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Dragonglass with Jacob Arnzen - Ep 155
3.1k Plays1 year ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, we talk with our good friend and recent graduate of the University of Wyoming, Jacob Arnzen. We delve into Oregon history, the vegetation and topography of Oregon and random tidbits about the Oregon Trail. He then explains what he did for his thesis and also explains why obsidian is a very interesting thing to study in the past. We finish off talking about federal jobs and how they are a good career path
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/155
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to episode 155 of the Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I am your host, Connor Jahnen, and I am unfortunately joined by my co-host, David Howe. For this week's episode, we are joined by Jacob Arnzen, who is a good friend of the podcast.
00:00:25
Speaker
gamer, and also a recent graduate of the University of Wyoming.
Jacob's Archaeological Journey
00:00:28
Speaker
He's going to talk about his career in archaeology and why he studies dragonglass. Jacob, how are you doing on this lovely Tuesday? Oh, I'm doing great. Just got back from work. It was a long trip through Portland traffic, but got through it and I'm doing okay. Good. I also want to start out by saying you're a long time listener of the podcast, aren't you? Yeah, I pretty much started listening to you guys. Well, episode one. Wow, really?
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah. Like, well, you guys, uh, when you haven't started, I was, uh, still in, I think I just started working for the forest service. Okay. So yeah, it was kind of fun because I would download your guys's episodes and bring them out with me to the field. And then during lunch break, which is usually our 30 minute break for lunch, I will turn it on, have like some background noise or like, just to listen to what you guys have to say or who you, what guests you had on. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good
Podcast Engagement and Local Weather
00:01:22
Speaker
to know. Have, uh, have you rated and reviewed the podcast before?
00:01:25
Speaker
Yes, I have. Okay. Very important to do so. You pass the five check. That's good, man. Cool. That's a, that's a warning to all the other guys. You get to come on the show if you're ready. No, you actually, I don't know. Absolutely not. I'm not allowed to make, uh, like, uh, what are those? What are the, what is this deal? Promises. Absolutes. There you go. And like, um, Carlton's here. Anyway. Yeah. Connor, take it away.
00:01:46
Speaker
Thank you for listening to those early episodes. I know they're rough, a lot of giggling, but we made it through. So if you are currently living in the Pacific Northwest, is it finally the darkness? Is it gone yet or is it? Yeah. It's actually been gorgeous here for the past five days. It's been great. We had an 80 degree day Friday and then it was
00:02:08
Speaker
again 80 on Saturday and Sunday, it started cooling off. And the last couple days have been pretty cool, but partly cloudy, but it's been still pretty warm and sunny and it's been great. We've had a pretty long winter out here too. And so it's kind of, we had snow up in the foothills not too long
Eastern Oregon Archaeology Overview
00:02:28
Speaker
ago. So it was kind of a long winter.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yeah, we're finally turning the corner up here too, which is thank goodness. Although winter in Wyoming is like till June. So yeah, I had friends come visit me when I was there in May and like, you know, you start doing fieldwork late May and they came out to visit, I think it was May 1st and it had just dumped snow like a blizzard and they were from Tennessee. So they hadn't seen that much snow in their life. And they're like, whoa.
00:03:05
Speaker
So you grew up in Oregon but not in the place that everyone kind of pictures Oregon as right the place you grew up in is a little different Yeah, so most people when they come to Oregon they think of this almost like tempered rainforest very very lush and green very wet very gray gloomy I think of veganism Oh, yeah
00:03:29
Speaker
Legalize the crack. That's just Portland. Just kidding, Portland. Love you. But that's actually just like one third of the state. The other two thirds is a lot of high desert environment climate. And so the area that I grew up in was in the far northeastern corner of Oregon near the town called La Grande. And it's up in the mountains and it's in this nice green valley, but it's not like green is like
00:03:56
Speaker
this area of the Willamette Valley and the coastal range of Oregon. It still gets pretty dry and pretty hot out there. And we're surrounded by big ponderosa forests out there. We have big prairies of sagebrush and then also grass prairies along the Columbia River. But it's significantly drier and warmer in that part of Oregon. And so it's like you get a lot of shades of green in Western Oregon, but you get onto Eastern Oregon, east of the Cascades, and you get a lot of shades of browns and yellows.
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of a wild once you like drive out of Portland going east, you like follow the Columbia River and all that area, which is absolutely gorgeous. Like anyone should do that drive. Beautiful. But then you really get this like quick transition to like, Oh shit, I'm in the desert. Yeah, it does change really rapidly as soon as you get past like, especially the hood river and when you get to the Dalles. Yeah.
00:04:52
Speaker
It's an absolutely beautiful area. I drove through Legrand and Baker City, the metropolises that they are. It was a beautiful country out there. It reminds me of bits and pieces of Montana and Colorado, those inner mountain valleys.
00:05:10
Speaker
whatnot. But when I was driving through there, I also thought, this has got to be a great place for people to live. Historically, pre-historically, it just seems like a great place to settle down.
Oregon Trail and Early Settlement
00:05:23
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So Eastern Oregon has a very extensive archaeological and historical record. Some of the oldest sites in Oregon are located in Eastern Oregon, Paisley Caves, Connolly Caves, Rim Rock Draw,
00:05:36
Speaker
that these are really old Paleo-Indian sites. And so having them in Kingston, Oregon means that this place was pretty special for people even for that long ago. And this area has been continuously used even from that time all the way to historical period. And this is like the first, the summer of the first locations where pioneers would have came to in Oregon.
