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The Mother of All Archaeology Podcasts - Episode 24
60 Plays8 years ago
Hi friends! It's Episode 24 of The Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Getting Dirty. In this podcast I open up about working throughout my pregnancy and managing family life and careers in the field. Then we cover some of the biggest news stories of 2015 and discuss the latest book club selection. Oh, and if you're perceptive you might notice that I started off the podcast pregnant and ended it with a baby. These things happen when you sit down to record at 10 months pregnant and decide to take a "break" for 2 days. C'est la vie!
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Update
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:23
Speaker
Why hello listeners, it's Jenny. Welcome back to the Struggling Archaeologist's Guide to Getting Dirty, episode 24. This is going to be a little bit of a hodgepodge of different topics of conversation and news and et cetera, but you know what? Whatevs, because I'm just really happy to be recording anything in general for you today.
00:00:48
Speaker
Because, as I'm sure you may have noticed, if you are following me on social media and listened to my last podcast, I've got a lot going on right now. And so, I'm just really happy to be recording anything, to be honest. If you're not up to date on the dates of my personal life, I am, well, I am
00:01:13
Speaker
ready to give birth at any moment. Let us just put it like that. I am super preggo right now, and I'm actually past my due date. So literally, I might have to, you know, run out in the middle of this podcast, deliver a baby, and then come back and finish recording it later. That's how pregnant I am right now.
00:01:35
Speaker
So yeah, I was really hoping to get this out for you guys sooner, but I'm sure you understand life's a little bit cray right now with all this stuff going on, preparing for a new baby and whatnot. And so yeah, trying to get some of my extracurricular activities up to snuff has been a little bit difficult for me. And for that, I do apologize. I should be bringing you guys some more regular content.
00:02:02
Speaker
But, uh, sorry, I've just been a little bit selfish lately. No, no, I've just been focused on me, me, me. And, uh...
00:02:10
Speaker
Mini me Mini me inside of me so That is why you've not had a podcast in some time, and I'm so sorry, but I will try to get this out to you guys shortly Depending on when I do in fact go into labor and have baby You may get this before or after that depending on how long he takes to get here So that being said um let's talk a little bit about what's gonna be on the podcast today
Being a Pregnant Archaeologist
00:02:40
Speaker
So, being a woman and going through this experience of being pregnant and working in archaeology and all this has brought up a topic that I think a lot of people who work in archaeology don't get to expound upon very often, or it's just kind of a
00:03:01
Speaker
a voice and a perspective that you don't often hear within the professional field. And that is about the experience of being a pregnant professional archaeologist, how it is working in the field, what to expect, and kind of my experience, because there's not a lot of people who talk about it.
00:03:22
Speaker
And also just the challenges of balancing your personal life with the professional world, which is something that I think a lot of people are very interested in. Perhaps those of you out there who may be thinking about a career in archaeology might be wondering, you know, can I make this work?
00:03:38
Speaker
with my personal life with having a family and a husband and or wife and children and dogs and chickens and whatever else you have going on um and so i'm going to touch on that briefly but uh before i do that i will sort of guide you in a different direction if this is a topic of interest to you because the archaeology podcast network
Women in Archaeology Podcast
00:04:04
Speaker
of which this podcast is a part does have a new podcast starting very shortly and it's it is focused on women in archaeology and so it is a panel show featuring several women every every podcast who are discussing different topics in archaeology and history in the professional world and having to do
00:04:27
Speaker
um with women and women's issues but then also just it's lovely to just have a panel of women discussing archaeological issues in general and so this is this new podcast um and i have been lucky to be a part of it so if you are interested in hearing more about issues like balancing life and work from a woman's perspective and i also talk
00:04:52
Speaker
on the podcast about my pregnancy and working as a pregnant archaeologist, then I would advise you to go to the Archaeology Podcast Network at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
00:05:06
Speaker
and look up this New Women in Archaeology podcast because it's extremely well done and there's a great group of ladies on there and you will hear more about this type of thing, especially in the first couple episodes, if it is something that interests you.
