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Bioarchaeology Across the World with Dr. Alex Garcia-Putnam - Ruins 82
316 Plays3 years ago
In this episode, we are chatting with Dr. Alex Garcia-Putnam who is the Assistant State Physical Anthropologist for the Department of Archaeology and History Preservation in Washington State. And how did we come across Dr. Garcia-Putnam? Well he is a UW graduate of course! We start out by recapping how we know each other and talk about Alex's awesome experience returning to US from Canada.
Alex talks about his experience growing up as a professors kid and how he got hooked on archaeology. We then discuss Alex's change of dissertation topic caused by the COVID19 pandemic and also discuss how bioarcheology can be used to talk about very relevant and interesting topics. We finish off talking about all the places he has worked as a bioarcheologist.
Literature Recommendations
- Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Website
- 2012 The Bioarchaeology of Violence edited by Debra L. Martin and Ryan P. Harrod
- 2014 The Anthropology of Plague: Insights from Bioarchaeological Analyses of Epidemic Cemetaries by Sharon N. DeWitte
- 2015 The Land of Open Graves by Jason De León
- 2021 Health, Stress, and Demography at Charity Hospital Cemetery #2 (AD1847-1929) by Garcia-Putnam, A., C. Halling, and R. Seidemann. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Meet Dr. Alex Garcia Putnam
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to episode 82 of A Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I'm joined by my co-host Connor Johnin and David Howe. In this episode, we are chatting with Dr. Alex Garcia Putnam, who is the assistant state physical anthropologist for the Department of Archaeology
00:00:33
Speaker
and history preservation in Washington state. And how did we come across Dr. Garcia Putnam? Well, he is a University of Wyoming graduate, of course. Alex, thank you so much for joining us tonight. How are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you guys doing? We're doing awesome, especially since we're all here together on this podcast, which is not something that we've been normally doing.
00:00:56
Speaker
I've missed it because I'm, I can't stop laughing. Carlton looks like PewDiePie with his new set up. Streamer Carlton. Yeah. I got the LEDs. That's how I spent my Sunday morning. But anyways, so Alex, you, you've just recently graduated. I mean, you still have revisions to do on your, on your dissertation, of course, but you actually now live
Adjusting to a New Life and Career
00:01:21
Speaker
20 minutes away from Connor. So how has been the readjustment in your life to moving out? Because you were out in the Southeast, if I recall. Yeah. So I have the dubious honor of being in a marriage with another academic. So we are constantly moving from place to place, depending on where things go. Kelly is down at LSU. So we were down in Baton Rouge for a while.
00:01:45
Speaker
And then I recently, you know, I was on the job market while I was ABD and I landed this job and I moved out to Olympia, Washington. I moved out two days after I defended. So I drove with a packed car from Louisiana to Wyoming, defended my dissertation and then drove another two days and started the job. And so Kelly's still living in Louisiana. We'll do that for a little bit here.
00:02:11
Speaker
At least Wyoming is on the way to Olympia, because I mean, I imagine if you were defending at the University of Maine, that would be a little bit more of a bummer having to go there than driving to Olympia, Washington. Actually, if you Google maps it, Laramie is on the way. It's like one of the stops.
00:02:28
Speaker
So it actually couldn't have been better.
Anecdotes and Humor
00:02:30
Speaker
And I like made time to go there. I was there for a week and a half and I just like hung out and saw friends and did a little rock climbing and, you know, drank delicious Colorado beer. And then, you know, got back in the car and moved on over here. See, I live in this like tiny little studio apartment, kind of waiting for Kelly and I to like house hunt in a few months.
00:02:49
Speaker
Gotcha. Excellent. Well, good stuff, man. It's definitely great to have you on. I know on this podcast, I don't know if you listen, we've kind of mentioned some of our journeys at various points throughout the podcast. So we talked with like Chris Rowe or Alex Craig. And so it's, it's fun to finally have you on the show.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yes. Yes. Yes. There might have been alcohol consumed at places. No, okay. Conferences attended in foreign countries. No. Is that story going to come up today? We don't have to bring it up, but it's been brought up before. We certainly can. You're a good looking dude. I forgot about that.
00:03:33
Speaker
So I guess we'll get this out of the way. We mentioned this before, but what I was referring to, me, we all, all of us, minus, Connor, you didn't go to Vancouver, did you? The SAA's a couple of years ago was in Vancouver, Canada. It was a great time. I went to the airport with Alex Garcia, our guest today, and Alex Craig, who was on previously, and Rhett Customs, Rhett, so the US has border patrol in Canada. Craig was the first, he's through. Garcia's in front of me.
00:04:03
Speaker
And I'm in the line, but I can hear Garcia say, no, my last name is Garcia Putnam. They're both part of that. And I just hear, going back and forth, that he turns to me. It gives me this disappointed look. And then they walk him to a different room.
00:04:20
Speaker
and i'm just kind of left in line like what the hell just happened i get through i get through security crepes like where's garcia and i was like they took him he's like what does that mean i'm like i don't know where i took alex and and so i went back to this room and they were like oh alexander garcia huh
00:04:38
Speaker
That's a name on a list. And I was like, well, that's great. That's like not my last name. Do you think I'm the laziest criminal of all time and just added a Putnam to the end of it? And apparently Alexander Garcia is on some list somewhere and they they didn't use these words exactly, but it was right around the time of bad Ombre.
00:05:03
Speaker
And I was like, I see it. I see it. I'm a bad hombre, huh?
