice to know when that stuff works and get good results. Speaking of results, what was your thesis on? Did you enjoy the thesis and did you get
00:23:32
Speaker
what you wanted out of grad school? Yeah, I did enjoy it. I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy it, which is why I applied only for terminal master's programs because I didn't want to be dived in and end up designing. I actually hated research and that I was just like being nostalgic for it or something.
00:23:52
Speaker
But I really enjoyed my project. It took me until kind of the end of it to decide that I did really enjoy it and I did want to keep doing it. So I ended up, that was past obviously application cycles to go straight into a PhD from there. So I ended up taking another year off between my master's and PhD. Smart. Good for you.
00:24:12
Speaker
So I mean, obviously going from French Canada to Kansas is like the next natural transition. I mean, it's, it's basically the same culture. So same location, you know, same language. You can't understand it. There's lots of vowels. Yeah. What made you choose the university of Kansas specifically?
00:24:38
Speaker
I ended up here primarily for my dissertation project. I was looking for lithicists who had projects that were like very hard science-y based and I wanted something that I could apply to existing collections because as the archaeology is like
00:24:54
Speaker
going to be less digging in the future. So that was what I was looking for. And so when I reached out to Fred Soleil
Career Aspirations in Academia
00:25:00
Speaker
at KU, he suggested that I could try an ancient DNA approach to lithics and that we had the facilities for that here. And so I'm, I'm pretty much here for this project. Cool. And the ancient DNA stuff, like, I guess I just want to dive into that. Like how do you extract DNA out of stone tools and things like that?
00:25:21
Speaker
It's pretty much the same as you do for anything else. So like all DNA extraction is really simple. You digest whatever's containing the cell so the DNA can be free. And then you try to wash away everything that isn't DNA so that then you can just like drop the DNA into a nice stable buffer where it won't degrade. That was a really clean explanation. Yeah, that's cool. Never really like thought I liked that. Okay.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah. So the variations on it are depending on like what material you're trying to get DNA from, whether you're trying to get endogenous DNA. So something that DNA from the thing itself, like a bone or a tooth, or if you're trying to get non endogenous DNA, which is just generally environmental DNA. So like if you have a soil sample and you're trying to get bacterial DNA or
00:26:19
Speaker
do paleo-environmental reconstruction. Those are all just environmental because they're non-endogenous. And so those give you a different extraction protocol just based on the material that you're using. And then the ancient part just means it has to happen in a clean room environment where everything is kept sterile and it's pressurized and you're working in like positively pressurized hoods so that you don't introduce modern contamination. Sick.
00:26:48
Speaker
So like hard science. Yeah. Yeah. I think I mentioned at the beginning, like when we first met, yeah, you were in full like a CDC, like it was Corona virus stage one. Like we had just found it, you know, like head to toe doing the extraction you have. So you have to do that in the field and in the lab as part of that to keep it kind of sterile essentially. Right.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, the problem with modern contamination is that it's really high quantity in comparison to ancient stuff. So DNA degrades over time. And so when you're working with ancient samples, it's just super low quantity and anything modern can overwhelm what you're looking for. So that's why like, even in my field collections, I'm garbed up in bleaching. For the Americans listening and me,
00:27:42
Speaker
What is endogenous? Endogenous means it's like inherent to the thing itself. So an endogenous DNA sample would be you're trying to get dog DNA from a dog mandible that you found at the site. Thank you for the explanation and using dogs. Okay, sweet. So do you use collections, I guess, field collected specimens and stuff that's been collected in the past as part of your research?
00:28:10
Speaker
Yeah, so for my dissertation, I have two, I'm working with three sites, and two of those are just like curated, previously excavated collections, and then the problem which I field collected. And that's because that's one of the things that I want to explore a little bit is how much of a difference does it make if we're able to collect things in the field. Because while there has been work getting ancient DNA from lithics, it's all been non-existing.
00:28:39
Speaker
previously collected specimens. Okay, and I guess we can end here. You cannot pick them up freshly dug and then lick them. You cannot, and it's so sad.