00:05:25
Speaker
and even not we're discussing a lot of other things besides being women and being pregnant and having families and being archaeologists. We have a whole range of topics that we'll be exploring and so it's kind of a rotating cast among the
00:05:42
Speaker
podcast panels so I won't be on it every week, but you will be able to hear from me here or there and some other wonderful women archaeologists. So definitely go to the APN and check that out for more on this type of subject.
00:05:59
Speaker
That being said, let me just go into a little bit of how my last 10 months have been, because technically I'm 10 months pregnant now, as an archaeologist in the field, because you may know I've been working out in a CRM project for the last
00:06:20
Speaker
Well, I finished working about a month and a half ago, maybe even two months now. But before that, I spent seven months working in the field here in New Mexico.
00:06:31
Speaker
which was fun, challenging at times. Not my favorite climate, I have to say, working in the Southwest. But I did enjoy my job. And I had a very good experience working out here. And I was very lucky to get this particular CRM job as it was local. And the town that I live in is so small that there
00:06:59
Speaker
have not been a lot of straight up archaeology opportunities for me since we have lived here. And in case you're wondering why I live in a town where there aren't many archaeological opportunities as a professional archaeologist, it's because my husband is in the military. And so I sort of choose to stay in and around the area where he is stationed for work.
00:07:27
Speaker
Obviously, I live here as well. Wherever we are stationed, I try to do the best I can. That's why I was extremely glad to have this job for the last seven months, which was great and was literally like 20 minutes down the road.
00:07:47
Speaker
I was excited to jump on that train right away. Now I did get hired for this job last year, right after I finished my master's degree, and before I was, before I found out I was pregnant.
00:08:05
Speaker
So I started work on the project and found out I was pregnant not too long after this. My husband and I were planning on starting a family this year, but we're not expecting to be so successful. I'll put it like that because I was thinking that, you know,
00:08:26
Speaker
without going into too much personal detail that I most likely would not be pregnant until near the end of this project just because I don't know I'd never done this before and so I figured it might take a while especially being a woman in my 30s so
00:08:46
Speaker
I just did not assume that I would be pregnant almost the entire length of the project, but that is what ended up happening.
Supportive Work Environment
00:08:56
Speaker
And you know what? It turned out fine. So I was a little nervous in my first trimester just not knowing how pregnancy was going to agree with me, how I was going to feel.
00:09:09
Speaker
not knowing whether I would be out hiking all day having to stop to throw up my lunch every 10 minutes or not, whether I was going to feel pretty awful and how that was going to affect my ability to perform my job, because working outside can be challenging. We hiked all day on the survey of this plot of land, 11,000 acres worth of land that we surveyed by foot.
00:09:41
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't sure how that was going to feel being pregnant. Thankfully, it felt great because I felt great. I think maybe being active was part of that, but I had a very, very smooth pregnancy, really no morning sickness, and thank goodness for that because it probably wouldn't have been very fun.
00:10:03
Speaker
that uh be my fears assuaged of feeling terrible in the field my other concerns were that my employer would not be very enthusiastic about a pregnant woman out in the field on this project and also that my being pregnant would prevent me from doing some things which uh would encumber my teammates or you know uh
00:10:29
Speaker
cause them to have to pick up my slack or anything of that matter because I'm a very hard worker and I don't like the feeling of not being able to do 100% on a job and I certainly would not like the feeling of other people having to do more work because of my limitations. But thankfully
00:10:49
Speaker
Basically, all of those things turned out okay in the end. My employer, when I did reveal that I was pregnant, was very happy for me. My immediate boss in the field was very accommodating, saying anything I needed, if I needed more breaks, anything like that just to let him know and the entire team would support me and do whatever we needed to do in that situation.