Alex's Archaeological Journey Begins
00:05:10
Speaker
Yeah. And yeah, I was in there for like 45 minutes and I almost missed the flight. And you guys have all done this, but the University of Wyoming roundup is on Saturday night and we flew on Sunday morning.
00:05:26
Speaker
And I was a little sweaty sweating most of the booze out at that point. And they must have thought that I was hiding something because I was just like shaky and sweaty. It was it was a rough time. And then, of course, I get seated. I get seated next to Todd Suraville on the plane and he looks at the girl sitting next to us and he goes, watch out. He's a bad dude. Cornpop, dude, bad dude. Great. Perfect.
00:05:56
Speaker
Did the drugs make it to Laramy?
00:06:01
Speaker
See, this is the main reason I didn't go to Canada. You just can't trust Canadians. I mean, they don't even know what an audio is. They don't even know the kind of drinks I like up there. No, I got to say, you know, these were all these were all this is American customs. These were all Americans doing this. Yeah. Yeah. No, the Canadians the Canadians like gave me a pat on the back and we're like, thanks for visiting. You've been great. I was like.
00:06:28
Speaker
Would you like to stay? Here's a free doctor's visit on us. Yeah, exactly. Oh man. Now that that's underway. Yeah. So we usually start out, you know, obviously you're an archaeologist, you're a bioarchaeologist, and I think we can talk about that more later. What were kind of your first experiences in anthropology or archaeology? It was really college. You know, I've listened to a few of these podcasts and
00:06:53
Speaker
You hear, you know, you hear Bob Kelly say he's been interested in it forever. Right. I found it in college. I was always a history nerd. Like I remember watching the history when the History Channel was a real thing. Like when it was exclusively like modern marvels and it wasn't like Ghost Hunter. How stuff is made modern marvel. Yeah. When it when it was just that stuff, that's like all I ever watched.
00:07:16
Speaker
And that was like me as a kid was just like spewing facts at people that they didn't care about. And when I went to I had like a long and a rambling road through college. I transferred college once and I just kind of like didn't really know what I wanted to do.
00:07:31
Speaker
But I always was interested in the past. And then I randomly took an archeology class. It was like sold, done. This is the only thing. So, yeah, it was it was pretty much like one class and hooked. Excellent. And so you also grew up as a professor's kid. Like your father teaches at UNC Chapel Hill. He was at Duke for ages and now he's at University of Texas Medical Branch. Right. I said you had to teach at this point.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's wrong. We're on university. Don't you in UNC have a very big rivalry? It's just the biggest rivalry in sports, but that's fine. That's how I had him intertwined. Even still growing up, you, um, cause your, your father's not an anthropologist. He teaches, he's in the medical school there. He was at the medical school at Duke and now, and now in the university of Texas.
00:08:22
Speaker
Okay. Excellent, man. And did that have any influence on you, like either just attending college or, you know, what was your original major going in? So, yeah, I mean, there was no question that I was going to go to college or not. I always wanted to. And I never, I think something different from growing up with a parent in academia.
00:08:41
Speaker
I never thought of getting a job, like, having a career where I just, like, went and made money and came home and it didn't matter, right? Like, you know, that I didn't care about. I, like, wanted to enjoy what I did. And, like, I love my dad was, like, researching stuff and...
00:08:56
Speaker
He looks at infectious diseases, which is funny. If you look at my dissertation work, we actually focus on the same disease. We're both now into yellow fever, which is really weird. But yeah, I think a big part of it was growing up and just being like, oh, I don't have to just get a job. I can actually do something that sounds enjoyable and I can follow an interest.
00:09:17
Speaker
And there's a career out there for someone who just wants to follow an interest. So I went to James Madison University. I got in at a high school and it just wasn't the right fit. It was, to put it in perspective, I transferred to Skidmore College, which doesn't have a football team, which doesn't have fraternities and sororities. It's in upstate New York.
00:09:37
Speaker
It's tiny, it's got 2000 students. And it also has one hell of an anthropology department. And I just, I fell in love quickly. I actually, I got to give James Madison some credit though. My first anthropology classes were there and they also have a great anthro program. And had I stayed, I think I could have found a home in that department. I just, I cut bait and ran. Now are you at JMU back when it was, was it the herpes or the clap university of the country?
00:10:05
Speaker
That was just after I left. Yeah. Yeah. JMU James Madison university in Virginia. This is how I know. So my Alma Marta Radford used to have that title of like highest chlamydia rate in the country of like university of the country and the JMU.
00:10:20
Speaker
They shot for the stars and they took it. They took it for Radford just up the interstate and just traveled two hours up, up 81. I think it actually did travel. It was probably a Radford student that brought it there. Let's be honest. Yeah, it probably was the fourth presidents.
00:10:39
Speaker
No, I actually I have some fond memories of James Madison. It was just not the right school for me. And I transferred to Skidmore College, which is in Saratoga Springs, New York. And I loved it up there. I mean, that's where I first found rock climbing. That's where I also first found craft beer. So all the other things that I love, I happened to find when I lived in New York and it gave me access to New York City and Boston and and all these other things.
00:11:03
Speaker
The two things that I most associate you with are craft beer and rock climbing. That's the culprit. That's the reason. We almost did both of them yesterday. Did you work with Dr. Bender? Yeah.
00:11:18
Speaker
Okay. I'm working on her randomly on another project. She's doing stuff in South Park right now, still working up there. So I was just super random. So Sue was my first advisor when she was the sole archeologist in the department. And she retired just after I did my field school. So I actually did my field school in South Park. We actually had a CSU master's student as our TA.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah. And David knows him. Ben, right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, promoter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So right. Like all these weird connections out to, I never knew I'd be out to Colorado and Wyoming, right? And I have all these strange, these strange connections from my first field school. That was my first time west of the Mississippi was just getting off the plane in Denver and going right into the, the, into the Rockies.