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah. So it seems like it's a pretty, you know, great place to live. Like you were saying prehistoric Lee and obviously Clovis comes through there or maybe something before Clovis, but can you tell us why? And like growing up in New York, like when I thought it was Oregon and two, like we played Oregon trail on the computer and like, why was Oregon like this bastion of like, you know, why is there a trail that goes through there as opposed to California or, you know, Washington?
00:06:27
Speaker
Right. Well, there's actually the California Trail, which was part of colonization of California by Americans. But like the most famously known Oregon Trail is actually just like it's multiple trails, a system of trails that all lead to Oregon. The reason for this push for to move to Oregon was kind of like was to outcompete the British because the British were also moving in. The Hudson Bay Company had a big part to play in Oregon history.
00:06:54
Speaker
even wait like just right after Lewis and Clark came through 1802 to 1804. The Hudson Bay Company right away came in and they're like, Oh, there's a bunch of furs out here. So they started establishing quite a bit of a presence out here in the, you know, the American government was like, Oh, we need to have an American establishment on the western coast. So by promoting the land grant act, which was allowed for
00:07:21
Speaker
American citizens to acquire 160 acres of real estate in the west, in non-settled areas.
00:07:31
Speaker
And granted this, this is all lands that were taken from the local indigenous groups. Non settled is like, yeah. So what I mean by non settled is non settled by white folks. And so, you know, it was very tantalizing for a lot of Americans who were struggling to make established farms in parts of the East because it was getting kind of crowded out there. So it was quite tantalizing to get free 160 acres of
00:07:55
Speaker
real estate in this barely publicized primo farmland in this new Oregon country. It really kicked off in the 1840s, the Oregon Trail, and tens of thousands of immigrants made that crossing.
00:08:12
Speaker
into Oregon. So when they first got here, though, a lot of them were quite surprised to realize that there was already a bunch of white settlers already here. A lot of them were Scottish, Irish, and French Canadian, French Canadian fur trappers that were employed by the Hudson Bay Company. But when they retired, the Hudson Bay Company kind of promoted that they should stay here and farm the ground and, you know, grow local crops here so they can
00:08:39
Speaker
Give it a sell it to the Hudson Bay company and the Hudson Bay company can sell it to their fur trappers for, you know, make bread and stuff for them. A lot of heart attack. I know in Wyoming, when I worked on Oregon trail sites, like there's a lot of like graves and like obviously children's size, some of them adult sized in Oregon. Do you see a lot of graves and do they mark and denote that they died of dysentery? No, not really.
00:09:05
Speaker
I don't think there's a significant amount of graves that we find. It's not an option on the site form. Yeah, it's not an option. Well, there is an option on the site forms for graves, but it doesn't specify what kind of graves. Because I'm sure Connor could run a model on GIS that filters out which ones were dysentery, which ones were wolves. Yeah, yeah.
00:09:25
Speaker
Well, I mean, through my career of working in Oregon, I've only found what not even found them. It's only been a lot of these were already known grave sites for pioneer journals, because they usually kept pretty good records of like, who was on there, who and then who died and, you know, cross-referencing with a lot of journal diaries and journals from all these pioneers.
00:09:47
Speaker
I mean, maybe they might have mentioned in the journals that they died of dysentery, but it's not going to say that on their headstones. And a lot of these headstones are just made. You can't spell diarrhea without diary. So. Well, and a lot of people can't spell dysentery during that time, so. Yeah. And, you know, like a lot of these headstones are made from wood, so they're not going to survive the arc, the elements. So.
00:10:10
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. All right. So sorry. It's an extra too much characters in the, in the, in the space, you know, I hit that character limit real, real, real quickly. Yeah. Uh, in, in that area, obviously, and you specialized in an obsidian, which is volcanic class or dragon glass, dragon glass, it, uh, like the native groups use that are the indigenous groups. They're like utilized it pretty well because it's pretty common. But before.
00:10:40
Speaker
And we dive into that. Could you tell us like before, obviously the Euro Americans got there and I guess Lewis and Clark can talk about that first, I guess. And then I wanted to know what tribes lived there or, you know, like who was there.
Native Tribes and Historical Education
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you basically asking me about all the tribes that lived in Oregon. And the answer is, is there's a lot and variety of different distinctive groups. But like the area that I'm currently working in, which is primarily along the Willamette Valley, which is like that, that big lush green valley. You see, if you look at a map of Oregon.
00:11:11
Speaker
There was primarily a group called the Kalapuya tribes, and they're made up of different bands of people. There was like the Tualatin, the Yamhill, the Mohawk, and that's just to name a few, but there is several bands that made up this group of Kalapuya. Okay. Yeah. And so, and then you go further into the coast range, the amount of groups that lived on the coast range is definitely, there's a large number of groups.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's like staggering. If you look at like an intro textbook, it's insanely dense, but it seems like that because it could support that lots of focus on rivers, salmon, different resources obviously made that place great to live in the rain made you sad, but it'll, you know, produces a lot of vegetation. I mean, it was sought out for by like a lot of herbivores like deer and elk. And then you were saying too, like the rivers produced a lot of fish, especially salmon runs.
