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AAA Takeaways - Episode 41
133 Plays6 years ago
On this episode the panel discusses the recent American Anthropological Association annual meeting in DC. We touch on important themes from the conference such as making anthropology more approachable, the need for truly inclusive archaeology, and teaching archaeology as social justice.
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Transcript
Introduction and Focus on Women in Archaeology
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:07
Speaker
Hi and welcome to the Women in Archaeology podcast, podcast about, for, and by women in the field. On this episode, we will be giving a brief overview of some of the amazing sessions we've attended at the recent American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, DC. The conference has been really great, and I'm super excited to talk about it on the show. It's currently Sunday afternoon, and we are recording in a somewhat public space, so you may hear some noise in the background.
Introducing Episode Participants
00:00:35
Speaker
Joining me for this recording are April Bisa, Sarah Head, Laura Heath Stout, and Sally Gaston. We haven't had the pleasure of having either Laura or Sally on the show before, so if you could go ahead and just give a really brief introduction about who you are, and then we'll jump right into the awesomeness that was the AAA's.
Research on Biases in Archaeology
00:00:53
Speaker
Hi, I'm Laura Heath Stout. I'm a PhD candidate in the archaeology department at Boston University and I'm writing my dissertation on how racism and sexism and heterosexism affect what archaeologists choose to study and how our diversity issues affect our knowledge production.
00:01:12
Speaker
Hi, I'm Sally Gaston. I'm an undergrad at Vassar College. I'm currently a junior and mostly studying archaeology but also sort of medieval studies and earth science. Great, thanks so much for those introductions. So I'm just gonna open the floor up.
00:01:30
Speaker
Did anyone go to any panels that you're super, super stoked about and you just like, you have to talk about them because I want to make sure that we talk about those panels first.
Teaching Archaeology as Social Justice
00:01:38
Speaker
Laura, I see you like looking really excited. Do you want to start? Yes. Well, it seems weird for me to talk about this because April was on this panel.
00:01:45
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But the teaching archaeology as social justice, I was so stoked about from the time I started looking through the conference book. And I scheduled everything else around that. And I was like, it was amazing. So it was a flash panel with a whole bunch of people doing five minute presentations on different aspects of social justice work as archaeology teachers.
00:02:15
Speaker
I was just, it was one of those moments where you feel like I'm in the room with my people, like this is the room where my people are and here I am, and I was so happy and so excited. Yeah, and it was really well attended. I mean, like we all know with conferences, like sometimes there are better attended sessions, sometimes you go to sessions that have more people on them, particularly, you know, like the 8am and 9pm sessions are well attended.
00:02:36
Speaker
And that room was just packed. It was pretty out of the way also. It was really hard to find. They stuffed them over in the Omni for one, which was the secondary hotel. And then it was kind of like an anthill, which the Omni is an interesting hotel just layout wise, but yeah.
00:02:54
Speaker
I actually had that one star because I used the app, which I recommend next year. It was nice. It ate my phone battery, but it was a good app. I had that one star before even April was on it. And then when I showed up, Dr. Larry Zimmerman was the discussant who was not listed anywhere. So that was a super secret surprise for everybody. So that was great to see him again. So I was also at that panel. I think a lot of us were at that panel. But there was a really great
00:03:24
Speaker
presentation, and I'm trying really, really hard to find the name of the woman who did it, but there were, I think, nine. Tell me what it was, and I'll remember, because I organized it. So there was a woman who was working on a, what was originally called a pauper cemetery, but they renamed it, because pauper is kind of a negative word, and she got a bunch of her students involved in mapping where graves were in finding old headstones if
00:03:54
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They existed. And a lot of the people buried in this cemetery were people who didn't have money. Families didn't have money to pay for
00:04:08
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barrels in the non-proper cemetery and getting her students engaged, so getting fieldwork experience, methodological experience with the techniques that you're going to use doing surveys identifying graves, you know, finding headstones,
00:04:27
Speaker
was apparently profoundly useful for them. There was one individual in the class who actually had one of her ancestors, not like a far past ancestor, but fairly recent ancestor was buried there. And there was just apparently this incredible engagement by the students with
00:04:45
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this project as well as being really functional, teaching people the skills that they need to have. I think the other important aspect of that talk especially was the community involvement that they had because of the project. She mentioned several times that people had come up to them to either
00:05:01
Speaker
mentioned people from the community had come up to the researchers to tell them that they had ancestors in that cemetery, or they had come up and asked if the archaeologists could help them relocate an ancestor that they knew was in the cemetery. The majority of those graves, she said, were not marked.
00:05:20
Speaker
Because it took decades sometimes to afford a tombstone for a lot of those, but she did say that they were kept well, they were upkept.
Social Justice and Archaeology on Social Media
00:05:28
Speaker
Eventually, you meet one good storm and you've lost. If you lose your marker, you don't know where you are anymore. You can see how that could have ... It's a good way of public archeology there as well as tying in with the students.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, and the local community does care. I think they said they were raising money to get some sea trees and maybe some benches, and they were planning to have some social events there, and the class is going to go forward and do the same thing.
00:05:55
Speaker
next fall, and the students who are still at the university, the students who do that class graduated, but the students who are still there are planning on taking it again. Who did that paper? April? That was Sarah Rose Paper, who was my co-organizer.
00:06:13
Speaker
is Archio Gal on Twitter. I'm looking for the name of her presentation with service learning and social justice insights from the first semester of the Hidalgo County Popper Cemetery Project. And she's at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
00:06:32
Speaker
Before we go to your theory, though, that panel, if you want Twitter celebrities as far as archaeology is concerned, I feel like April mined Twitter and was like you and you and you, because Sarah M. Rowe was on there. I know I'm going to say her name wrong, but Karlyn DeLaCova.
00:06:55
Speaker
who is Bones Holmes on Twitter as well, and she's been on there, she's been on Twitter probably as long as Twitter's been active. Bob Merkle was there, a lot of you know him, especially if you follow our key fantasies. Who else was on there that was like huge on Twitter, aside from April, of course. She's on there. She's an archaeo mapper on Twitter.
00:07:18
Speaker
Usma Rizvi is also on Twitter, which I wasn't following her until then. And then I was like, I want to quote her on Twitter. And I went and found her. And she has a really cool Twitter feed. Well, I actually organized the session on Twitter completely using Twitter. And these are just people who just stood up and said, I want to talk about this.
00:07:39
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We had a great variety. We had an undergraduate. We had people who are students at various levels. We had people who are professors at various levels. We had people who are, you know, Larry's retired now. Like we had such huge diversity. And I think I was talking to Sally when we were walking.