00:12:08
Speaker
Interesting when you talk about interesting connections or crazy connections, my first CRM project was a Tetra-Tech on the Mountain Valley Pipeline project. I was like, oh, what are you here for? I'm just doing this because I'm about to go to University of Wyoming. Oh, we just had this other guy who's going to the University of Wyoming. His name is Alex Garcia, but he's overworking in Petcher right now. I was like, oh, that's cool. Someone to look forward to. And then I'm looking for housing in Laramie and I'm talking to this lady, Diana,
00:12:31
Speaker
She's like, Oh, why are you here? And I was like, Oh, you know, I'm an archeologist about to start, uh, at the university moment. She's like, interesting. I have another archeologist as a tenant. His name is Alex Garcia. So like I had two references before I remember the first time meeting him. Like, so, uh, I've been following you for the past three months and you and Kelly were like, well, I was like, let me explain. Well, and our crew chief on that project was also Jacobson.
Master's Path to Bioarchaeology
00:12:56
Speaker
And she also ended up going to university of Wyoming. Mm-hmm.
00:13:00
Speaker
Yeah, she was hitting me up about Bob, and I was like, he's about to retire, so you should get out here. And she did. Before the segment closes, so you went to Skid, JMU, then Skidmore, where'd you end up pursuing your master's degree? So I fell in love with bioarchaeology from taking one osteology class. I worked with bones once, and I was like, rocks.
00:13:20
Speaker
And I was done. And then I wasn't sure if I wanted to do forensics or bioarchaeology. And I ended up doing a master's program at East Carolina University. And the person I ended up working with there, Megan Perry, let me choose between forensics and bioarch and let me do a little bit of both while I was there. So that was huge. And it ended up, as you mentioned a minute ago, it ended up letting me go to Petra twice and excavate tombs in Petra. So I can't really ever complain about that.
00:13:45
Speaker
No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, that's like a, uh, in terms of places to work, that is one, you know, on the archeology bucket list to say you've worked at a, like a, such a prominent site like that, not once, but twice. Like that's yeah, that's amazing. And what ultimately kind of pushed you into going for the masters?
00:14:04
Speaker
Um, I would love to say it's some like really wonderful story, but no, it was like 2011 and I was living at home after graduating college because 2011 was pretty terrible on the job market. And I was like, well, I can either, uh, I can either just like go get a job somewhere doing something, or I can go back to school.
00:14:23
Speaker
And I was like, all right, I'm going to try this back to school thing. And so I applied for a few PhD programs, a few master's programs, and doing a terminal master's was like the best decision I ever made. I was not ready for a PhD. I was not mentally or emotionally like ready for that type of research and that type of commitment. And a two-year master's was amazing. I felt so much more sure of myself as a scholar. I did a small experiment for my master's thesis. I mean, it ended up just, I was like, oh, okay, like science isn't that hard. Look, I did the scientific method again.
00:14:53
Speaker
You know, excellent. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, we try to stress the importance of that here too. Like for the audience listening, you don't have to go right into a PhD. I think we've hammered that in and like Alex has a really good, you know, success story of that. Cause like the emotionally mature thing is something no one considers and no one's going to tell you like, Hey, you're a kid. Like don't come here.
00:15:17
Speaker
Yeah. I've been actively telling our audience not to pursue a PhD for like a whole year now. Just avoid it. There's no, there's no reason if you don't. We are truly inspiring the next generation here and actively stopping.
00:15:31
Speaker
If you're 110% committed to that thing, whatever it is, then I say go for it. But if you have any doubt, it's a really hard road. The job market's terrible. It's hard just to get through it in the first place. So yeah, I mean, it's something not to be taken lightly, for sure.
00:15:49
Speaker
Excellent. And we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. And in the next segment, we'll figure out exactly why Alex decided to take the road and all that trouble and how that's paid off for. So we'll be right back with episode 82 with Alex Christie and Putnam.
00:16:01
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 82 of Life Immigrants podcast. We have Dr. Alex Garcia Putnam here and we ended the last segment kind of talking about things.
Understanding Bioarchaeology
00:16:11
Speaker
I just spaced what we were talking about, but we wanted to start this segment off by having Alex kind of define what is bioarchaeologists and maybe highlight some differences between bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah. So as I said, I'm, I kind of, especially during my masters, I had the opportunity to do, do both of those things. And so forensic anthropology, right? Is that we, Connor and I were just talking about this whole bones phenomenon, right? Everyone watched the show bones and wanted to do forensic anthropology, right? And that is looking at the human skeleton and trying to assess it for, for medical legal purposes, right? Solving a crime, you know, trying to give this person an identity,
00:16:51
Speaker
to compare to a missing person's list and then trying to help criminal investigators. Bioarchaeology is looking at the archaeological record through human skeletal materials. If you think about all the things humans leave behind, we leave behind pottery, we leave behind stone tools, we leave behind metal artifacts, we also leave behind our bodies. We bury our dead, we've been burying our dead for
00:17:16
Speaker
hundreds of thousands of years. And so we have this rich kind of archaeological resources, the human body, the human skeleton, and the folks that work with ceramics and that work with stone tools, you are kind of using those as a proxy to look at human behavior. And oftentimes, especially with ceramics, you can get at specific behaviors, but with the human body, we're looking at the direct
00:17:40
Speaker
evidence of a human life. And that's not to say that we can always perfectly infer patterns of behavior from that human skeleton. We can see that individual, which is something that's really missing in a lot of our other archaeological investigations, is we can get down to the individual level and scale up to the population level.