00:11:15
Speaker
and my other teammates were extremely happy for me. And so that made me feel a lot better. I never had any type of sit down of, you know, tell us right now, are you not gonna be able to do this? Is this gonna be a problem? No one ever mentioned that to me on this project. And so that could just be that I had a particularly great employer, was working for a great company. I'm not sure, but
00:11:45
Speaker
As far as women being nervous for the reaction you get when you tell your boss you're pregnant, I know there are some places where you may not be so, that news may not be so welcome and you may be treated a little bit differently, but I from personal experience would say that that was not the case with me or with my company.
00:12:06
Speaker
So, so that was very nice. And, you know, maybe I'm just really tough. But throughout the seven months that I worked the job, and I did work through my seventh month of pregnancy, I didn't feel like I was slow. I slowed the team down. I didn't feel like I was a drag on
00:12:25
Speaker
our work on our progress and effort and I really feel confident that I did all that I could to be a team player 100% and still
00:12:41
Speaker
Be responsible as a woman who has to, you know, another person to think about now in her life. As far as recognizing my own limitations and maybe times when I did need to slow down a little bit, maybe I was pushing myself too hard and needed another break or two or needed, you know, just a day where I wasn't hiking at the same pace that I usually did because I was tired and maybe I needed a little bit.
00:13:11
Speaker
You know, I needed to give myself a little bit of a break. Not to the point where it disrupted our work, but you do have to be honest with yourself and honest about your limitations in pregnancy or no, working in this field.
Physical Challenges of Pregnancy in Archaeology
00:13:27
Speaker
Some people have other physical limitations or problems, and it's really no different. You have to be honest with yourself and with your team about what you can and can't do.
00:13:38
Speaker
And when you need to, you know, take a break, when you need certain concessions made, you need to be vocal about it and hopefully your team will be understanding of that. And so pregnancy really is no different than people who have any type of other.
00:13:56
Speaker
So that was basically how I viewed it from my position being outside working every day. And so, yeah, I guess I just wanted to give a little bit of an example of how that worked.
00:14:13
Speaker
I still hiked the same amount as every other person on my team. I took the same amount of breaks. I just made sure that I was taking care of myself, eating a lot, and making sure that I was properly fed, had plenty of water, you know, was never pushing myself.
00:14:31
Speaker
beyond my comfort level. At a certain point, I did stop climbing over all of the barbed wire fences that we had to traverse in our survey because I just did not feel comfortable putting myself in that position with my big belly to be climbing over post-whole, you know,
00:14:51
Speaker
Fences and fence posts and all that. So I did have to, you know, climb through them instead of over them at a certain point. But it was that that wasn't a huge deal. And so, yeah, that's what I would say to anyone considering, you know, obviously it depends on what type of project you're working on and what type of work you're doing.
00:15:11
Speaker
If you're in an excavation situation, there are perhaps a couple more things as a pregnant person you may want to limit yourself in as far as heavy lifting is concerned. If you work in a laboratory, you may need to limit the amount of contact you have with certain materials, toxic materials, which were used in the past a lot like lead and
00:15:36
Speaker
things like uh things like that um but you know he really depends on your situation and your feelings on your own safety and well-being so um to any women out there who are thinking of becoming pregnant you can absolutely work in this field while you are pregnant do not let it stop you um just be open and honest with your team and with your employers
00:15:59
Speaker
and do not forget to be personally responsible to know yourself, know your limitations, and to make sure that you are vocal but still respectful of the project and the people that you are working with. And I think everything will be fine, honestly. You can excavate pregnant, you can survey pregnant, you can work in a lab pregnant. There are basically no
00:16:25
Speaker
Well, if you're a maritime archaeologist, this I might caution you against pursuing during a pregnancy, just simply because scuba diving while pregnant I do not believe is safe or recommended. So that might be a limitation to consider.
00:16:43
Speaker
if that is a field that you are going into and a lifestyle that you are considering. But as far as everything else is concerned, you know what? I say go for it. Just do it because it's probably gonna be fine. I was really scared going into it that I would have problems, but it turned out a lot better than I expected. And so I'm really glad for that. I did have a wonderful experience. And thankfully my project ended
00:17:12
Speaker
at right about the right time for me. I would say the end of my seventh month was when I was starting to get to the point where I would have been too uncomfortable to continue working outside in New Mexico in the middle of summer because it was July. And so for me, that would have been the right time for me to stop working.