00:07:56
Speaker
today or yesterday, that I think we got a huge amount of diversity for an archaeology panel because we were talking about social justice and people with diverse backgrounds have stories that they want archaeology to talk about and include those identities in archaeology. So if you think that there isn't diversity in archaeology, it's probably because you're talking about the wrong things and the things that people from diverse backgrounds.
00:08:21
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Well, and I'm actually going to maybe end this April a little bit. Her five minute intro was really, really stellar. Just talking about she had looked at what university programs have social justice or what universities have social justice programs and what
00:08:39
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disciplines make up. The social justice programs and like archaeology isn't super well represented. It wasn't in any of the ones that I found. I didn't find a single social justice program that includes archaeology. Right, but some of them did include anthropology, although we use it often as electives for social justice. So April's talk is all about the fact that archaeology isn't traditionally kind of viewed as being this
00:09:04
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social justice force, but that there are so many great ways that you can take archaeology and use it for social justice and you had nine people highlighting different ways in which they can do that. I personally would be super stoked to see more
00:09:19
Speaker
archeological classes being included in social justice curriculum because it's awesome. Well, in April's suggestion of retitling, I think that was both the most important takeaway in the discussion, I think. I feel like that, anyway.
Anthropology's Broader Social Impact
00:09:38
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But it was also the most controversial, was the whole concept of retitling the names of classes that are being offered so that they reflect, I think you said put the thesis of your
00:09:49
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the thesis of your class in the title. And I think, I honestly agree with that 100%. I think being a bit more descriptive in the title about what your class is supposed to be about will get more people into it. Wow, no one's ever told me to talk about it.
00:10:04
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I was thinking about that because, so I taught a class last summer, and the summer term at BU, it's our archaeology 100 class. It's not even required for the major, so it's very general education, and it's called Great Discoveries in Archaeology, which just makes me want to gag every time I say it. And it has, I used to be a TA for the class, and I watched it being taught as like, and then I'm Rick Schliemann, found this really cool thing, and maybe he was a little disappointed.
00:10:34
Speaker
Right. Yeah, exactly. And it was a very Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia focused. But it's supposed to be our kind of global introduction to ancient civilizations kind of class for humanities credit for people for general education classes. And it ended up being fun to have that title of my class because I couldn't change it.
00:10:58
Speaker
I was just given the summer section of it. Then we ended up talking in the class about why the title was problematic. I think probably the most global version of that class has ever been taught. I've learned so much about Asian archaeology and Sub-Saharan African archaeology and Australian and Pacific Islands archaeology that I didn't know about because my education has been mostly in the Americas and the Mediterranean.
00:11:27
Speaker
It ended up being such a cool learning experience for me. It ended up being fun, but if I ever get to have any power, we're getting rid of that name. I'm following your lead. What title would you give to an intro archaeology class if you could take a minute to think about it if you want.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah There was another interesting panel that I don't know if any of you were at it was sort of a different thing but it was also focusing on kind of how education how like archaeology is portrayed to like Students or to in this case it was two kids and so somebody had analyzed And I'm totally I thought I had written down her name, but I've totally forgotten at the moment about
00:12:12
Speaker
archaeology and children's books, and so what people's initial perceptions of archaeology is. Were you there
Gender Disparities in Academic Journals
00:12:18
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as well? No, but I'm not. Oh, yeah. Because that sounds really interesting. Yeah, and so she had analyzed the, in her case, she was looking at Indus Valley civilization as like the topic, because that was her, I guess, area of research,
00:12:32
Speaker
And it was sort of looking at like five or six children's books and how they portrayed archaeology as a discipline, how they portrayed like the idea of looking at the past in general and how they were portraying kind of gender, like who archaeologists were. This project was this because I remember something going across Twitter.
00:12:55
Speaker
Teresa Ragsack from Kenesha State University. Come on down. Yeah, I remember something going across Twitter, somebody asking for children's books. Yeah, it was really interesting. It was slightly disappointing consensus of the fact that it seems as if most of the people portrayed as archaeologists in the books themselves are
00:13:19
Speaker
male and are white and that they're sort of like this but also in the sense that this idea of looking at prehistory was very much like historians think rather than really kind of discussing archaeology in that way in the sense and very much based on this sort of like oh yes civilization model argument to authority yeah she talked about a lot of this like how
00:13:42
Speaker
It's not teaching children critical thinking skills to question the things that they're told by authority. If you're giving this so young, historians argue or historians say, it is still something that is much more nuanced than that. If you can introduce that when kids are young, it really builds critical thinking skills.
00:14:03
Speaker
I feel like we really chip children these days when we're in school. We don't teach critical thinking anymore. I know that there are a lot of teachers who will argue with me, but frankly, we don't teach critical thinking anymore. We get kids coming out of high school, going into college, and you're expected to critically think, and none of them know how to. I feel bad for them.
00:14:25
Speaker
starts early with these books, teaching them to not question authority. She was talking in the way she looked at it. I guess she had also kind of talked with the kids who had read, she had talked with some of the kids who had read them as well too, who were like four, five, six, seven, or like even like 10
Uncredited Roles of Women in Research
00:14:40
Speaker
years old of like kind of how they thought about it too, which was really interesting. But one of the things that was like most striking to me about it was the kind of idea that the little cartoons of like archeologists that were drawn as like the people in it were
00:14:54
Speaker
predominantly white and predominantly male in the place. They all look like Dr. Jones, too. A little bit. A lot of them were wearing lots of khaki. So it was very much kind of playing into this.
00:15:07
Speaker
early 1900s. It's been portrayed in media forever. We all know that that's not actually true. If you don't know about or haven't seen the Trailblazers website, which is amazing, and they primarily highlight women who have been involved in the field of archaeology for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
00:15:29
Speaker
but they also make an effort of showing people who are not white and the work that they've done, particularly, they've done a couple interesting posts on the fact that they don't actually know these individuals' names, but white male archaeologists who would go dig in the late 1800s, early 1900s would often get locals to do the actual digging,
00:15:56
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you know white male archaeologists would stand and supervise and look at all the fun things that they pulled up but they're not scraping dirt they're not moving dirt they're not sorting they're not sifting and you have these pictures from
00:16:09
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excavations for 100 years ago that are just filled with, you know, local men and women for whom we have no names, and they were doing the archaeology. Yeah. There's also I saw a poster by Sean Bruno, who I think I think he's a cultural anthropologist. And
00:16:30
Speaker
And he was working with actually a biologist whose name, I forgot her name, but she was doing some of the statistics work. And they were looking at journals from anthropology journals, including some that are specific to subfields. So they included American Journal of Archaeology, for example. Going back to 1976, I think, and they
00:16:54
Speaker
looked at the mastheads of the journals that list the staff, and they assigned genders just based on first names, which they acknowledged was, you know, imperfect, but at least a starting point. And they showed that in all of these journals over time, many of the executive editor or the editors in chief were men, and many of the clerical staff were women.