Pandemic and Research Adjustments
00:18:01
Speaker
And that's, I think, one of the amazing things that bioarchaeology does is that kind of multi-scalar approach.
00:18:10
Speaker
Looking at one skeleton is interesting. Looking at a population or a sample from a cemetery really tells you about a past population. You ended up writing your dissertation on that kind of approach, right? You basically were given
00:18:25
Speaker
a certain amount of bones and trying to infer stuff off of that. Do you mind talking about that? No, not at all. So the shocker of the COVID-19 pandemic kind of derailed my original dissertation topic. I was going to be working down in Peru. I actually still have a site. I'm trying to kind of figure out how to kind of move off of it now, now that I have this job.
00:18:46
Speaker
I had this whole project in Peru. I'm really a historical bioarchaeologist, so I'm even more kind of different from the stuff you guys do. I really work in the historic time period. My big interests are kind of colonialism and after. My dissertation research ended up, I was living in Baton Rouge and the pandemic hit and I was like, well, what do I do? I can't get to Peru.
00:19:19
Speaker
What was that? Sorry. Oh, yeah. If I couldn't get back, if I was stuck there. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Going down there during the going down there still is a kind of not an easy thing. So through a friend of a friend in Baton Rouge, I made some contacts that worked at the attorney general's office. Strangely enough, they because of the amount of burials that kind of
00:19:33
Speaker
anytime soon. And then a friend of a friend, actually one of Alex Crave's friends.
00:19:44
Speaker
It rode out due to flooding because of hurricanes and things in Louisiana. They housed bioarchaeologists that constantly work on those, constantly work on those collections. And they had a collection that had been kind of unfortunately neglected. And it was a collection from a hospital from New Orleans from the 1840s to the 1920s. And it was an indigent hospital. So it was the hospital for the poorest residents of New Orleans. And it had
00:20:11
Speaker
unfortunately, also been found as they were doing road maintenance. So it was backhoeed up and it bore all the marks of those backhoes. And it was about 881 fragments representing only 74 individuals. So incredibly fragmentary stuff. Yeah. And I spent a lot of time with glue. I definitely like left that little room, just like kind of dizzy multiple days in a row from huffing, probably a little too much glue.
00:20:40
Speaker
And then I ultimately was able to actually get my hands on another collection from the same cemetery that was housed at Louisiana State University. And that's actually since been re-interred, which is really cool. I'm really happy that that's happened. But yeah, it's this population of immigrants and enslaved individuals and free people of color and kind of the lowest margins of society in New Orleans.
00:21:04
Speaker
from this crazy time period, right? This is before the Civil War to just before the Great Depression. Think about what changed in the United States in that time period, right? Like massive cultural changes and this population saw it all from the bottom effectively. And so I looked at the health
00:21:22
Speaker
of those individuals. And then I also, unfortunately, these individuals were also used by the medical school as specimens after they died. So they were cut up and autopsied and dissected. I also looked at those marks of kind of post-mortem violence, if you will. That's super cool. I mean, not for them, but yeah.
00:21:46
Speaker
And one of the other things that I hinted at earlier when I talked about yellow fever, yellow fever was this massive issue in New Orleans during this time period. And it can't be seen skeletonly. It leaves no marks. It usually kills fast enough that nothing would show anyways. And so I was looking at this population of marginalized individuals in the midst of a pandemic, effectively.
00:22:14
Speaker
And this is in June 2020. So this is the midst of the pandemic right after George Floyd. I felt like I had stumbled upon this dissertation that was the most timely kind of difficult thing I could have imagined in terms of grappling with those issues.
00:22:34
Speaker
So you mentioned looking at populations in a cemetery rather than just one person.
Historical Insights from Bioarchaeology
00:22:40
Speaker
I worked for a site for the DOD. I can't say where it is, but speaking of pandemics too, all these graves didn't have any bones left. There were a few metal trinkets and things with the end glass, but it was just stained soil where there was a body.
00:22:55
Speaker
And you couldn't read some of the headstones and it was up in rural, like Appalachia. And like, you could tell there were very many of them that died at the same time. It ended up being the flu from 19, what, 11, around then. 17, 18. Spanish flu? Yeah, Spanish flu. And like then we could tell like, okay, was it 1918? Yeah. Okay.
00:23:18
Speaker
They were like the gravestones were like right around like in those areas because you could narrow it down then and they were all of course like Irish railroad workers and yeah, it's just neat when you like know history a little bit and then you can put that in with what you're digging up. That's why historic archaeology is really cool.
00:23:32
Speaker
So this is one of the things I'm kind of, I love, it's funny, I switched from being a history major to being an anthropology major. I always had this interest in history, but I was always bothered because it wasn't perfect. Neither is archeology, right? There's biases in both, but by using the two of them together, you can really eliminate a lot of things. So I had this like relatively healthy looking skeletal sample. I didn't see any like really overt signs of poor health.
00:23:59
Speaker
But they were like the poorest of the poor from a southern city in the 1860s. It's just not necessarily the happiest place to live. And they died in a hospital, right? You'd think they wouldn't be healthy. And so the history clued me into yellow fever. But then I looked at the history further and there's no mention of these cut marks and these saw marks from dissections and things.