00:28:52
Speaker
The reason I say that is I had known Beth for about 10 minutes and she took out a bunch of artifacts and said, lick this by face. Because she had taken them last year so that, you know, they were in that like a sterile environment and she could extract the DNA, but
Advice and Future Plans
00:29:10
Speaker
she brought them back this year and then now everyone could get their licks in. Yeah. I don't, I don't know how licking specifically became the thing.
00:29:22
Speaker
That was probably me. I would wager so because also we would pull flakes out while we were digging and you would lick them immediately. Because I could. It was so exciting to be able to.
00:29:38
Speaker
I get it. I think I mentioned this on one of the past podcasts. It's a weird thing to explain to other people that you're licking things that were buried for thousands of years, but it is oddly satisfying when something sticks to your tongue and its bone and you're like, okay, it's weird.
00:29:57
Speaker
I think it's specifically because I was telling Krave not to lick things in 2019, because whenever something came up, I think Krave might have been threatening to lick things. That seems possible. Yeah. On that note, let's come back in the third segment of episode 122 and pick Beth's brain. There we go. Okay. We'll be right back.
00:30:23
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 122 of a Life in Roods podcast. And we are going to start this segment off by continuing the last segment where we were talking about things and stuff, I think. Oh yeah, we're talking about DNA and we wanted to see obviously you're in the throes of your dissertation, you're working on stuff.
00:30:43
Speaker
etc. What kind of results have they found using these sort of methods and what have they found on stone tools, either in your case or in other cases in the published literature?
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, so what I'm doing is really closely based on some existing methodologies, but they're old. So this was actually something that people started trying in the 90s and early 2000s. Extracting DNA from stone tools is just another environmental DNA extraction. And the way that
00:31:14
Speaker
you do it kind of follows the same as everything else. The biggest difference is that you sonicate the tools before you extract from them. And that's based on some protein analysis work that was done in, I want to say the late eighties where they sonicated stone tools. They stuck them in a sonication bath and then did protein analysis based on what was shaken out of the tools.
00:31:43
Speaker
So sonication, I mean, pull stuff off of it. Sonication, like, like sonic, like sound pulses, like ultrasonic waves. Okay, cool. And so when it goes through a bath, it makes all these tiny little bubbles. And so looking at for the DNA stuff, actually, one of the papers is looked at, they use these little fluorescent beads.
00:32:08
Speaker
and they got them trapped in micro cracks in the surfaces of lithics. And so they lit up, right? They fluoresced. And so you could see like this different size beads being trapped in micro cracks and then sonicated them to see if it got them out. And it does. The teeny little bubbles go into the cracks and knock out the little fluorescent beads. And it works the same way with proteins or DNA.
00:32:35
Speaker
Sweet. And so then you can just extract from the liquid. So, Orange Shanks was a biologist. He did some work on that. And he actually, he went to Wyoming, I think as like a visiting scholar or something like that. I'm not in the early 2000s. And so he collaborated with some folks out there, Marcel Kornfeld, and I'm not sure who else. And they did some experimental work with tools that have been used to butcher
00:33:04
Speaker
animals and then they washed them and then tried to extract from them to see if they were able to identify what they've been used on. It's some really neat stuff. Were they successful in their endeavors?
00:33:17
Speaker
Yeah, their work was successful. I think they had some mystery ones where they like butchered animals and didn't tell the people like what they had used them on and then extracted it to see if they could, they did as like a blind study and it worked. They then tried to use it on tools from bugus holding. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. It's one of those ones that I've only ever read. I think that's, I think that's right. Yeah.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that one they, they did get a species identification. I think they only got a few. And I know one of them was feline and they did mention the possibility of like probable contamination from somebody that had a cat at home on the crew. There weren't, there weren't smile it ons or not at that time. I don't think so. Or domestic short hair cats running around the planes at that point.
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But that's sort of where it comes back to like my super sterile collection procedures is to try like, see if we can avoid anything like that. Cool. And what else have they found? They found, unlike other publications, they found DNA from obviously probably elk, deer, bison, extinct, et cetera.