00:17:36
Speaker
And thankfully my project ended at that exact time, but that is also another thing you will want to consider if you are taking a job, a CRM especially or something like that, how long you will want to work in your pregnancy.
00:17:52
Speaker
So just things to consider and a little bit of my perspective on working while pregnant in archaeology. It was all good and I don't think it's anything that you should let stop you. So go for it mamas! And if you would like to hear more about my
00:18:13
Speaker
work while pregnant and balancing life and careers. Like I said, head over to the Archaeology Podcast Network and listen to some of those first Women in Archaeology podcasts that should be airing soon. So that's all I'm going to go into as far as my personal experience. But I just thought that might be helpful for some women who are working and thinking about starting families or having children while working in this field.
00:18:42
Speaker
or people who are interested in going into the field and not sure whether they'll be able to work around something like being pregnant. Because personally, when I got pregnant, I know I looked on the internet to see what else I could find about women writing about this. And there was very little out there. I found maybe like two blog articles by women talking about their pregnancies. And so I was discouraged by that. But there is a website called trowelblazers.com.
00:19:11
Speaker
And that is run by a couple of wonderful women bloggers who work in I believe not just archaeology but also geology and paleontology. And you will be able to find some writing in from that blog on their experiences as well with children, families, and pregnancy working in this type of field. So that's another thing you could check out if you are interested in more.
Motherhood and Anthropology
00:19:37
Speaker
And so with that, we are actually going to continue in the kind of series that I started last podcast episode about sort of childbirth, women, pregnancy, and anthropology. And so this week, or month, rather, I was inspired by an interview that I read recently with an anthropologist named Sarah Blaffer-Herdy,
00:20:04
Speaker
about her book Mothers and Others, The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. And Ms. Herdy is basically a specialist in the evolution of human behaviors dealing with childbirth and child rearing through our history as well as into
00:20:25
Speaker
the history of our hominid ancestors, and how that also relates to primates and other relatives of ours, I guess you could say, as far as their social behaviors are concerned and why humans are so different. And so I thought this was pretty interesting
00:20:41
Speaker
topic of conversation. My husband actually over the last nine months has we've had this sort of continuous conversation about how a lot of this stuff was dealt with in the ancient world because he was very curious and he'll just be like hey wait a second you know how did they used to do this back before they lived in modern society when they were hunter-gatherers and how did they how did their children survive and how did they take care of this and that.
00:21:05
Speaker
So he's kind of brought it up a couple times and so we've kind of been talking about it a little bit which is why I thought this tied in pretty nicely to that conversation and just you know what I'm going through right now. So the basic premise of her book is that you know human children take a lot of energy and time and effort to raise.
00:21:29
Speaker
And this is kind of a result of our evolutionary history, but it's also the cause of a lot of our behavioral traits. And a lot of people, when they think about hominin and ancestry and our hunter-gatherer selves,
00:21:47
Speaker
They focus a lot about the man's role, and a lot of people assume that women and children survived in these earlier times through the efforts of the man to support them through hunting. And that's basically the sole reason why social cooperation became really important in these small groups that we lived in, and why in a long-term relationship between male and females developed,
00:22:15
Speaker
monogamy, you know, for example, was because of this responsibility that the male had to keep the women and the infants alive.
00:22:24
Speaker
And basically what she says about that is that as important as hunting was to the survival of a people or a social group and women and babies, mothers did a lot of it themselves. They were not in the old times and our hominin ancestors would not have been sitting around waiting for men to bring them meat. They would have been gathering and doing what they normally did after the birth of
00:22:51
Speaker
an infant and throughout their pregnancy. So there really wasn't this kind of lull in their ability to contribute to the well-being of themselves and their child. But because
00:23:07
Speaker
It did take so much energy and children needed so much attention throughout this period. We do discover that the social groups that women were a part of became extremely influential in the raising and the survival of their children.