00:17:18
Speaker
And if there was a correlation between having a male editor in chief and a male associate editor, like statistically significant correlation there. So there are men running the journals. There are men deciding what gets published. There are mentoring men as associate editors. And then there are all these women doing this clerical work that never
00:17:48
Speaker
that doesn't get much credit. I work at the Journal of Field Archaeology as an editorial assistant, so I know this work. I am in that category of clerical workers at journals, also, alongside everything else I'm doing. I do so much work to help non-native
00:18:08
Speaker
English speakers with their articles to make them really clear. I do so much worth checking that everything that's cited in the text is in the references. I do so much kind of cleaning and molding work that contributes to the production of archaeological knowledge. But I'm not an author on any of these things. And so you know that there was always been women, clerical workers, secretaries, wives, girlfriends, like doing all this work that is making archaeology research possible and yet not getting credit for it.
00:18:38
Speaker
So there was actually a really interesting Twitter hashtag that was going on six months ago that I'll double check. I think it was thanks to my wife, but I'll double check that hashtag and put it in the show notes. Anyways, this hashtag thanks to my wife was basically just photos of acknowledgments that were like, thanks to my wife for typing eight versions of this draft and doing all of the copy editing and clerical work.
00:19:04
Speaker
Thanks to my wife for doing the first translation of this text that's ever been done, which by the way, my dissertation is 90% based on. I'm sorry. Why isn't this your wife's PhD if she did the translation? Right. It's that double X chromosome. Somehow that makes it not possible for that to happen. It's crazy. So if you're interested in more of that, you should definitely check out that.
00:19:30
Speaker
hashtag on Twitter that does bring us to about the end of our first 20 minutes. But when we come back, we'll talk some more about panels we went to that we absolutely loved. And maybe see if Laura has an answer to my question.
00:19:49
Speaker
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00:20:12
Speaker
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Preparing for Non-Academic Careers in Anthropology
00:20:20
Speaker
That's arcpodnet.com slash members. Hi, and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology podcast. So far on today's episode, we have been discussing our thoughts and feelings about this year's AAA panel, which was held in Washington, DC. To start off the session, I actually really wanted to talk about
00:20:43
Speaker
A panel I attended on the importance of preparing anthropologists for non-academic jobs.
00:20:51
Speaker
And I actually tweeted some quotes from that panel, one of which was, anthropologists need to be better at talking to the public about what we do and why it is important in an understandable way. And I can just tell you that I don't think I've ever seen so many Twitter interactions on anything I have tweeted in my entire life. It seems to be really resonating with people. And I know everyone that was sitting in that session
00:21:20
Speaker
felt very passionately about the fact that anthropology really seems to stigmatize non-academic jobs, particularly at a graduate level. There's this idea of my PhD student should be going and getting a job in the academia because if they go work for Boston Consultancy Group or a different NGO or Adidas, I heard some anthropologists do a marketing
00:21:46
Speaker
analysis a couple years ago, that that's somehow dirty or shameful or we should be pure academics. That stigma really, really needs to change both for the students in anthropology who don't necessarily want to go be a professor, but also for the success of the discipline.
00:22:09
Speaker
I think someone had put some numbers together last year. In anthropology, there were 100 tenure track job openings last year. And there were 600 PhD students who graduated with a PhD in anthropology. And those numbers are just not sustainable. We need to tell people that they can get jobs elsewhere and also provide the skills for them to be able to get jobs elsewhere. I didn't even realize there were
00:22:37
Speaker
anthropology jobs outside of academia, honestly. I am not an anthropologist, obviously. But with archeology, we have at least two paths you can go down, at least. You can go academic or you can go into the private industry and go work CRM, that kind of thing. I saw it mental, sort of, as well. Yeah, you can do government work, too. Just with anthropology, even in my head, it's just like you do academics or you do nothing.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a problem. And they talked, there are a lot of NGOs that want people to come work. There's government stuff. I mentioned Adidas had hired some anthropologists to do, you know, marketing.
00:23:17
Speaker
Ethnography, essentially. Talk to people, figure out who's buying our shoes. Who should we be marketing to? Yes, that's very capitalistic, but it's also a job. There were some statisticians who worked for various different branches of the government. One of them worked for the CDC. The kind of stats that you can do in
00:23:41
Speaker
anthropology when you have data is really applicable. But that also means that you have to teach your students statistics. And there are a lot of departments that are really, really theory heavy. And it's great if you can discuss Foucault and Butler and Marx and whoever else you've read for your department. And that does teach you critical thinking skills and being able to think for yourself.
00:24:09
Speaker
But that is often harder to quantify on a resume. We're saying, I've taken this statistics class and I used this particular methodology, which I could apply for your program, is really, really useful. Well, we were talking about this at the Tweet about how anthropology seems to be a very theory-heavy field, but not so much a methodology-heavy field.
00:24:38
Speaker
seem more comfortable teaching theory and not method. It wasn't, you, Chelsea, was saying that it's been that way for so long that we've jumped a generation now where we don't know how to teach methodology. Yeah, so that was actually based on one of the comments that I actually heard in the session that I'm talking about right now, where someone who has been a methodological anthropologist,
Teaching Methodology vs. Theory in Anthropology
00:24:59
Speaker
and this was more established, you know, has been teaching for 30 or 40 years,
00:25:04
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individual who's at their university, anthropology and sociology used to be in the same department. When it split 20 or so years ago, the anthropology department wouldn't take him despite the fact that he's an anthropologist because he wanted to teach multivariate statistics.
00:25:26
Speaker
to the students. And they said, we're theory, we're qualitative, we don't need this sort of quantitative thing. And if that's been going on in the discipline for 20, 30, 40 years, all of a sudden you have people who, you know, may be your professors
00:25:42
Speaker
who don't have the methodological training to necessarily provide it to you. And that's not saying that they don't exist. I know the NSF has a great summer program on research methodologies. There are some other groups that do that. But not everybody can get into those. Right. As an undergrad, I've sort of noticed this as well in the sense that I felt I had to go and learn statistics. And in the class of like
00:26:07
Speaker
I don't know, 30 people, it was mostly biology majors or people who were pre-med. And there was myself and one other person who also took Anthro. And I know this because we had our Anthro theory class together. And so we were both trying to figure out how we're supposed to take the statistical knowledge that all of the example problems we're doing are based on medical things.