00:24:25
Speaker
And so the history informed my health interpretation and my bioarchaeology informed the kind of the history of this hospital as well. Now, did like the families of these people know what was going on or was it just like you'd have some poor dude that generally someone in the society looks down upon or they don't have power within the societal structure that doctors just felt like, okay, this person's dead. They're now going to become a
00:24:50
Speaker
unwilling cadaver? Yeah. And so the answer, the laws that govern who owns a deceased individual are incredibly complicated, and they're not very clear, especially the historical laws. So we didn't have a legalized body donation program in the US till the 1960s.
00:25:13
Speaker
What? That was much later. I was like, 1920s, 1930s. You're like, no, fam. 1960s. I believe it's the I believe it's the I should I don't remember the exact law, but it's yeah, I think it's 1968 was when that law went into went into official like into the into the law books. But there were universities that were kind of doing, you know, had body donation things before that. But like in terms of in terms of it being them not just being able to like
00:25:41
Speaker
you know, take unclaimed bodies. Don't quote me on this, but I believe in some states, unclaimed bodies are actually still fair game. Definitely in Texas. Just because Texas is like that, you know, if it were going to be a state, it would be Texas, Texas or Louisiana.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah, I the research into these individuals was, I mean, you know, looking at how they were treated in life and then how they were treated in death, you see. And then and then, of course, the the the wealthy cemeteries.
00:26:15
Speaker
aren't getting bulldozed for a road to go through them either. So you have this next level of destruction of these individuals' lives and identities. So they were mistreated in life. In many cases, they were dissected in death and then bulldozed 100 years later.
00:26:34
Speaker
And then of course I find them sitting on a shelf and like my colleagues in the attorney general's office are swamped. They're doing this work day in and day out. They just didn't have the time to look at a collection
Contemporary Relevance of Archaeological Work
00:26:45
Speaker
like that. And that's why they brought me in. And I thought this was gonna be a fun little side project to do during the pandemic. Cause I could do it from home effectively. I went in to the attorney general's office to do it, but it was safe. I was in a room alone. So I just sat there and when someone came in, I put a little mask on.
00:27:01
Speaker
But it turned into this much bigger thing and turned it easily turned into my dissertation without me kind of even really noticing. And then I pitched it to my committee and they were on board and I got writing. You know, this this really brings up an excellent point, especially like in today's archaeology and anthropology, where there's a whole question of what's what's even the point? Like, how do these studies relate to modern day issues in your dissertation? Because when we spoke earlier in the spring,
00:27:30
Speaker
and you were telling me about your dissertation, I was just absolutely blown away at how you were able to use really your training to identify not just the cut marks, but also the societal, socio-cultural context in which those cut marks were able to exist.
00:27:47
Speaker
And that, I think, really just illustrates the utility of especially bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology, because just by looking at the health of these skeletons, but also realizing that there's this post-mortem manipulation going on, talks about much larger concepts regarding society during that time that people just absolutely overlook. And then you're like,
00:28:14
Speaker
this. It just informs so much and opens, as you said, such a can of worms that it became your dissertation that hits a lot of forms, the core of anthropology as a discipline here in the United States. It's just fascinating.
00:28:30
Speaker
what some of those projects like the one that you undertook can reveal about our culture in some areas. Yeah. I mean, it's hard, right? Some of these things that we're uncovering. And then, yeah, this is true for many people looking at things like climate change, people looking at underrepresented communities. It's these pieces of the world that
00:28:51
Speaker
are difficult and are contentious topics. And I think we have to confront those. We shouldn't shy away from them. We should be seeking those opportunities out. And I think this was also happening when we last spoke in the midst of what was going on in New England, where it was revealed that museums in the Northeast were using African-Americans as they're teaching collections. And you could see those dualities between what was happening there and
00:29:17
Speaker
clearly what was happening in parts of New Orleans. Yeah, I think you're referring to the move bombing victims at the Pennsylvania schools. Yeah. So not technically New England, but we'll forgive you for that one.
00:29:30
Speaker
The Mid-Atlantic, my fault. Where does Pennsylvania fall? Is it the Mid-Atlantic? It is, because it's underneath New York. I had a whole argument with someone about this. New York is also technically not New England. It's the Mid-Atlantic, yes. New York is New York, I think. New York is like Texas. It's not one thing. It's its own thing. It's all East Coast to me. Have you ever lived on the East Coast?
00:29:55
Speaker
No, I've never lived there. I visited there, but yeah. Not quite the experience that you guys are having. Kind of the post-mortem being destroyed by a backhoe or something like that. A trencher is the reason that I'm actually going to just be burned.
00:30:17
Speaker
I don't want to be a part of
Future Aspirations and Global Experiences
00:30:19
Speaker
that post-mortem stuff. But yeah, I really like what you guys are talking about because sometimes it's hard, like you both had mentioned, that it's hard to bring this into the real world to the present day to make it applicable. So I think it's really cool that you were able to do that and you were able to make it through COVID with a dissertation.
00:30:39
Speaker
In the strangest of ways, the pandemic and moving away from this project in Peru, I actually sped up because I didn't have to wait for summer fieldwork. Working internationally is really challenging. You go down for six weeks in the summer, eight weeks in the summer. Maybe you spend a semester there, but still it's these shorter stints.