00:23:27
Speaker
Not just men, not just having a man around to go out and kill things and bring the meat, but having what she basically calls aloe parents or other type of family members or social group members to help take care and raise children.
00:23:47
Speaker
And so this is other than the mother or father. It can be grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, or just random members of the pack. And so these people were extremely integrated into a child's life from when they were an infant to help support the mother, to maybe take the child so that the mother could go out and gather or watch them for a bit while she was preparing food or doing something else.
00:24:14
Speaker
and that this system and how this developed is actually quite different than the way that social groups in our closest primate ancestors work as far as child rearing goes, which is kind of surprising. So you would think that chimps and gorillas and bonobos and some of our extremely close primate relatives would have very similar social behaviors as far as child rearing, but they do not.
00:24:40
Speaker
Um, they actually are much more mother-based parenting, so orangutans and chimps and gorillas and all that. When a child is born, they are almost primarily always cared for by the mother for a much longer period of time, without as much help from the surrounding social group.
00:25:00
Speaker
In fact, even though there are many primates who do have some form of allo-parenting or group care of an infant, there's actually only one little sub-family where they have a rather
00:25:18
Speaker
similar amount of alloparenting going on as human beings do, and those are actually the very small species of monkeys in the New World called marmosets and tamarins, and they are actually much more similar to humans as far as child rearing than the other great apes, if you can believe that or not, so very interesting.
00:25:40
Speaker
And so why the difference and how did this difference affect humans and how we evolved separately from our other great ape relatives?
00:25:53
Speaker
So basically, survival in the Pleistocene and the, you know, millions of years ago during the evolution of our hominin ancestors, survival was hard, basically, is what it comes down to. And when they started living in these really small social groups, and it became obvious that infant mortality, which can be up to, you know, 40 to 60% in a lot of these ancient populations,
00:26:21
Speaker
and is also reflected in primate populations as well. If infant mortality is much higher in a situation where the mother has less support or maybe can only rely on the support of a male who may not always be successful with hunting, may go through some dry periods, in those situations if
00:26:42
Speaker
It becomes obvious that children are dying quicker and more children are dying than what's the solution and they obviously figured out the solution was more support from the rest of the social group or that maybe that was even a cause in why people started sticking around in larger social groups and other members of the family or whatnot would help
00:27:04
Speaker
take care of the child so the mother could get more done and so the social group in general could thrive a little bit more. And so they started this practice of allo-parenting and the interesting difference at this point becomes the development of the child and in the larger scheme of things the development of different behavioral traits of the human.
00:27:28
Speaker
So what I mean by this is basically the difference in the mother-infant bond and the behavioral traits that children developed in human and hominin social groups as opposed to the other great apes.
00:27:43
Speaker
And so it's really the flexibility and the dynamics of human and hominin social groups and how they're different that leads to this evolution of different characteristics in our species as opposed to the other great apes. And so what I mean by this basically is that it comes down to the mother-infant bond and how dependent an infant is on its mother versus having to be dependent on more than one person
00:28:11
Speaker
aka the social group that it lives in. And so in human groups and hominin, early hominin groups, babies are born and they are obviously attached to their mother and it's very important for them to be able to learn how to read their mother's cues and facial expressions and emotions. But they also, because they deal with other people as well, are not
00:28:36
Speaker
solely dependent on their mother and so they must also learn how to communicate and Read the cues of other people as well and to adapt to different caretaking roles and situations which is something that say an orangutan or a chimpanzee baby does not have to do because they only have that one caretaker in the mother and so they only have to learn how to decipher that mother's cues and and behaviors and
00:29:04
Speaker
emotions. So way, way, way back in our history, when we started this aloe parenting thing, children had to adapt, babies had to adapt actually, to more than one person. And so, evolutionarily, the infants who were better at communicating with multiple people through their ability to interpret and read different emotions
00:29:31
Speaker
and intentions and all of that were more successful because they were better able to communicate what they needed from whoever they may be dealing with in that social group. And so this ability to better communicate and to better read emotions and other people's behaviors basically led to this theory that infants and human babies developed
00:29:59
Speaker
system of cooperation and empathy because they were put in that situation. And so the ones who did have the ability to empathize better and the ability to cooperate and communicate better were more successful. These were the infants who survived through adulthood.