00:26:29
Speaker
And like how we're supposed to actually be able to apply that to what we want to do with it for archaeology, for bio-anth, for even like anthropology as well. So it's a kind of, then even if the students are reaching out to try and learn that other ways, it's still kind of like lost in translation almost. It really can be. And I know I took a stats class as part of my PhD program. I'm a bio-arch, so that was actually required for the bio-arch track.
00:26:58
Speaker
But it was taught in the sociology department by a sociologist. And he was lovely. And that was fine. But the sample sizes that they were working with were tens of thousands. They were pulled from census data. And then he's turning to me and there was another bioarchaeologist in the room and saying,
00:27:18
Speaker
You know, what sample are you going to use? Where's your data? And we were like, look, we managed to cobble together 150 data points. This is so great because we actually had one cemetery that's been excavated that had 150 skeletons and the data is available and it's so great. And he was like, wow, that's a huge sample group. Right. And then he was like, I don't really know what to tell you because the stats that I use, you know, the minimum number
00:27:44
Speaker
For a lot of them, I would like it to be in the thousands, and you have 150. And it might not change the statistical model that you're using, although there are some statistical models for which an N of 100 or an N of 30 is not enough, but it can change how you interpret
00:28:03
Speaker
the results. Trying to learn stats from someone who dealt with sample sizes of tens of thousands, I learned the models. Don't get me wrong, you can run an ANOVA test, you can run a multivariate regression, whatever, but it's different. It's not that you can't run a stat on it, it's that people don't understand the difference between, people hear stats and they all think one thing, might not even show enough.
00:28:27
Speaker
So they don't understand that stats can be applied across different fields, and in each individual field, a sample size obviously is going to vary, and that also means that the validity of that sample size is going to be more or less trustworthy. Using medical stats, a sample size of 150 wouldn't be anything that I would trust, but in anthropology or archeology, I would be like, ooh, that's a bunch. Well, that turned out really well, especially when it comes to skeletal remains.
00:28:57
Speaker
I think the layperson doesn't understand that variation across fields. And I think that's part of the problem. I think this is part of the problem in general, like our fields, anthropology and archeology, don't communicate well with the outside world. And if we can get more anthropologists and archeologists to leave academia and go get those jobs, even if it's not like,
00:29:26
Speaker
CRM or something that's so obviously connected like if people go work in nonprofits or go work teaching at Like high schools or doing like museum education things that are connected but not the same If all these people with all this knowledge Leave the ivory tower and we don't just say okay never come back like you're a failure. We hate you Then those people are bringing all this knowledge that we
00:29:56
Speaker
I mean, anthropologists and archaeologists, I know, are so idealistic. We think what we're doing is really valuable. And so it seems like we should be encouraging people to not just stay in an ivory tower and talk to each other. We start off that way. But I feel like we're getting jaded the longer we stay in any individual area.
Realities of Archaeology Careers
00:30:15
Speaker
Like, I'm a graduate student with Adam State University, which has a fantastic online program. I'm enjoying the hell out of it. But some of my cohorts have been in the field for like
00:30:25
Speaker
15, 20 years and they're just now going back to get their masters because you just need it now. But there's definitely a little bit of crustiness there amongst some of us who have been working for a while. And it's not just because we're old, it's just because you do this for so long and you come up with your big stars in the eyes thing, I'm going to go do this thing. And everyone's like, no, you're going to dig a bunch of holes and you're going to fill it back in. We get that at the end of the day and you're like, oh.
00:30:50
Speaker
And so I feel like that's probably happening with anthropology and at the academic level. I don't really know, because I'm not in those two fields, but it just seems like a natural progression. And I think once you get to that point, it's the whole, we were having this conversation, why aren't we training people? And it's because, well, that's the way I did it.
00:31:07
Speaker
And if it worked for me, why doesn't it work for everybody else? Or just the bitterness of, I did it, therefore you must, kind of thing. Although some of that is going to have to change simply based on if anthropology wants to survive. I think anthropology saw its maximum number of BAs or BS students graduate in, I think it was 2013. And between now and then, the number of
00:31:35
Speaker
people who are graduating college with a degree in anthropology has gone down by about 20%. So if anthropology and archeology want to survive, they need to find a way to make themselves relevant. And it's totally understandable because if you're going to go to college and most people are taking out loans, you want to know that you can get a job after college, which means that we need to prepare people to get jobs after
Anthropology's Modern Career Importance
00:32:00
Speaker
college. And some of it is also
00:32:03
Speaker
If you are an anthropologist and you get hired somewhere and you do a great job, make it known that you're an anthropologist because a lot of people get anthropology and they're like, I don't know what that is. I don't know what that teaches you. But if you've worked with an anthropologist and you know how awesome they are, you might be more inclined to hire another anthropologist. From a very practical perspective in terms of working with NGOs and things, and there are NGOs who would like to partner with universities.
00:32:29
Speaker
to give them money to have research assistants to come do data analysis because they're on the ground and they have all of this data and they don't necessarily do the kind of academic analysis that you would see and they'd like that to happen. And because they're NGOs and they work on hot topic issues that people like, it also means that they get a lot of money, right? And we don't have a lot of money. So why would you turn your back on a group
00:32:58
Speaker
that wants to give you money so that some of your undergrads or grad students can come get real world experience, can learn about potential future employment paths, can afford to live while they're in college, maybe take out fewer loans. Why wouldn't you do that? Do you think maybe the colleges don't know what anthropology is?
00:33:24
Speaker
Well, as a professor, I can tell you that a lot of my colleagues in other departments have no idea what we do, especially with the proliferation of ethnic studies departments. Like at Vassar, we have a Hispanic studies, we have an Asian studies, we have an American studies department.
00:33:39
Speaker
So a lot of people go to those departments if they want to learn about local cultures and local issues in different places of the world. And lots of people just want to label anthropology as colonial and therefore bad and staying away from it. But I think we as professors, that's part of my whole let's retitle classes.
00:33:57
Speaker
everybody at my college would know better what I'm teaching if I would stop calling things archaeology of something. Right. So it's something about it's just still archaeology. But we need to I think to change the conversation a little bit, teach people that you don't have to get an anthropology degree and
00:34:15
Speaker
get an anthropology job, but that you live anthropology, that you learn project management skills, you learn to have difficult conversations and how to be ethical with the people that are at your table. You learn that people have different backgrounds and different experiences and there isn't one right version of anything. You can go into any sort of public
00:34:37
Speaker
policy, any sort of politician stuff, you could go into just human resources and be living your anthropology and not say, well, I'm a failure because the title of my job is an anthropology. As long as you develop these skills and become a human being that respects all other human beings and sees that people act the way they are because of the things that have happened to them and their peoples in the past, you're a successful anthropologist and it doesn't have to be that you're doing anthropology.