00:31:00
Speaker
This, I was able to do it 15 minutes from home and I knocked out my data collection in four months while I was writing. So I started this in early summer 2020 and defended in September 2021. And, you know, I don't that wouldn't have been possible with that Peru project. And that project still has a very strong place in my heart. I would love to go back and excavate there. Obviously, with with my new job, I'm incredibly busy here in Washington and, you know, taking a month off is not really
00:31:30
Speaker
something I can do in an adult job. Yeah, man. That's absolutely nuts. And with that, we'll be right back with segment three, continuing on episode 82 with Dr. Garcia Putnam. And we're back with episode 82. So we wanted to close out this segment talking with Alex about his
00:31:51
Speaker
experiences working as a bioarchaeologist across the globe, because he's been able to do some really cool things during his career. So we kind of wanted to highlight your experiences in the field doing a lot of different things and how they've shaped your research and worldview and perspectives in archaeology. So why don't we go ahead and just kind of start with Petra, because we've already mentioned that, and then we'll go from there. So what was that like getting to work there?
00:32:16
Speaker
So I started this master's program knowing about as much as about Petra as anybody else. I was like, oh, Indiana Jones. Cool. Great. Awesome. Like Temple of the Crescent Moon, you know, and I know, you know, the whole time I was there for I actually did it at the end of my two years there. So I finished. I defended my master's and then left for Petra for six weeks.
00:32:38
Speaker
And Jordan is the coolest country. I have nothing but positive things to say about Jordan. It's incredibly friendly. You know, the people there are wonderful. The food there is amazing. We lived in a kind of a Bedouin village just on the outskirts of Petra and we took the truck into work every day.
00:32:56
Speaker
And it's amazing, you never become desensitized to where you're working when you're there. You'll be screening or working hard, then you'll look up and you'll be like, I'm in Petra. It was the coolest thing, right? You know the big stone carved facade tombs that are straight up the rock walls? Shocker, that's not where you and I get buried.
00:33:25
Speaker
right? Those are those are tombs, but the kind of the everyday person doesn't get buried there. And so they were actually the project I was on was looking at a kind of the what I like what I always like to think of as like the subdivision of Petra, it was like just out
00:33:46
Speaker
You crossed the Roman road and you went outside past some temples and there was this ridge called the North Ridge and it had a series of homes and a series of tombs and they were right next to each other. So we had a team doing the domestic archaeology and a team doing the tomb archaeology. And I was in charge of one of the tombs and I was there 2014 and 2016.
00:34:09
Speaker
I will say this was a joint project between East Carolina University and North Carolina State University. My advisor at the time, Dr. Megan Perry, met East Carolina and Tom Parker, who recently passed away, who was an incredible scholar. He was at NC State and he was one of the best ceramicists I've ever seen. You could pass him the tiniest shirt and he could tell you what year it was from. I mean, just absolutely incredible guy.
00:34:33
Speaker
And so, yeah, I was in charge of one of one of these tomb excavations. And the way it worked is they dug straight down into the sandstone bedrock and then straight over.
00:34:43
Speaker
making this underground chamber. And then they dug graves down into the floor. And that was about 2000 years ago. It's since been filled with desert sand and trash and debris. So we had that, it was about two meters down. And then the chambers were about two and a half by two and a half meters square. So it was a lot of dirt to move before we even got to the skeletal remains.
00:35:12
Speaker
How hard was it to remove the Autobot and Decepticon remains from the site? I was about to ask about the Fremen.
00:35:21
Speaker
So you know what's really funny is if you watch, if you've ever been to Jordan or go to Jordan, you'll also go to Wadi Rum, which is right next to Petra, this big desert valley with huge sandstone towers on either side. And Dune was filmed there, Transformers was filmed there, Star Wars, The Last Jedi was filmed there, Aladdin was filmed there. So you'll see all these things and you're like, oh, I've been there. Oh, I've been there. Oh, look at that. So it is pretty incredible in that sense.
00:35:51
Speaker
But no, I did not run into any Decepticons. Good. Could have been your toaster. You never would have known. I know.
00:35:57
Speaker
It was like Meryl that you was driving. Yeah, that Meryl was. Oh, that's, yeah. If only I had had a Camaro at the time or now. Did you eat a lot of shwarma there? I ate a ton of shwarma and I ate a ton of falafel, but I will say that both times I was there coincided with Ramadan. So I was actually really limited in my ability to go to restaurants because lots of them were closed during the religious holiday.
00:36:27
Speaker
Did you have local archaeologists and archaeological support working during that time as well? That is the weirdest part about working internationally, is that you hire local workers to help you. Not only did we have local Bedouin workers that were honestly better at archaeology than I will ever be,
00:36:49
Speaker
right? These are guys that have never been formally trained. They can excavate down. They're like, I'm like, Hey, hey, 10 more centimeters. And they just go at it with a pick. And it's the flattest floor you've ever seen. Right. And it's incredible. And we also had a department of antiquity reps there as well. So were the Bedouins working during Robert was that Ramadan is when they
00:37:09
Speaker
You don't you fast during the day. Yes. And so that was actually a big a big kind of point of contention a lot. We some of the more devout members of the the working group would want to would want to fast and not even drink water. And we would be like, guys, it's too hot. Like, please, there are exemptions.
00:37:28
Speaker
to fasting in Ramadan. And we would be like, guys, this is like one of those times, right? This is one of those times where you can please, you were working much too hard, you need to drink water. And so that was really hard for us, you know? It's this weird dynamic of working with another group of people and them being kind of the workforce there with you. It was not something I had ever experienced in the United States, obviously.
00:37:53
Speaker
I said we had a big Islamic community when I was growing up and two days during Ramadan was, we changed practice to evenings after a while. Oh, oh, oh, for football. Yeah, absolutely. It makes complete sense. I will say that our work schedule there was get up at like 430. We were on site by six and we were done by like one 130 every day.