00:30:19
Speaker
who reproduced more and so these traits became much more common in our population and it led also to a much higher success rate for infants' mortality and for the social group in general.
00:30:36
Speaker
So more babies survived. The babies who did survive were better at communicating and cooperating within a social group. And so these behaviors became part of humans as we evolved. And essentially, I think
00:30:54
Speaker
The author also goes into a little bit about brain theory, that part of this also resulted in the evolution of larger brains in humans as well. A lot of people theorize that bigger brains develop because of men.
00:31:12
Speaker
who are more successful at hunting and providing meat and more calories for the human diet. But she says that a lot of it also has to do with the success of our social parenting in children surviving who were better at communicating and cooperating within groups.
00:31:33
Speaker
So, anyway, if you were ever wondering how the mother-child bond and the act of parenting helped the evolution of the human species, there you have what is probably sounding like a really confusing and long-winded explanation of how this may have happened by me.
00:31:54
Speaker
So I'm sorry, I feel like I've kind of rambled on this for a little while and it may not be the best composed narrative for you to understand. But anyway, I just thought that that was a really interesting article. So basically she's saying that it's a
00:32:09
Speaker
And so, there is your little lesson in the anthropology of child rearing for today. I hope you enjoyed this and found it interesting. It probably is still sounding confusing to you as it is to me, but still cool, and so that's why I did it, so deal with it. And now, let's move on to something else.
00:32:34
Speaker
Like the news!
Queen Nefertiti's Tomb Discovery
00:32:36
Speaker
Yes, let's talk about some recent archaeology news that's been going on. I thought I would appraise you guys of some of the recent headlines and big goings on in the world of archaeology in case you were not aware. So, first of all, my first news story of the day. Has Nefertiti's tomb been found?
00:32:58
Speaker
So if you hadn't seen this on the news already, there is an Egyptologist by the name of Nicholas Reeves who believes that he may have discovered a hidden chamber inside King Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
00:33:18
Speaker
Now, he was doing some scans of this burial chamber in King Tut's tomb, and he discovered it's kind of hard to see with the paintings on the walls, but underneath he has found some extremely straight lines and fissures in the rock that he believes could actually be
00:33:42
Speaker
hiding a chamber attached to what we now know as King Tut's tomb that we were formally unaware of and that this tomb could possibly be or this chamber could possibly be another burial tomb and he believes that it could possibly house the body of Queen Nefertiti.
00:34:07
Speaker
from a fellow ancient Egyptian history nerds out there. Nefertiti was the grand wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the famous heretic Pharaoh, that is, who, you know, took over rule of Egypt in the 1300s during the New Kingdom from his father, who was a very beloved and powerful Pharaoh. And he kind of switched things up a little bit and pissed everybody off by attempting to change the state religion of Egypt from the
00:34:36
Speaker
traditional polytheism of its days to this kind of monotheism that was centered around the sun disc, the Aten. And so he changed the capital of Egypt, took a bunch of people to El Amarna where he built his temples, and he just kind of wasn't really concerned about the welfare of the Egyptian people for a while, which, you know, didn't work out too well for him.
00:35:01
Speaker
And so, after him and Queen Nafertiti, after their demise, he was sort of vilified throughout all of Egypt and throughout history. His, well, who they assume was his son, Tutankhamun, did take over the throne after a brief interlude, and of course we famously know King Tut.
00:35:24
Speaker
from his wonderful burial tomb discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon and so Yeah, did I mention everything the basics? I think I covered the basics there. Okay, so
00:35:39
Speaker
Going back now to the story, so yeah, so King Tut's tomb is a big deal, right? And, you know, they've been studying it since 1922. And you would think that we would have kind of figured out pretty much everything that there was to figure out about it. So the fact that the sky reaves is claiming that there might be extra chambers attached to King Tut's tomb and oh hey, Queen Nefertiti might actually be inside one of them.