00:35:06
Speaker
I mean, to build on what she's saying.
00:35:09
Speaker
Anthropology teaches a lot of skills, and maybe that's just life skills in general, like you're saying project management, and the ability to talk to people who are different than you and not feel like a total idiot, or at least hide the fact that you feel that way. The ability to listen, because ethnographic methods teaches the ability to listen and to actually hear what people are saying. And change your opinion based on what you've just heard. And that right there. And not a layer causing. Right, that right there.
00:35:38
Speaker
So maybe what we need to do as a field is, I mean obviously not everybody who's going through classes right now is going to graduate and become a professional anthropologist, but they can.
00:35:49
Speaker
become a project manager for a business. They can become a company researcher. They can become outreach for just PR. You could be that person in PR that people actually like to talk to. You could be a great person in HR because you hear what the employees are actually saying and what they need. You could go into law and actually be an employer. Those should be anthropologists that are leading diversity initiatives. Politicians.
00:36:16
Speaker
Lots of things that we don't necessarily teach the skills of anthropology to make people better anthropologists in a statistical analysis for small data sets. But every anthropology course and every anthropology experience teaches you to be, I think, a better human being. And therefore the value of that is the value, you know, any tuition.
00:36:38
Speaker
As long as you can still eat and have a good life, it's worth becoming a better human being. I've always said an intro to anthropology course should be required for all degrees. It's because it makes you a person and not just like you, you know? You're not just like selfish me. You're like, oh wait, there's other people in the world. But when you take anthropology classes, and I don't know that I necessarily realized this
00:37:02
Speaker
when I was taking my first anthropology classes as an undergrad student, because my self-ethnography, shall we say, could have potentially used some work. But as I've been TAing anthropology classes, launching students to come in and grapple with questions that maybe they'd never thought of, or even better, grapple with questions that they thought they knew the answers to, is amazing. And you see people the way they think, the way they relate to one another,
00:37:31
Speaker
change and it doesn't matter what you do with the rest of your life, that's an important skill. Learning to change your mind is a lost art form, apparently. No, I'm serious. I'm dead serious about that. There's even studies that I've seen come across, well, the internet, which is never wrong, about how
00:37:52
Speaker
Once you have something in your head, the average person, once they have something in their head, there's literally nothing you can do to change their mind. That causes some issues, obviously, down the road. I think, like April was saying, learning to change your mind, and you built on that as well, Chelsea. The whole concept of, here's a really hard thing that you thought you knew the answer to. Well, guess what?
00:38:13
Speaker
learning that you can change your mind and it doesn't make you a wrong or bad person and that you can then take that forward and apply it to other things. That right there is a life skill that just needs to be taught. Ethnography reading tells us to go to the source. Exactly. Don't say you know.
00:38:32
Speaker
what other people would say or think. Sally and I were both in an American Indian session that was, does anthropology matter to American Indians? And there was a 75 year old American Indian who works for the Smithsonian, who she said, and she was serious, she said, I think anthropology has done a lot for Native Americans, American Indians,
00:39:03
Speaker
you know, disarticulated and put into the Smithsonian's collection and that people will do research on me and they will learn a lot because they will have a modern Native woman skeleton that they have all of the data for as far as my medical history, my life history, my tribal affiliation and all that stuff. And we're talking about how that's just proof that you could never say no person of X group would ever want Y.
00:39:22
Speaker
And I am going to, when I die, have my body ceremonially
00:39:28
Speaker
So we're teaching you in anthropology, not only to critically think and so forth, but that there is a place that you can go find that information. And it's by going to the source, going to those people, spending time with them, not asking one person one question and then, oh, now I know.
00:39:45
Speaker
what everybody of this identity has to say. So I would say that anthropology can never go extinct as long as people want to be better, but we have to make that the predominant message of our field and then people will be coming to us, even if it's just for one class or one talk or to read one book, because most people want to be better.
00:40:12
Speaker
It's so kind of like one of the things I think is easiest to forget and put that like anthropology really makes you have to remember is that like other people aren't like you can't think of cultures as monolithic which is I think something that in archaeology we have had to struggle to
00:40:29
Speaker
subvert often but in and like how four fields has helped that in a lot of ways be able to say like no things aren't monolithic in general and also that and that going into reading ethnography like that the panel it's really made you think about the fact that
00:40:46
Speaker
People have incredibly diverse, different opinions about their own practices and their own ideas that is not something that you can say, this group believes this. That doesn't work. But reading ethnography, doing anthropology, makes you realize that fact and makes you question how you interact with the people who you interact with. And that's so helpful if you're going to do HR. That's what you need, really, is
00:41:15
Speaker
Think about the multiple different facets of people's group identities and individual identities. Yeah, I think that's a great note to end on, sort of at the end of our second segment. But people are multifaceted, and you should pay attention to all of their various different facets, and anthropology teaches you that. So thank you very much, Sally, for that great insight, and we'll be back.
00:41:44
Speaker
Archaeotech Podcast, hosted by Chris Webby Webster and Chris Boone Sims, is a show dedicated to the technology of the modern archaeologist. On the Archaeotech Podcast, we interview people using interesting tech, and we dig into the issues, advantages, and try to uncover the disadvantages of the digital age and going paperless. We all know there is no paper in the future, or should we say, paper has no future. Check out the show at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash archaeotech. Let's get back to the show.