00:12:08
Speaker
like Camus was a big intensified geophyte out in the Willamette Valley. Yeah. Was all this taught like in your school growing up, were you given like Oregon history and prehistory? What do you mean talking about like high school? I mean, like even like high school and elementary school. I mean, is it, is it something that they focus on? Yeah. I mean, when we were in elementary school, they, they really kind of introduced us to, to Oregon history. And I remember fondly when I was in elementary school, like fourth or sixth grade.
00:12:35
Speaker
We had these field trips that we'd go to Fort Walla Walla, which was the local historical museum near my elementary school. It was first a fur trapping outpost, and then it became this trading fort for pioneers when they first got into the Oregon country.
00:12:53
Speaker
Then it became a civil war era for like, it was, it had a detachment of union troops there during the civil war. And then during World War I, it became a, like in case the war went out there, they just stationed troops there. Like why? Yeah. Yeah. It was, uh, yeah, it was because if Oregon, the citizens of Oregon actually became Southern sympathizers, then, uh, it was, uh, union trips were there to quell any unrest.
00:13:18
Speaker
There was a few occasions of unrest, but it wasn't like, uh, there was like 150 years later. Right. Yeah. And Fort Walla Walla was the only fort had Union troops stationed there. There was numerous forts along the alignment Valley that were first built to guard the Indian reservations that were being established out there.
00:13:46
Speaker
like Fort Hoskins, Fort Yamhill, and Fort Umpqua. These are three major forts that were there, but then became pretty strategically important during the Civil War. They housed a lot of Union volunteers and Union infantry detachments protecting Union interests there in Oregon. And I think I kind of touched on this before, but Lewis and Clark, I know when they went through West Chicago Way, they found Oregon and they built a little fort there on the coast. Which one was that?
00:14:16
Speaker
That was Fort Clapsett. And it's technically on, it's on the Washington side of the Columbia river, like right at pretty much at the mouth of the Columbia river is where they spent their winter of 1803, I believe.
Exploring Obsidian and Its Significance
00:14:30
Speaker
And when they were the first Euro-Americans to complain about the wet weather, there's a lot of general entries of them complaining, complaining about how wet it is.
00:14:42
Speaker
because winter here on the western side of Oregon is very wet. We get a lot of moisture and we don't get it technically in snow, we get it in rain. The fort was built in 1803 and then they abandoned it after the winter of 1803 and then spring of 1804 they made their way back up the Columbia River. The fort was abandoned and there was no other occupants of it.
00:15:07
Speaker
I guess technically we haven't found the footprint archaeologically of Fort Clapsett, but we know the general area of it's at. And there's actually a really good national park or state park there. I think it's a national park. Well, since you just triggered my PTSD for the winters in Washington, I think we're going to end this segment. We'll be right back with episode 155 of the Life in Ruins podcast with Jacob Arnson.
00:15:32
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 155 of Life Room's podcast. I'm here with Connor John and you guys know that. Sorry to put them on you guys. And also we're here with our friend Jacob Arndson. He is obsidian expert, man. Can you start with what is obsidian? What's obsidian?
00:15:56
Speaker
Oh, you're really putting me on the spot there, David, calling me obsidian expert. There's way better experts of about obsidian out there than me, Dan Steuber, for one thing, Craig, Craig Skinner. He just defended a master's thesis about it. So tell me about obsidian. I'm kidding, man.
00:16:17
Speaker
We can riff on him because he's our good friend. Okay. Just, just before we get emails about how we were being mean to Jacob, he is our friend. We do like him. They're being mean to me, save me. So yeah, obsidian, what it is, is it's a basically it volcanic glass. So when the igneous rock, the excuse from the volcano as lava, it cools very quickly and informs this, um,
00:16:44
Speaker
when it's high in Seneca, it forms this volcanic glass and it doesn't come out as clear like glass. Sometimes it does, but most of the time it's this distinctive, very glassy black color. But except that it actually does come in a variety of different colors sometimes. Like you have a mixture of black with mahogany or which is kind of like this orangey red color. They can come in shades of blue. There's a rainbow obsidian, which is like this multicolored
00:17:11
Speaker
sheen to it. Like if you hold it down to the light and let the light bend off of it, you get this rainbow sheen. But it's incredibly sharp. And that's one of the most important parts about this type of stone is that it's it's like glass. So it's kind of easy to break.
00:17:25
Speaker
And so that made it very sought out for for flint knappers or for stone tool makers is because it is easy to make tools out of it. And it's also incredibly sharp. Like, I don't know if anybody's ever dropped a glass bottle on the ground and then tried to pick up the sharp pieces. You probably always had little tiny cuts on your hand or a really big nasty cut. Yeah. You know, this, that is basically the same concept to what's obsidian.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, I know that they used it in like surgeon blades at some point during our lives because it gets down to like just a super sharp edge. And another kind of cool aspect to it that is important archaeologically is that it's sourceable, like its chemical composition is unique depending on what flow and all that is.