00:34:39
Speaker
So that's pretty much actually the limit. What I just went over is basically the limit of what's been done with DNA from lithics. In 2017, there was an undergrad at Montana who used the protocol and identified something links Bobcat, Cougar family on
00:34:58
Speaker
some stone tools from the Bridge River site. But that's the most recent thing that's been done and that's pretty much it. There's other examples in the literature of people getting non endogenous DNA from artifacts. So things like binding agents for rock art pigment, which is some cool stuff that was also really early.
00:35:21
Speaker
There was some 80s work. And there's stuff with quids and menstrual aprons. There was a pipe stems paper, that's a really cool one. But there's not a lot of non-endogenous DNA collected from artifacts in the literature.
00:35:41
Speaker
Cool. So in your kind of goal in this PhD, and you mentioned this kind of is that you're really wanting to get those methods, the methodologies down, and then you can really get into what you're finding and things like that.
Podcast Conclusion
00:35:56
Speaker
So it's kind of like a two part kind of thing. And the sites that I'm working with, even like the site choice is like, it is really methodological. I'm trying to get a real latitude span.
00:36:07
Speaker
with my site so that I can look at questions or preservation, depending on environment and climate as well. And it might end up being entirely methodological. If I don't get any useful species ideas off of any of them, then it's just going to be a purely methodological disc.
00:36:26
Speaker
But we definitely need those. That's exciting. I mean, to be on that, it seems like the leading edge of that stuff, but also seems like it would be hard and difficult because you're not building off of an existing sort of literature. You're almost writing it yourself at that point. Yeah, it's the Wild West of ancient DNA is sort of how we keep describing it in our lab group. There's a couple of us that are sort of working in these non-endogenous
00:36:54
Speaker
collections, like protocols. And it's, it's really weird. It's also, I don't know. I mean, it's, I can't like do it wrong if there's not an established right way yet, I guess, which is kind of nice. I personally think ancient DNA is dope and like it's like, but I've heard a lot of criticisms to it, especially when pulling like lipids out of like stone tools.
00:37:22
Speaker
And like some people are like, Oh, I don't buy that. Like, is there a lot of that or is that more to do with like bias at a site? What do you mean? Like, um, this might be different, I guess, but like pulling like the fat off the Clovis point and saying it's Provocidian at La Pral. Like, I didn't know a lot of people were like that.
00:37:43
Speaker
Yeah. Is that even DNA? So that's not DNA. That's proteanomics. And so I think that was a proteanomics thing. Got it. Okay. With the lapral stuff. But those, so with those, a lot of it is like kind of old school hemoglobin work. One of the limitations of that, like for the questions that I'm interested in is that you have to look at like specific species.
00:38:10
Speaker
And so when you send out your sample, a lot of the places will give you like three or four species that you can choose from to match to. And that's it. So you're trying, you're like, okay, I want you to look at proboscidian bison and I don't know, ungulates or whatever. Whereas with high throughput sequencing with DNA, you can just sequence what's there and then
00:38:35
Speaker
run that against databases essentially and see what matches and so that it's not, it never eliminates all bias, but it does, it lets you pass a much wider net. Gotcha. Which doesn't answer your question. No, but I realize now that like my question was mis-asked, what did you find through the LaPrel stuff? I don't think I even asked you that when I was in the field.
00:38:57
Speaker
I don't, so I don't have results for that yet. I've only just finished the process in the artifact. So just that sonication and I'm going to start on extractions now that I'm back. Got it. So it'll be a while still. So TBD we'll have, we'll have you back on and we'll chat about it. So you obviously at some point you're going to fit into your dissertation. What would be like the next ideal step for you as part of like your, your arc and throw life journey?
00:39:25
Speaker
I do want to stay in academia, which I know is a giant gamble these days, but I love the teaching and I like being able to run my own research and I would like more autonomy in that eventually. I do want to stay in academia, so I guess I'm going to be on the postdoc market.
00:39:49
Speaker
I mean, it works. I mean, obviously it's a brutal market, but if it's what you're wanting to do in life, like I think it, I think a lot of what we see with like people struggling in it and it is because they have, maybe they're not fully committed to it or don't have a good idea of going in what they're going up against. I think is like the big things we see with academia. Yeah. And I mean, my plan is I will give it five years and plan to reevaluate in five years.