00:42:15
Speaker
Hi and welcome back to the Women in Archaeology panel from the AAA's. So far on today's episode we've talked about some excellent panels on teaching archaeology as social justice, kids' impressions of archaeology, why we need to make anthropology more accessible to a broader public,
00:42:41
Speaker
And kind of along those lines, Sally, you went to a panel on community anthropology or community archaeology. Do you want to
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah, it was a panel on community archaeology and it was sort of out of the way. So there weren't like an enormous number of people there, but it was really interesting in the sense that all of the presenters were kind of people who were very much up and coming in the field in the sense that it was a lot of grad students and like PhD candidates and a few people who were just like out of either their masters or grad school. And so it was very much a really interesting perspective into sort of like where the theory in
00:43:18
Speaker
in archaeology as a discipline is going to kind of go in the next like five or ten years because some of them proposed some really interesting ideas of where kind of community archaeology is going at this point and so one of the one of the concepts that really interested me was this somebody proposed the concept of sustainable archaeology which was sort of based in
00:43:41
Speaker
black feminist archaeology and indigenous archaeology and community archaeology and also sustainable tourism. And so this idea of how you kind of balance the needs of the communities that you're working with, with also the ecological problems that sometimes arise. So in that case, the presenter had done a lot of work in the Caribbean and like how do you work with
00:44:07
Speaker
communities that are affected by like most recently the hurricanes that have been so destructive and so like how do you build archaeology as a discipline that's not necessarily destructive as well that really brings in the community and brings in their needs and also facilitates kind of like
00:44:22
Speaker
the growth of those archaeological resources in a lot of ways, which I thought was a really interesting perspective. There was also somebody who proposed, they called it triple time and triple methodologies, which was bringing the idea of the past, the present, and the future into how you study archaeology and
Sustainable Archaeology and Community Needs
00:44:43
Speaker
then also bring together archaeology, ethnography, and historical preservation to be able to look at
00:44:50
Speaker
kind of like historical preservation and the way that cultural resources can be managed and worked into community spaces and community dialogues and policy. Yeah. One of the things in that session also that I want to bring up is Claire Novotny and Maya Dedrick. I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name, but in their paper they talked about
00:45:21
Speaker
They both work in the Maya area, one in Yucatan, Mexico, and one in Belize. And they both work in communities that have local government committees on heritage. And they presented these two case studies of their two different projects and how committees work. And they talked about how
00:45:47
Speaker
Working through the local government and having a committee of like citizens like modern people in your community
00:45:55
Speaker
overseeing your work makes it so that the community, the descendant community can dissent against what archaeologists do. And so they gave an example. I forget what it was, but it was something that the committee decided that the archaeologists would not have done it that way. It was not something that the archaeologists thought was harmful, but it was just like not the way they wanted to go about it. And the committee was like, no, this is what you're going to do. And they went with it. And they were kind of like, man, that's not what we wanted. And then they went, wait a minute.
00:46:25
Speaker
This means that we're doing it right because we have created a real collaboration because in a real collaboration, both groups of people have a say and the fact that this committee is empowered to tell us like, nope, this is what the community needs means that and that we are irritated by what they said, but we're doing it the way they want means that we're actually doing it right. And I was like, yeah.
00:46:54
Speaker
I just want to stand up and applaud. It was really cool. And getting those kind of stories out is so important to decolonizing archaeology. That's kind of a buzzword. Yeah, it's definitely picked up on that this time. Yeah, I mean, the political climate that we're in. Right, exactly. But that if we want to do a better job of making anthropology relevant, and going back to the conversation we had in the last section,
00:47:21
Speaker
that getting these stories out about, hey, we did this really cool thing, and we're not just going to come in and do some archaeology and go away. And you might get a field report or a dissertation, but it's not going to go any further than that. That's not good archaeological practice. And also the habit of us going in and being like, we're going to interpret this for you. You'll get your report with our interpretation.
00:47:47
Speaker
It's not necessarily what the community needs and wants. Fortunately, whatever your opinion is of that, that's what you have to take into consideration. It's not about us. I went to a very important presentation that was in the
00:48:04
Speaker
Indigenous archaeology and it was actually anthropology and indigenous sovereignty. Almost everything I went to was about indigenous issues. It was by Kristin Barnett from Bates College and she was talking about a native community
00:48:22
Speaker
And she did an anonymous survey during the excavation and at the end of the excavation of this community of 400 Native Americans. And she found that 90% of them were aware of the excavations that were taking place, but 0% had read the book that the archaeologists provided to the community about the project that they were doing. And that 30% thought that the ancestors were not being respected during the excavation.
00:48:49
Speaker
And she did another survey at the end of the excavation, and they were very upset because when the archaeologists finished the excavation, they left the site in such a state where there were big tarps still out there. They didn't completely fill in their excavation units.
00:49:05
Speaker
So the site was scarred. So I think both the idea that when we give people a book to read and say, here, go read this and understand what we're doing, a lot of public archeology, like, yes, we need to disseminate materials, but we need to make sure we disseminate materials if people are asking for them what they want, the format they want, the length they want, the type of language, and that we need to be proactive in understanding
00:49:35
Speaker
Well, what issues are you possibly having? Okay, we can do a better job at what we're doing right now. Let's go make sure that that site is in a state that they think is respectable. Just have a face-to-face with those people. I mean, it's not going to kill you.
00:49:50
Speaker
Lots of times when you try to talk to community members, they won't tell you what they're concerned about because that confrontation.
Accessibility of Archaeological Findings
00:49:57
Speaker
Right. And that's part of being anthropologists. We're okay with that sort of disagreement. But there's a lot of people out there who just don't want to tell you things to your face because they're so upset that they would rather complain in other terms. An anonymous survey is a great idea. But I think one of the things that could have alleviated a lot of those problems is all that information they're trying to
00:50:19
Speaker
throw a book at you and be like, here, read this, you know, spare time. Wouldn't it kill you to have a 30 minute, 45 minute town hall meeting with these people, even though you don't know that she didn't do that? She might have done that in addition. Yeah. But I mean, even if all you're doing is standing up there with a PowerPoint slide, at least people are leaving slightly more informed than when they showed up. And then you can give them the book.
00:50:39
Speaker
And the whole archaeological project, I believe the beginning of it, she was just involved in, and then it became more of her project later on. So we definitely, that's why I want to make sure that I give you the name of who this person is so that you can actually go find more than what I'm comprehending and remembering from a 15 minute presentation. I think that's part of why the committees were also useful because it was like the mayors of these towns or the local governments that were
00:51:08
Speaker
forming these committees of just people in the towns who are interested and the archaeologists would be, I think, maybe the archaeologists were there at some of the meetings, but not all of them, and those people could organize them initially, but yeah. And so the people in the committees sometimes were making decisions when the two archaeologists, who are both, I think, from the US,
00:51:30
Speaker
would be like back in the US and the committee in Belize would be talking about stuff and making decisions and then they could present it as a like the committee made this decision and I think that helps get over some of that like I don't want to have the confrontation I'm just like some person and this is this like educated white person from the north like educated gringa coming down and telling me what to do whereas if with the committee they could
00:51:54
Speaker
like build power in the committee and then say that we are representing the community and we're saying this and it's easier to say. They're also members of the community themselves and they can go and it's one thing to take an anonymous survey from somebody who you don't know but it's another thing when you're talking to like your neighbor or like somebody you go to church with or somebody you like I don't know have interacted with in the supermarket generally like that's much more interaction so that you have on a daily basis.