00:18:12
Speaker
the impetus for your project, your idea of looking at this in the past. Yeah, exactly. And it can be easily sourced through a process called X-ray fluorescence or XRF for short, which basically just means that it just shoots an X-ray laser at the obsidian and then it just
00:18:33
Speaker
measures the different reflections off bounce back from that and looks at the chemical compositions of them because you're right because every flow obsidian flow has a different trace element compound to it and it makes it very handy.
00:18:46
Speaker
to know these trace element compounds and these flows, because then when we find obsidian artifacts in an archaeological site, we can use X or F to source it back to it. And that was the premises of my thesis, which looked at the distribution of the type of obsidian from the flow glass buttes, which is located in central Oregon.
00:19:04
Speaker
Well, and it's sweet that because in like shirts and stuff like that, we don't really have, and it's, there's, there's stuff working towards that, but other like forms of glass or rock that's used in the past, we don't really have that beautiful stuff. Technology. Yeah. That's the one. Can you explain where glass buttes is and kind of some of the variations and possibly the importance of it in the past? Yeah. So glass buttes is located in central Oregon.
00:19:33
Speaker
So you go east of the Cascades, down past Bend, you just keep going down Highway 20. So you hit mile marker 75, and there's a road called Obsidian Road. And the mountain ranges off to the south from that Malapose. There's two buttes there. There's big glass buttes, and then there's little glass buttes. But both of those mountains there are just covered with obsidian.
00:19:55
Speaker
One of the largest obsidian sources in Oregon, and it's one of hundreds of other obsidian sources in Oregon. But what makes this place pretty special is that it's a 796 square kilometer area of obsidian. There's also, it's a big source. So is there a big volcano under it then?
00:20:13
Speaker
What's really interesting is that all of Eastern Oregon used to be very volcanic. You look on the maps, well, like if you get on Google maps and stuff and turn on the terrain setting and you kind of just, or just even the satellite imagery and you just kind of scroll around, you'll start seeing different calderas just scattered around on the landscape of, of Eastern Oregon, which includes the Great Basin, like the Northern Great Basin is part of that Columbia plateau. But this place used to be heavily volcanic and.
00:20:42
Speaker
I don't know if there's a caldera right at glass buttes. I don't think there is. I think this was just like a formation that formed there. And then as it wrote it away, it exposed all these sources out there.
00:20:53
Speaker
And what's also really interesting about glass views is that it's not made up of just one source. It's not one flow, but it's made up of nine different variances. So there's nine different flows that happen there. And we know chemically the trace elements for each one of those flows. And so we can test different obsidian from different sites of like, which flow they came from. Some of them are more sought out for than others might mainly because it was probably due to access. Like they had better access to this particular flow than say,
00:21:23
Speaker
like variant nine. I don't think I've ever seen glass be subsided nine variant nine found at an archeological site yet. But that, but it could be because it's, we recently figured out there was nine different flows at glass view. So I think, I think in 20, 2003 is when that study concluded that there was nine flows. So it was not a lot of that one of number nine. Yeah, but there could be, it's just that a lot of the older stuff that was sourced probably that might have
00:22:04
Speaker
And because we can source things and we have this like unique opportunity in the past to see
00:22:10
Speaker
how things moved and you kind of approached it theoretically through this network analysis or this trade network kind of analysis, right? One of the things I wanted to do for my thesis by using this distribution of glass beads obsidian was to use it as a proxy for changes in the intensity of social networks in between hunter-gatherer societies. How does this change over time?
00:22:36
Speaker
What I did was I compiled a bunch of sites with glass speed subsidian in it. You know, this was done through sourcing analysis, such as like XRF and.
00:22:46
Speaker
compile the data set of all these sites in there. And then I've plotted it out on GIS and then separated them out by their date, the site's date ranges and into temporal groups using like a pretty, pretty large temporal groups though. Like the terminal plastic and early Holocene, which is like from 14,000 to 7,500 cow BP. And then the middle Holocene, which is two, 3000 cow BP. And then post late Holocene is everything post 3000. But like.
00:23:13
Speaker
So I find these up and then plotted it out via their temporal ranges. And what we see is that the during earlier times, like during the terminal passing early Holocene, the distribution was quite restricted. It didn't really go beyond Oregon. And then during the mid Holocene, it start to expand further out. And then especially during the late Holocene, it just.
00:23:33
Speaker
explodes. And a lot of it was ending up in British Columbia, which I thought was like the Salish Sea area, which is that the area where Vancouver Island's at, where Fraser Valley's at, the San Juan Islands. In that area, there was a lot of glass views upsetting ending up there. And so what this means was that as like, incorporating this distribution as a proxy for social networks means that social, and I guess I should explain what social networks are, which are the interactions between
00:24:03
Speaker
between groups. I was more thinking of the actions of sharing or trading, exchanging of goods, mostly food items, and then also even creating agreements between each other, such as accesses to each other's lands for resources.
00:24:20
Speaker
why this happens is because foraging is never really a sustainable way to always be consistent. It's never consistent or reliable. So there might be times when you have shortfalls in your resource gathering. And so you want to have a connection with your neighbor when you can go up to him and be like, hey, man, can I borrow some of that delicious fish that you have that you have a lot of, you have enough to share?