00:38:19
Speaker
And we had a forced siesta. So we would eat a big lunch and then from like two to three in the afternoon, it didn't matter if you slept, but you had to be horizontal. Just the. It was mandated, but it was like, and then you get up in the afternoon and do lab work.
00:38:36
Speaker
Oh, it was mandated. Damn. OK. No, like people were like, dude, like, go lie down, go lie down and be like, no, I got to get working. It doesn't matter. Go lie down. I just imagine someone with like a cricket bat just like knocking out people's knees and just lie down, lie down.
00:38:51
Speaker
Like a level out to horizontal. I got to say, guys, I never throughout college, never throughout grad, I never nap. I'm not a napper. I slept every single day from two to three on that project. Just I passed out. Excellent.
00:39:10
Speaker
But yeah, so Jordan was incredible, right? I was able to see this whole other culture. I was able to excavate these incredible, in these incredible places, work with just some of the best people in the world. And really, I was completely immersed in that culture. My Arabic is awful. I know four words. So all credit goes to the guys I worked with, the Bedouin that I worked with, because they spoke a lot more English than I spoke Arabic, right?
00:39:36
Speaker
And we made it work. I was really fortunate my second year there, one of my students was studying to be, I think she was an Arabic minor.
00:39:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. I had a lot, I had help. Cool. Absolutely. And I know we've chatted about this. You've also, you seem to have knocked off quite a few places in the globe where you've done bioarchaeology, which is cool and awesome. Could you talk about some of your experiences in, is it Laos?
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I worked in Peru as well as I kind of talked about earlier, but I also was a contractor for the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency, which looks for past war dead people who were killed in action or missing in action.
Recovery Missions and Global Archaeology
00:40:23
Speaker
Imagine someone in World War II gets shot down over the Pacific or Marines fighting across Guadalcanal, that kind of thing, right? And you don't have time to bring your buddy out and you bury them on site. Then there's this agency attached to the Department of Defense that goes out and actually looks for these individuals.
00:40:43
Speaker
And I was able to do two missions, they're called missions, I was able to do two missions with them. The first to the Solomon Islands, which not many people have kind of heard of, but many more people have heard of the Battle of Guadalcanal, which is this famous World War II battle. So I was able to work on the Solomon Islands, looking for some individuals who were lost in action there from a World War II site.
00:41:03
Speaker
And then I was also able to work on a site in Laos from the Vietnam War. And I can't get into the specifics of those, but what I will say is, I mean, talk about working with local communities, especially in Laos, you know, 70, 80 locals helping you, forming a giant bucket line. You're excavating, you know, the typical pace for these excavations, this is not archeology as we know it. This is a four by four a day. So four by four meters a day.
00:41:32
Speaker
You're moving dirt. You're not, and you're not digging, you know, it's a whole, it's a whole different mindset. It's much more akin to forensics, right? This is a recovery. And the goal is not the, the minute details of the stratigraphy. It is finding evidence that that individual was there, whether it's a tooth or a dog tag or, or a set of actual remains.
00:41:57
Speaker
Yeah. You're just trying to bring people home. You're not trying to learn more about a site. It's like, we know that there's American war debt somewhere here. They need to go home. And so that is your goal. Use those archeological skills, boost the speed up to 200 and get them out. Yep. I was brought on for that second project in Laos specifically because it was on a mountainside.
00:42:17
Speaker
And they were like, oh, you, you, you know, yammer, you yammered on about climbing for the entire time you were in the Solomon Islands. You want to go, you want to go get harnessed in and try this, you know, try this out on a slope. And that's exactly what it was. You know, we, we had, you know, mountaineers, you know, that worked for the, for the military, setting up rope systems for us. And we were actually kind of, you know, doing, doing archeology on this, this slope like that. Right. Which I was forever happy on. Um,
00:42:45
Speaker
I'm kind of a mountain goat in that sense. That was really easy for me. But the archaeology, the challenges of maintaining a grid, the simplest thing on a normal site, maintaining your grid, God forbid you look at that grid in terms of for its accuracy now. By the end of that, it wiggles. But the end goal, again, is recovery of these individuals.
00:43:12
Speaker
It's such an important mission, and I think it's an incredible place to have worked, and I was incredibly fortunate to work there for two missions. They're just doing a really great thing, a really great service. I see it as really putting our money where our mouth is, right? We have this no man left behind mentality, and they're making sure that that's a reality, and that's really, really cool.
00:43:38
Speaker
I think, you know, and part of the reason I wanted to talk about this with you is because you've highlighted the diversity of jobs you can get as a bioarchaeologist or as an archaeologist in general.
Diverse Archaeological Techniques
00:43:52
Speaker
I think it highlights different methods and things like that. And you're not always going to be digging with a trowel and a one by one trying to like scrape through everything. You know, I think
00:44:04
Speaker
We've tried to highlight this on our show is that there's a diversity of jobs, what you do, methods, all that stuff. I've got an embarrassing confession. I think I've dug a one by one once. Right. I've worked in, listen, in Petra, in Petra, we were digging by the confines of the tomb, right? So we dug to the walls.
00:44:31
Speaker
And in Peru, we dug some one by ones, but it was much more to the edge of it. I've worked on a lot of larger architectural sites too, right? Like more monumental things. So you're digging to the outskirts of a building wall or whatever it might be.