00:52:20
Speaker
It is. And there's also the Public Anthropology Conference, which was a couple weeks ago at American University. Michael Blakely was the keynote and gave a really interesting, informative keynote. But one of the things that he talked about was issues not just with academic archaeology, where you have a community group at archaeologists, but where you also have a developer or a county council or government that's not
00:52:50
Speaker
of the community or state government that you're trying to work with, and that the only path forward is a path that makes the community feel like they're being respected and like their wishes are being heeded, that allows the archeologists to do good scientific archeology that is ethical, that is moral, that makes them comfortable, that you can also get
00:53:19
Speaker
this other government or if you've got a developer on board with paying for or doing this thing and that that can be really difficult and adds another element of complication and if you have solid relationships with the community and they know they can come to you with issues that they're having or that you will listen to and respect what they have to say, that also allows you to
00:53:48
Speaker
be a united front if you are trying to get the stakeholders to agree to something that maybe they don't want to because it costs more money and why would they want to spend more money? That's another important thing to consider. I think this falls into the conversation we're having. It just shifts away from indigenous populations a little bit.
00:54:12
Speaker
Yes, but it's your paper that you presented. The discussion we were having the night before you presented your paper, Chelsea, about the anthropology of disabilities. Yes. And you made some very valid points when we were having that discussion.
00:54:28
Speaker
How did your paper go? I assume it went beautifully. It was good. It was an 8 AM panel in the day after all of the receptions. And they put us in a massive, massive ballroom. So we had 30 or 40 people there, which in a regular room would have actually been great. But in a ballroom that has 200 shares, it didn't actually count them all. But yeah, it was a really interesting session. It was on what does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene. And we had people talking about,
00:54:57
Speaker
you know, cyborg-human interaction, cyborg sexuality, zombies. I talked about disability. Someone else talked about the archaeology and anthropology of non-human animals. There were a couple of theory papers. I'm sorry, I missed this. Yeah, I know. I almost went. I went to something else. She's gone. She's gone. There was a paper on kind of human origins issues as well. So it went really well.
00:55:28
Speaker
You had some observations, though, on anthropologists studying people with disabilities. Yeah, I mean, my basic thoughts of anthropologists, or archaeologists, I should say, who study disabilities is that, and this is certainly not, you know, overall. Nobody's going to check the subscription will detect. Right, and there are some great papers out there, but there are a lot of generalizations. There are a lot of everyone with a disability
00:55:55
Speaker
is disabled and that's it, that there are no other aspects or other facets of their personality. Identity isn't engaged with critically, how does being biologically male versus biologically female, upper class, lower class, being a laborer versus emergent, how do all of these things impact perceptions of disability? And also, there are different types of disabilities. Disability isn't a universal experience. You can have people who can't see or can't hear
00:56:25
Speaker
have some sort of intellectual impairment in individuals with Down syndrome. And that those experiences are not all the same. And that we just need to be really careful of not othering people, looking at them as other. These are other humans.
00:56:43
Speaker
They're not just others. One of the key tenets of disability rights and disability justice movements has been nothing about us without us. That's a big slogan of autistic self-advocacy network, for example.
00:57:03
Speaker
that ties nicely together the archaeology of disability issues that you're talking about and this community archaeology and collaborative archaeology things that we've been talking about that when non-disabled people
Collaborative and Respectful Research
00:57:19
Speaker
start doing advocacy or research about disabled people that is not collaborative, they mess it up. They do all these problematic things that you're talking about, othering disabled people. I don't want to appropriate Nothing About Us Without Us and apply it to everything, but I do think that men shouldn't be writing about women without consulting women about what they're saying. White American archaeologists shouldn't be writing about Native American people without
00:57:49
Speaker
consulting native people and like not that you like people get to write about people who are different from themselves but you have to do it with collaboration and respect I think.
00:57:59
Speaker
Yeah. I almost feel like that's kind of a no-brainer, but it really isn't. It seems to not be. It was also the topic of a surprising number of talks today, or at this conference, too, of like, we need to be doing this. And everyone's like, yes. Well, yeah, I mean, we really need to. I think that was probably like, if we're doing takeaways, which I know Chelsea gave us the high sign a few minutes ago, then I have an order. But I think that's my takeaway here. I'm surprised at how much self-policing and
00:58:31
Speaker
common sense advocacy that was here at this conference, just in general, the whole like, we should be talking to the people we study. And I'm just like, well, yeah, of course we should, but apparently that's something that needs to be said. And this whole concept of anthropology as social justice.
Anthropology's Role in Social Justice
00:58:49
Speaker
I mean, it's an interesting crossover that I honestly didn't think about until I got here, but really it kinda is that way. And we should be teaching it and treating it more that way.
00:59:00
Speaker
I feel like how self-aware the field is at this conference is especially the whole concept of decolonizing the thing. And there were a couple other terms that were being tossed around that I am not familiar with and now have to go familiarize myself with. But it just seems like this conference compared to the other ones that I have gone to was a lot more, hey, everybody, let's do something to fix this. We know the problems are here. Let's do this. And we can all do it together. And I really kind of appreciated that kind of hopeful upbeat.
00:59:30
Speaker
to this. Am I rambling? No, it's not rambling at all. It's really good points. We do have about five minutes left. I know, Lauren, you would really want to talk about... Oh, yeah.
00:59:41
Speaker
pail you into this morning, so I'm sorry we're short on time. No, it's okay. I'll try to do it quickly. So there was this panel as a roundtable. It was called Sexual Violence and Anthropology. It was at 8 a.m. on Sunday, because that's what conference organizers do to the panel on sexual violence and anthropology.
01:00:02
Speaker
It was a panel of like eight or 10 women who are, they're all cultural anthropologists, although they like acknowledged that they were talking about kind of one piece of anthropology and they were self-aware about that.
Addressing Sexual Violence in Fieldwork
01:00:16
Speaker
And they're doing, all of them are just like doing really interesting advocacy and activists and also research work on sexual violence in anthropology and the ways that
01:00:31
Speaker
anthropologists.
01:00:35
Speaker
The ways that we talk about, that most people talk about ethics and anthropology, including like institutional review boards, think about protecting the research subjects, which is really important and no one's against protecting the research subjects, but it puts women anthropologists who may be sexually assaulted by research subjects in a really awkward position because if they report their sexual assault,
01:01:06
Speaker
then they are putting their research subject in danger. Also, they're reporting their rapist.
01:01:16
Speaker
it's this really messy situation. And there was this older woman who was talking, many of them were kind of young women, and she was talking about when she mentors students, she has these young women students who are wanting to do ethnographies in kind of dangerous situations. And she says, well,
01:01:44
Speaker
That's dangerous. It's dangerous to go into that community. If you study that, if you're studying a criminal organization, that could be dangerous. If you're studying a very male-dominated organization, that could be dangerous, and no one else in her department is thinking about this. It was really interesting.