00:24:44
Speaker
And they would give it to you, but they would expect to be reciprocated later in the future when maybe say they have a bad time collecting enough fish. And so they might ask you is like, Hey, can I get some of that extra huckleberries or elk meat? And during these processes of exchanging these food items, items such as like obsidian would be traded along with that. And it's not going to be the main object that's going to be traded, but it's just kind of like this part of like, thank you for
00:25:14
Speaker
doing this for me. And so that trade kind of goes along across these cultural borders. And so as social networks intensifies,
00:25:23
Speaker
that obsidian that got traded to that first group might be trading it to another group later on as they're getting other resources from them. As social networks intensify, so does this distribution of glass beads obsidian.
Social Networks and Obsidian Distribution
00:25:36
Speaker
That's what my thesis is showing. It's pretty restricted when there was less people in the landscape than during the terminal plasticine early Holocene.
00:25:45
Speaker
But as populations start to grow and there's more people in the landscape, there's kind of a more need to create these social networks because there's less access to food. You also get to see this explosion of glass-based obsidian being distributed only to the northwest though, which is also kind of fascinating about my data was that there was no glass-based obsidian found in south of the Oregon border.
00:26:10
Speaker
in Nevada, especially in Nevada, it was just empty of it. And it's kind of fascinating because glass boots is not that far from the Oregon and Nevada border.
00:26:19
Speaker
Yeah, and it was really interesting. David watched the thesis of defense, but ADHD is a hell of a drug. You might have missed this, but one of our professors, and I was at the defense in person, and one of our professors in front of us kind of had this really shocked reaction. Because Nevada is really not that far from Oregon, and there's no real barrier that blocks it.
00:26:45
Speaker
from the obsidian going down into Nevada and entering those trade networks and social networks and expanding from there. There's no reason why we can think of now that that wouldn't go to that place. But you kind of had a hypothesis about that, right?
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah. And that professor actually asked me that question as soon as, as soon as I was done. Cause I also saw his reaction. I knew that question was going to come. He was going to ask me that question. And what the question was, is like, what is my thoughts on why glass buttes is not ending up in Nevada. It's probably because Nevada is also part of the great basin and Oregon and glass buttes is also located on the northern edge of the great basin. And so the people who were living along glass buttes who had access to glass buttes.
00:27:32
Speaker
also had access to the same resources of the Great Basin. And so did the people who live in the Great Basin in Nevada. And so if both groups are sharing the same kind of resources, if one group is having a shortfall in resource gathering because the climate is changing and maybe like certain resources are not as abundant and predictable as they were before, that means the other group, group B, is also having a shortfall because they're
00:28:00
Speaker
the climate and the resources are about the same. And so they're going to still probably not have enough resources to be able to share. And so since there was no ability to share resources between each other, there was no establishment of these social networks between each other, at least through the processes that I was looking at, which is the sharing, exchanging of resources or access in each other's lands.
00:28:24
Speaker
Or it could also be that the territory of that particular group was much larger and it encompassed that. And maybe they weren't just bringing that up sitting with them. So that's really interesting. I mean, if you and your neighbor have the same crops and they both fail at the same time, you're kind of just both out of luck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You're not going to want to go to them and be like, Hey, I need, do you have extra food? And they're going to be like, no, man, we, we, you share the same crops. So I can send alerts to Katanya like, Hey, I need some sheep like fresh out, bro.
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah, we're all out of sheep. I know you got that sheep, man. Don't lie to me. Yeah, I saw you drawing that extra card. Well, I guess I had this question earlier. You're talking about these social networks, and I guess they're more in calderas than Silicon Valley's, but there is a lot of silica in Obsidian. Anyway, these were terrible jokes really fast. Silicon Valley? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah.
00:29:24
Speaker
Like I imagine those are also for like genetic diversity too. Like we kind of often, especially archeologists, we just think of things in technology. But of course back then when you're hunter gatherer bands kind of traveling around, you gotta, you know, trade genetic flow and all those kinds of things. I wonder if somebody could use your thesis to look at that as well. But you know, it's a ton of a tiny, precise area with little information to go with, but I don't know. I was just kind of thinking that while we were talking.
00:29:50
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that was definitely something that myself and my advisor, Dr. Robert Kelly or Bob, that we talked about quite a bit about was like, you know, the same thing about like marriage partners, acquiring marriage partners. And that's definitely part of social networks.
00:30:06
Speaker
definitely so because if you have a small group of population, you definitely want to seek out other groups of people to seek out marriage partners because you don't want to start mixing in that gene pool. You don't want the Habsburgs. Exactly.
00:30:21
Speaker
And so, you don't want to accidentally marry your sister. So, you know, you got to go out and find marriage partners. And so, that definitely incorporates a lot about what is part of social networks.
Jacob's Thesis and CRM in Archaeology
00:30:33
Speaker
Unfortunately, I couldn't really incorporate that into my thesis. Otherwise, I would be, might as well just do a PhD. It was getting too much. We just kind of focused more on this aspect of sharing and exchanging of resources.
00:30:48
Speaker
Well, cool. Well, thank you for sharing and exchanging your resources about... Must be drug and glass. That was the drop.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah, all right. After that, let's pick it up with the next segment. Welcome back to episode 155. I'm not going to do the whole thing again. Just going to jump into Obsidian Man. You just submitted your thesis to ProQuest, so congrats. That means he's officially done. He submitted it to be published, or at least it's on record that it is published in a piece of work that is his copyright.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, so congrats on that. Yeah, you have to freaking pay for it. Rich would tell me that he'd get like randomly get checks from ProQuest. He'd get like for like 20 cents or something. Be like, yay, someone bought my thesis. I can get bubble gum for that now.