00:44:48
Speaker
And then obviously with with DPAA as a contractor there, you know, I was we were digging four by fours. So looking at our friends that like work at Laprelle, you know, some of these some of these really these sites where you are you are digging down in these perfectly flat. I don't think I could do that. Like it's been so long since I've had to do that perfect excavation that like it's it's like kind of daunting for me to think about.
00:45:14
Speaker
that kind of archaeology. Yeah, I get scared too. If you put a, give me a shovel or anything like that. I can do that. I can make it flat. I can burn, burn through some stuff, but just scraping through stuff has got to be difficult. I know. And David, you've, you've mentioned this before on the podcast, like you go at topper, you know, if you, you did a scrape too much, you'd like burn through a level. Wait till we get Derek on here. He'll, he'll let you guys know about that.
Career Reflections and Recommendations
00:45:43
Speaker
Excellent. Well, dude, it's been awesome having you on. Alex, we really appreciate you coming onto the show. It's been great. You know, we've been, for our Wyoming friends, we try to like wait to have them on until like they're close to done or done. So rather than just bringing a bunch of our Wyoming friends, like, so how's your dissertation going? You know, we could actually, we have success stories as to what you've accomplished. And since we've met you at this point, like five years ago, at least I met you like five years ago.
00:46:11
Speaker
What year is it? 2021? Yeah, I guess six years ago. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, but before we end the show, we're a couple sources. These could be books, articles, or videos that you would recommend for anyone interested in bioarchaeology, archaeology, Peru, or getting involved with the Veterans Recovery Program thing.
00:46:30
Speaker
Lots of the folks that work at the veterans, that work at DPAA, a lot of those scientists are publishing a lot, so you can certainly look for them, search for DPAA. They have a great website with lots of information as well. Not necessarily bio-arc related, but a book that every single anthropologist needs to read is The Land of Open Graves by Jason De Leon.
00:46:51
Speaker
I thought you were going to say the fifth beginning. I'm so glad. So I actually went, I looked, I was like, all right, I wrote down a list of books and stuff and I went and looked and I got scooped on like four of them. And, but the one that I didn't get scooped on was the land of open graves.
00:47:10
Speaker
And that book, every single anthropologist should read it. It's true for field anthropology. It looks at the current crisis on our southern border and kind of the politics and the personalities and the people that are trying to cross the border and how, as the government is kind of pushing back. And it's this brutal look at kind of life on the border and life between borders as well.
00:47:40
Speaker
And it's every single, it's four field, every single anthropologist should have to read that book. Otherwise, any work by Sharon DeWitt, especially her work on plague cemeteries in Europe, that's like classic bioarchaeology. And it's just, she looks at these
00:47:56
Speaker
these incredible cemeteries where we know every single person died of plague. Is she at Texas? She is, she for a while was, I think she, I believe she's still at South Carolina. Okay. But yeah, that's fantastic. Really fantastic work. The other one is the bioarchaeology of violence. It came out maybe 2013, but it's still a worthy read. Lots of good case studies and a really good theoretical approaches as well.
00:48:20
Speaker
And I mean, shameless self-promotion, definitely. I just put out an article with my colleagues from the Louisiana Attorney General's office. So definitely check that out. What's the title of that? We'll throw it. We'll throw that in here. Oh, that's health, stress and demography at Charity Hospital Cemetery number two. No, no one has pubs off. That's impressive. I mean, it like just just came out.
00:48:43
Speaker
No, dude, that's perfect. No, absolutely. We'll absolutely direct people to go read that. If you're curious as to what happened at Guadalcanal, I highly recommend with the old read at Peleliu in Guadalcanal by Eugene Sledge. And that's absolutely the wrong one. I meant helmet for my pillow and that is by, I got, I watched, I actually watched the
Conclusion and Farewell
00:49:01
Speaker
Pacific recently. That's how I know. The Pacific is, I actually, I watched the Pacific just before I left for, for the Solomon Islands.
00:49:09
Speaker
Nice. A lot of cool stuff happened. My dad's a former Marine and Guadalcanal is a favorite topic is. Alex, where can our, you know, followers find you on the social medias, on the interwebs? So I am, I'm social media inept, but I do have an Instagram. It's a Garcia Putnam, my name, no hyphens. You a LinkedIn guy? Uh, no, but I, no, no, but I have a, I have an academia account and I have a brand new, my wife forced me to get a Twitter account. So I'm at Garcia Putnam.
00:49:40
Speaker
I barely used it, but I'm trying. All right. For sure. Got it. Awesome. Well, yeah. Thank you so much, Alex, for chatting with us today. And because this is a life in ruins, we have to ask you a very important question. If you had had the chance to go back and do it all again, would you still choose to live a life in ruins?
00:50:04
Speaker
Hell yeah. Excellent. Well, with that, we just interviewed Dr. Alex Garcia Putnam. You can find him on Instagram, Twitter, and academia.edu. All those links will be found on the description wherever you're listening to this podcast.
00:50:20
Speaker
Please be sure to rate and review the podcast, guys. I know I haven't been on the past few. Carlton's been off a few. Connor's been off a few. But you know, we're still here. We're still kicking. You know what else is kicking? The two stars that we have. So kick, get, get just more stars. All right. I've said my piece. And with that, we are out.
00:50:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her. That means two things.
00:51:15
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know. I mean, that's a common one. OK, I got a better one. You guys watch the news. Someone poured oil over a major Jordanian city and heated it up. It was petrifying. They're done. All right. I'm going to end it. Yeah.
00:51:48
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster, Rachel Rodin, Laura Johnson, Max Lander.
00:52:07
Speaker
And this has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.