00:40:19
Speaker
Whether it's worth continuing to fight for that career, the nice thing is that all of the DNA work gives me a really good industry out. If I want it, it's a good off ramp. We were talking in the circle at camp. I really respected the fact that you were like, you said exactly that.
00:40:38
Speaker
You want to do the academic route, you went back to do it and like you're set to do that. However, you do have a backup plan and like you'd fully content to do something different if not academia. And I thought that was like solid. I haven't heard someone say that before. I mean, I'm just trying to be realistic. I know. Right.
00:40:57
Speaker
I know how many job applications Heather, for example, put out there before she finally got a tenure track job. It takes a while. It's a gauntlet. Yeah. I don't know if I can do that or not. But if 23andMe calls, you'd go work for them. Are those things applicable, sort of what you're doing now?
00:41:20
Speaker
I would rather work for the, for embark the dog DNA one. I guess another thing I'd like to say, and I'll let you continue after this, but like even like not having the data, like the analysis stuff done, like what you're doing, it's pretty like a great example of how much work and like planning and how much like logistics of scientific collection you have to do in archeology. And a lot of people think it's just digging holes, but like you're doing the hard,
00:41:48
Speaker
like science of it. And it takes a lot of prep work and a lot of like, you want to make sure it's done right. Yeah. And it's, it's just so many hours in the lab for the like short amount of time that you spend on site. Yeah. Like what? Like a month max in the summer at a site? Like it? Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:08
Speaker
Well, on that note, you know, thank you so much for coming out and chatting with us. And, you know, we really appreciate and are excited to see where this stuff kind of goes in the future. We're not, I wouldn't say we're personally invested, but we're, it feels personal to figure out what's going on in Lapprell and, you know, and we have connections so much. It's really nice. It's been really nice chatting with you and we're excited to see where it goes in the future. Yeah.
00:42:36
Speaker
Do you have anything you want to tell the general public in the world about archaeology before you go? I don't know. Send your small children to archaeology conferences. There you go. Okay, there we go. So before we end the show, what are a couple sources that you would recommend for people interested in lithics or ancient DNA?
00:42:58
Speaker
So for LIFX, I think George O'Dell's LIFX analysis is a really accessible intro, and Drefsky is kind of what I use more now, but I think O'Dell is a more accessible way to get into it.
00:43:12
Speaker
For sure. And for ancient DNA, there was a review paper last year by Orlando et al. It's in Nature Primers, I think, and it's just ancient DNA analysis. That's, yeah, Orlando et al. Awesome. I will also plug Bob's book, the fifth beginning, the Robert Kelly. Which we are currently getting royalties at this point. Sorry to say, we need royalties at this point.
00:43:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I guess where can our listeners find you like to reach out for research, like ideas, or just follow you on social media. So I'm on Instagram as BL Potter 13. That's mostly a jiu-jitsu things. So that's not, oh shit, we should have talked about that. Yeah. And then I'm on Twitter as B Pots 13.
00:44:02
Speaker
Okay. We will put those in the units. TZ, because I'm cool. So this is a life in ruins. We have to ask you the most important question. So if you had the choice to do it all over again, would you one go to an academic conference at age 13 and two also continue into academia and live your life in ruins?
00:44:29
Speaker
Yes. And absolutely yes. That's a great answer. So we just interviewed Beth Potter. You can find her on Instagram at BL Potter 13 on Twitter at be pots one three. And it's your favorite time audience. Please be sure to rate and review the podcast provides feedback on whichever podcasting platform you use until listen to our show.
00:44:51
Speaker
If you provide us feedback, we do better and we can get better episodes of better content out. So just go on there and click the little button, give us a star, half star, five stars, whatever you want to do. I'll wrap this up, but thank you. 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.
00:45:21
Speaker
And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. All right, it's everybody's most not favorite time. It's time for a dad joke. What's your joke, Connor? I heard something recently in the news. Did you hear that they aren't making 12-inch rulers any longer? Ooh. That was good.
00:45:56
Speaker
of all the jokes you've done in a while that one was pretty deadpan good yeah awesome well I need to shower with that we are out
00:46:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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.