00:31:38
Speaker
I don't even think we could afford bubble gum on those prices. Inflations. Nah, not bubble-icious, tell you that. Maybe bigger than two. But yeah, like I zoomed into your thesis defense and like at the end, it's kind of awkward when you're on Zoom to ask questions, but I want to do, but I can't see whose hands are up. So anyway, what I wanted to ask though, was you're a pretty great example of like you were in grad school for a year and a half, then dipped out and did.
00:32:04
Speaker
a job immediately, which is kind of, it's not in the, that's a top 1% thing I think that happens. I mean, not exactly, but it's good to do and it doesn't happen often. I wanted to ask, how does your thesis, if you have any last thoughts on that, like how does that contribute to the work you do now? Or like, you know, how can you apply that to what you're doing? Cause essentially that's why you went to grad school, right? Right. Yeah. It was to get my master's so I can move up into my career. I think my thesis is,
00:32:32
Speaker
pretty important to, to, you know, kind of work on doing, because we, when we, the kind of work I do is a basis on like CRM. So it's cultural resource management, but it's done at the federal level. I worked for the forest service before, before going to need my masters since 2015. And I started my masters in 2021. So I worked there for
00:32:52
Speaker
Close to seven years. And so it was, um, you know, one of the things that we definitely looked at when I was there, you know, we had a lot of city insights and what really got me thinking was like, there's so many sites here. What can we do with this? Like, what kind of research can we do with this? And since when I decided I was going to get my masters, I really thought about this, like, what can we do about this? Like, what can we do with this data? Because we collected so much of it. You know, I didn't really come up with my thesis topic until I actually got there and talked to my advisor about it. We kind of just sat down and looked at what kind of data I had.
00:33:23
Speaker
or how to available to. And then we came up with this, this research question. And so what a lot of the, the sites that I incorporated into my, into my dataset or a lot of them were collected from like the data was collected by CRM archaeologists and federal archaeologists, like even like those from the BLM or the forest service or efficient game, like a lot of federal agencies.
00:33:47
Speaker
do a lot of recording of sites and sometimes they will also send these artifacts in to get them sourced. And so that data was crucial to my thesis because if I just focused on academic sites, they usually focus on particular sites and they're usually pretty widespread. And I wanted to have a very large data set to be able to look at how this distribution forms across the landscape.
00:34:14
Speaker
And so it was very important that I incorporated a lot of CRM archaeology into this. Now, since I'm on the topic of the Forest Service, it was a very important job for research, not just going out there and just recording a site, calling it good. This stuff is going to be important someday for somebody.
00:34:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think that your research, like you were mentioning, and the thing that we're talking about, all the stuff that the CRM folks, the different government agencies contribute to is called the gray literature, which is something that not a lot of people have access to. I am currently the gatekeeper for the Wyoming version of that stuff, just to make sure that doesn't get into hands that are not. He does take bribes.
00:34:57
Speaker
Not yet. Those are underutilized data sets, I think, in general, and a lot of my professors would agree. There's a lot of good data to be had in these gray literature stuff, and it's cool that your thesis showed the importance of that, and that the work people are doing on the ground is important. Could you recommend that people get portable XRF?
00:35:25
Speaker
Oh, they worked in these areas. Yeah. I had one. I would be using it all the time because like, like I was saying, when I was working for the forest service, like this, there's one particular course I was working for primarily the, all the prehistoric sites had obsidian in it. And there's a lot of obsidian sources in Eastern Oregon. There's over a hundred of them. So it would have been really nice to have that portable XRF banner out there just whoop.
00:35:53
Speaker
And just finding out what all these pieces are because we can't collect it all and send it in to get a lot and get tested. It's a lot of work to do so. So to have that portable, portable XRF would have been super handy.
00:36:06
Speaker
expand on that and I guess for non-archaeologists listening like it's not just about like where did this come from like the the pace of obsidian like what source just so you can match it in like a database it's like you want to know if you found something like a some points or some flakes way out in Portland you know like where people used to live if where that came from and you can see how far people were going from those church or not church
00:36:30
Speaker
obsidian resources to where they were or traded or primary or secondary reduction areas or if it was just, you know, start bringing it up with some pressure flaking and things. Yeah. I mean, I imagine that's like part of a big part of your thesis too, but.
00:36:44
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like, like I mentioned earlier, it's something we rarely get information on. And we know that people are trading goods and moving stuff, but we don't have something as good as obsidian. Obviously, other stuff is being traded as part of this. It's probably, obviously, humans. I'm just kidding. You're finding other brides, Britons, stuff like that. So, it's important. Portable XRFs these days, where they just like a couple thousand dollars.
00:37:11
Speaker
Yeah, there are a couple thousand. I think more than a couple of thousands. They look like sewing machines. It's definitely something we can't afford on our budget. But yeah, you know, hopefully in the future, this technology would become more available. And I mean, look at tablets, you know, 10 years ago, where all of us were still using 10 or 20 years ago, we were still using the trembles.