01:02:06
Speaker
in terms of thinking through how all of our different ways of doing research position us and just the complexities around these issues. And also, it was really interesting to see that, like I said, it was on Sunday at 8 a.m.,
01:02:24
Speaker
As I tweeted, most of the people in the room appeared to be women. I was unimpressed that so few men showed up. And then one of the men who showed up kept like trying to like talk over, like he asked a question, but by asking a question, I mean he talked for five minutes and then someone tried to respond to him and he just talked over her. And I was like,
01:02:51
Speaker
Do some don'ts. Do show up to the panel on sexual violence. Do listen. Do not talk over. Like, what are you doing? And so it was both really hopeful because all these people are speaking out and talking about how to
01:03:07
Speaker
take this hashtag me to moment that we're in and extended and not let the backlash get us down and all of this, but also I was seeing some of the patterns recreating themselves in that room. And so I have these really like mixed feelings about it, but mostly I'm like, yeah, we're having these conversations and they're really important.
Engagement Beyond Academic Circles
01:03:28
Speaker
But it is also an issue about
01:03:32
Speaker
We, as anthropologists and archaeologists, talk to people who already know and already care, and it's about being able to communicate beyond the choir, right? The people who show up to those panels are interested in those issues, and that's great, and I'm super happy these conversations are happening because they haven't always, and it's actually fairly recently that we've seen a large uptick, and I am so stoked those conversations are happening. We also need to figure out
01:04:01
Speaker
how to get people who might not already care to care. Yeah. Yeah. No, and you're completely right. And we need to figure, my thing is, is like, we can tone things down to make the conversation more comfortable for those who are uncomfortable about it, but at the same time, what are we sacrificing to do that? I mean, I guess on your point, that's sort of been the,
01:04:30
Speaker
kind of theme of this conference in general. It's like the idea of why does archeology matter? And this idea of how do we make archeology matter not just as a discipline for the discipline, but how do we make it matter for actually applying it to move those conversations past the doors of a conference center or the walls of a university? Definitely. I wish we had more time to discuss this, but I know that we have an hour limit on our podcast. So I'm going to ask if anyone has
01:05:00
Speaker
Any final thoughts that they just, they really want to get out on the air. Now, how's your opportunity? I feel like Sally, tell us what you thought. What's your parting wisdom here? With her and I'm fine.
01:05:19
Speaker
It's kind of an overwhelming experience, I will admit. There are 6,000-ish people. I somehow did not expect that there were that many anthropologists in the world somehow. They're not all here either. Yeah, no, it hit me at some point, and I don't really know why it hadn't before. But I think it's like an incredibly...
01:05:38
Speaker
interesting experience, especially coming as an undergrad where I wasn't presenting anything. I wasn't like doing a poster session or something. And so I really just got to like kind of throw myself in and just go to things and like try and randomly talk to people and stuff like that. That was really an interesting thing to sort of see where this field is and where it's going and like what I really think of it in a lot of ways, which was it was just a super interesting
01:06:06
Speaker
experience, and I'm a very valuable one going forward. Laura, what's your final thought? Well, I have to answer the question. I would rename Great Discoveries in Archeology, and we were talking about this during the commercial break, but I was saying we need the word global or world in there somewhere, and Chelsea suggested something like
01:06:27
Speaker
archaeological perspectives on world issues and I really liked that because that's what I'm doing with my students. I think of it as a kind of bait and switch. I lure them in with the pyramids and then we talk about racism. It's really fun.
01:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, the aliens are like the total thing about racism. All the races are right there. Yeah, yeah. We'd like to learn them in with like, did the aliens build the pyramids? And I'm like, no, and that's a racist question. Let's talk about why. Exactly. Yeah, so something like that and having it stay
01:07:05
Speaker
nights and like open about global issues would allow me to talk about whichever issues are like at the top of the headlines at that time or are most affecting my students so it keeps it vague enough that I can be a little flexible but also makes it it's so much better than great discoveries in our geology which is just like boring and
01:07:29
Speaker
I give you an A plus on your homework assignment. Thank you. We have to drive back to New York as soon as we're done with this and tomorrow is my last teaching day of the semester. I am in grading mode. Okay, thank you. I appreciate it. You remind me of finals with a swing. Don't remind me. April or Sarah, do you have any?
01:07:51
Speaker
I, as I said, went to mostly Indigenous and Native issues things. I went to films, I went to cultural anthropology, I went to archaeology. And I would like to say that I think there's a lot of progress in the anthropology and archaeology of Indigenous issues and connecting past peoples to present peoples and talking about the future. But I think it's because we had a large turnout of Indigenous anthropologists. And I think three different panels I went to
01:08:18
Speaker
were all indigenous people talking about those issues. So I think hopefully I'd like in the future there would be more integration so that the conversation will be going back and forth. But as we talked about a little bit, there aren't agreement from one indigenous anthropologist to the next anyway, so we still have that. But for those who are down on that, it takes a few years for things to get into publications, but I think conferences are great places to see change as it's happening.
01:08:49
Speaker
I threw my two cents in earlier. I'm just glad that we have some new voices on the podcast and have April back. Chelsea's doing a fantastic job. Chelsea sold this podcast to so many people this weekend. I walked around with her so much and she was just like, I do the women in archaeology podcast. And I'm like, that's right, you do. And even was interviewed as an authority.
01:09:12
Speaker
on podcasting. So congratulations. Now I'm embarrassed. So what are your final thoughts? Yeah, I will say my kind of final thoughts for this conference as well as the podcast that we've just recorded that there were so many topics that were covered. They were so amazing. I'm absolutely thrilled that you all could come and participate in this and I'm really grateful. We love having
01:09:38
Speaker
Hi, everyone's perspectives. I'm sorry that we didn't have, you know, 20 hours of recording time to talk about all the amazing things that we saw here, the conversations that have happened in panels, networking happy hours, sitting on the Metro trying to get home. I just, the tweet up, the conversations on Twitter, if you want to know what's been going on, the hashtag for this meeting was amanth17, and there have been some really incredible
01:10:07
Speaker
Twitter conversations that have been happening Yeah, people really using media this definitely I would just love to see these conversations continue on the air with the public at Departments in field schools, you know, I think that I'm seeing a lot of positive Changes that are happening and I really hope they continue
01:10:35
Speaker
for the future. So on that note, thank you again so much for being here. And thank you for organizing. And hopefully we will see you all again on the podcast soon. Sarah, April, I'm sure Sally and Laura, please, please, please.
01:10:56
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Women in Archaeology podcast on the Archaeology Podcast Network. Please like, share, rate, and subscribe to the show wherever you found it. If you have questions, leave them in the show notes page at www.arcpodnet.com slash WIA, or email them to womeninarchaeologypodcast at gmail.com. The music is retro-futured by Kevin MacLeod and his royalty-free music. To support the network and become a member, go to www.arcpodnet.com slash members.
01:11:23
Speaker
This show is produced at the Reno Collective in Reno, Nevada. This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle 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.