00:37:39
Speaker
A lot of people I know, CRM archeologists I know, moved over to using tablets or just even our phones because they have just as good of satellite GPS receivers on it now that are just as good as the ones that were on those Trimble devices. And they were cheaper and more available. So I think in the future, I think XRF would become like
00:38:01
Speaker
You know, we can, you could just take a picture with your phone and still do like an XRF analysis on it. That would be super sick.
00:38:10
Speaker
It doesn't seem that crazy. No, no. And I think there's even like some phones out there with like a lighter camera on it or something like that. So yeah, I think so. I just want to clarify, it doesn't look like a sewing machine. It looks like a, um, a screwdriver or like a power drill. Oh, like a DeWalt power drill. The one I'm thinking of was at the museum and it was like huge, but yeah, the most of them look like a, you know, old power drill. They're not very portable if they're sewing machine size.
00:38:41
Speaker
They're still heavy they're not they're not light a piece of equipment there's they're kind of heavy
00:38:46
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's definitely something you don't want to have in your backpack all the time and try to hike around in the woods for up a mountain and, and then just to kind of zap a couple pieces of, of, of obsidian. I guess. Yeah. It's funny to think about it too. Like they look like the little, when you're at the self checkout, like the little like laser scanner, like you can just have your trial and like a compass and just have that and just start zapping obsidian barcodes in the, in the field.
00:39:13
Speaker
Why would you need to do that? I don't really know just to, you know, have better data while you're walking out there, but a few of that later. So we've talked about this informally.
00:39:24
Speaker
on Sea of Thieves and the bars, et cetera. But I think you're a big proponent of people going into federal offices and doing archeology and CRM in general.
Careers in Federal Archaeology
00:39:39
Speaker
What would be your spiel to someone who is interested in being in the BLM or working for the Forest Service, things like that? Oh man, I get to do my recruitment speech.
00:39:51
Speaker
I think it's a great opportunity to go into the federal agency, especially at the Forest Service and the BLM, mostly because you get to travel to different places that you probably never would have thought of to go to before. Many people who worked at Eastern Oregon, they're like, I never thought Eastern Oregon looks like this, or parts of Oregon looks like this.
00:40:14
Speaker
the Forest Service and the BLM offers a lot of opportunity for people to experience a new terrain, new landscapes, and new cultures. And it's also very steady work. Normally, when you first want to start off with the federal service, like if it was a federal agency, as an undergrad, you're going to be mostly a seasonal, what we call seasonal employee that is
00:40:38
Speaker
1039 hours. You get 1039 hours to work for this agency, which adds up to six months of employment.
00:40:45
Speaker
You get to work out there for the summer or in parts of the fall, maybe spring. And then you get to go off and do other things during the wintertime. And a lot of times we will hire you back. And right now we're, we're definitely short-handed on a lot of seasonals. You know, there's a lot of agencies that were offices that were short-handed on seasonals, mostly because like we're, you know, like everybody else, we're having projects and boosts in projects.
00:41:10
Speaker
do the, like the infrastructure bill. So we're need more people and we're getting, and we want to get more people. And so I highly recommend a lot of people just to, just to go to USA jobs, uh, which is the main place to find federal agency jobs is on that website, usajobs.gov. Make yourself a profile, upload your resume and a federal resume. It's a little bit different than a regular CRM resume. Just longer. Yeah.
00:41:39
Speaker
Yeah, it needs to be a little bit longer. Just make sure to read carefully over the application and try to incorporate some of the terminologies that they use in there. Because we use a little bit different terminologies. When we say class one, two, or three, it's not the type of like class one, which is like pedestrian survey, or class two, which is testing, class three is the excavation. We use class one, two, three,
00:42:06
Speaker
different term. It means that we have different definitions for those. So just read carefully over those and try to incorporate into your federal resume. And don't be disheartened if you don't get into one location. And also, one of my biggest advices I can ever give to anybody, a new person who wants to get into a seasonal position in the federal agencies is look for places that are not typically well known.
00:42:33
Speaker
You know, like that's how I got to my job working in Eastern Oregon. I worked in a really small town that I frankly only been to a couple of times when I was just a little kid. So, but I had a great time and it was a wonderful forest. I made a lot of good friends there. So yeah, definitely just apply for places you've never heard of before. Don't apply for the very popular recreational areas because a lot of other people are going to be competing for that. I mean, you can still apply for those. Definitely go for it. You might get it, but you want to definitely have a lot of backups.
00:43:03
Speaker
And if you take one of those jobs to out in the middle of nowhere, essentially not to say where you're at, it's middle of nowhere, but when you're near Portland, but middle of nowhere, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming, to some people, like who the hell knows where Worland, Wyoming is, but you take that job and you put your time in with the feds. Like then later on you can, you have a better chances of, and you're already in with it. You can apply somewhere that you would like to work like Yellowstone or.
00:43:28
Speaker
I think the Statue of Liberty in New York is technically a national park. I think once you really are in the federal system, things get a lot easier. I think once you're recognized and been hired, but it is kind of a journey. And like David said, it's not the same sort of resume CV. And like Jake mentioned, you might get disheartened because there's
00:43:58
Speaker
lots of jobs that you apply for that you might not get. But if you do your time, it seems like a worthwhile endeavor. Yeah. Yeah. Just keep at it. I mean, like I said, we're looking for a lot of people. So I mean, some places just fill up super quickly, but some places don't. And so we try again. So if you don't get into the place you want first, just keep going and try again at a different place and hopefully you get it.
00:44:24
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, if you love hiking around in the woods or in, in sagebrush country, I mean the forest service or the BLM are great agencies for that. And you get, I'm assuming you, um, you've worked with the feds a bunch, so you get probably pretty solid insurance. You get a 401k with the, um, I almost said the army. That's what I had, but, um, with the really good federal pension pension pension. Yeah. Yeah. The pay is also probably much better than you'll get in other places.
00:44:54
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, for most, for the most part. Yeah. It might take some time. It might take some time to get into the real good pay ranks. Um, and also like just kind of like another little tidbit about working for the forest service or the BLM is that you're not just working with archeologists. I mean, it's not just archeologists working in these agencies. You're working with a variety of different disciplines from wildlife, biologists, fisheries, hydrologists, geologists, forestry,
00:45:24
Speaker
specialists or civil culturalists and range managers too. And so you get to work in an agency that is not just about archeology, but as well as all these other disciplines and you get to meet these people and you get to work with them and you get to make really good friendships with them as well. So it's a great opportunity for that. Yeah. And what I always like about that too, from friends that do
00:45:48
Speaker
federal work. Everyone's tax dollars go to that. So like it's, I mean, not to say it's like a noble cause in any sense, but like you.
00:45:56
Speaker
Like you're doing a service to American, I guess. It gets weird because I mean, you're working on indigenous land and stuff, but like you're preserving that essentially and mapping that out and like adding to that heritage a little more. And yeah, like it's work that has to get done and it's tax money. So yeah. Yeah. And they pay off your student loans if you work for them for 10 years straight. So do they?
00:46:21
Speaker
Yeah, so do that.
Further Resources and Podcast Information
00:46:23
Speaker
Thanks Jake, you know, so much for coming on and chatting with us. Really appreciate it. Any recommendations for lit, for obsidian stuff that you can think of at the top of your head? Just buy my thesis.
00:46:40
Speaker
No, there's a lot of good books out there for just just articles, really upsetting in Oregon. The Dan Suber and Craig and Craig Skinner wrote a really good article on Class Buttes, the history of Class Buttes. And so let's see what else. The Winds of Winter. Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. Dragon Glass. Fuck off. Must be Dragon Glass. Dragon Glass. A Dream of Spring is the last one. All right. We're done.
00:47:10
Speaker
Anyway, we're done with the interview. We're just done with him talking. David's done. Are you an Andresky or Andresky or are you with the other guy, lithics guy? Oh, which other list this guy? So you're an Andresky. Yeah, I'm definitely an Andresky. Yeah. Washington state's like. Yeah, not that hard. I know there's a lot of people in Eastern Oregon terms. Yes, it's a hot skipping away.
00:47:40
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. David, what's the other guy? Uh, I can't remember his name because I'm team Andresky, but there's another lithics book out there that like, I've said, I have Andresky and it was like, why? And they use something else. And I'm like, whoa, it might not be mine. It might be like water, right? Oh no, he was geo, geo archeology. He's geo-arch. Yeah. They'll remember someone sitting, shitting their pants right now listening to this because they want to say it with that.
00:48:08
Speaker
There's the British one. Yeah, there's a British... Like the Jean-Hôt-Pateau one? No, that's French. Jean-Hôt-Pateau. Jean-Hôt-Pateau. All right. Well, yeah, thank you. We'll put those links in the show notes. Jacob, if you had to do this all over again, would you still choose to live a life studying? Must be drug and glass. Absolutely.
00:48:40
Speaker
I was thinking like, how do I say no in a very fun way? Yeah, no, that's cool, man. And we appreciate you listening to the podcast. I remember you telling me you ended up going to Wyoming because we talked about it enough. I mean, it was part of your decision. So that means a lot to us and we appreciate you. And I got to be good friends with you this summer. It happened every day. It was real fun working with obsidian. So yeah, I brought a bunch of glass buttes with me. A lot of obsidian was glass buttes.
00:49:00
Speaker
I thought you'd be one of the good ones who said no.
00:49:10
Speaker
Jacob is a far greater napper than me, by the way. Anyone listening? Jacob also liked and reviewed the podcast, so you know, do that and you might get on now. Or else, guarantee anything. You want to plug? Anything you want to plug? Or I guess you want to be able to buy your thesis. That's right. Yeah. Oh yeah. Per quest.
00:49:28
Speaker
ProQuest game. Yeah, like, review the podcast, rate, send us emails, yell at David for being a Columbus sympathizer. Oh my god. I'm rating Jane Goodall, you know, just keep doing that. What do you know about Vasco da Gama, though? Or you could, yeah, or you can just email me. Email me and I'll send you my resume. I will probably be in the show notes. I'm in my thesis. All right. Well, thanks for coming on. You have died of dysentery.
00:49:56
Speaker
And with that, we are out. 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. Jacob's a fan of the show, so he knows what's coming up right now.
00:50:25
Speaker
Wow, what a great audience. Did you hear that I got arrested? No. Yeah, I left my car at the bar and took the bus home. Turns out I was too drunk to drive that too. Wow. Topical.
00:51:01
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.