00:36:07
Speaker
is, you know, kind of a big deal. And one of the things that he claims led him to this determination is the paintings in the tomb where he believes this chamber is located behind. He's looking at them and he's thinking, you know, was this tomb really designed for King Tut? Because it seems to me that this tomb was not
00:36:32
Speaker
designed originally for Pharaoh. He believes that the tomb was originally designed for a woman, a very powerful woman, who became Pharaoh. There are two figures on the walls who he describes as Nefertiti, who was the queen and who many believe did become Pharaoh after the death of Akhenaten, but under an assumed name which was
00:36:56
Speaker
the shadowy figure of the next pharaoh Semenkakare, and so many believe that that was actually Queen Nefertiti. So if that is true then, and his interpretation of this wall relief is also correct, then this tomb looks like it was made for a woman who became pharaoh, and she is being crowned by a younger noble who he believes to be King Tut.
00:37:22
Speaker
So he thinks that the tomb was actually supposed to be for Nefertiti all along. And then when she died, or when King Tut died, they put him in there and Nefertiti got moved to this other chamber. Now, you know, I really kind of, I mean, this would be exciting if there was another burial chamber that was undisturbed attached to King Tut's tomb, no matter what's in it. But I don't really see his reasoning in believing
00:37:51
Speaker
that there must be the body of Queen Nefertiti hiding in this extra chamber. I'm not really sure where he comes to that conclusion from, and maybe I just need to read more about it. But that is the theory. Now, the current Egyptian antiquities minister, a man by the name of Mapdu al-Dhammadi,
00:38:12
Speaker
is also excited about this find and he is going to I think help figure out how exactly they might access this chamber without actually damaging any of the current, you know, tomb there. Obviously they don't want to do that.
00:38:29
Speaker
So they're trying to figure out how to do this. They're going to do some radar and thermal imaging and stuff like that. And Damati, you know, I think is a little bit more realistic. He says, you know, if there was someone else who was going to be buried in King Tut's tomb, it's not necessarily Nefertiti. She is actually not even believed to be King Tut's mother by many.
00:38:52
Speaker
There's another wife of Akhenaten's named Kia who is probably a more likely candidate and so he says, you know, it's possible it could be her, it could be another member of the family. It's not really, you know, set in stone right now.
00:39:08
Speaker
literally, that it is the tomb of Nefertiti. But it is a possibility, and so that is why this new story is exciting, because wouldn't that be cool? So yeah, keep your ears tuned into the archaeology news to find out more about the saga of the chambers of King Tut's tomb as it comes.
00:39:33
Speaker
And in other news, a new species of extinct hominin has been identified.
Discovery of Homo Naledi
00:39:42
Speaker
This was all over the web a little while ago, so if you're tuned into this news, I'm sure you know all about it. But a study recently released
00:39:53
Speaker
basically is about the discovery in South Africa of a bunch of hominin skeletons in a cave that have been studied and are preliminarily being referred to as a new species of hominin called Homo naledi. And so Homo naledi has been
00:40:18
Speaker
sort of given this designation as a part of the genus Homo. And there's a little bit of controversy over that because he has a lot of very different traits, many of which actually are more in line with the earlier Australopithecines. And so he's a very interesting specimen because he is such a weird mix of older and more modern hominin traits.
00:40:45
Speaker
And there are a couple things about this find that are exciting and which makes it more exciting than your average new hominin. One is that there were a lot of bones found, a lot. And they, you know, they go through and they see sort of, you know, like how many skulls do we have? How many right tibias do we have? You know, etc, etc. And by sort of counting out the number of
00:41:11
Speaker
each specific bone that's represented there, they can kind of give an estimate of how many people are represented in the population of the artifacts recovered. And so normally, with a lot of old hominins, you don't have a huge number of fossils to go off of in your study. We have some hominin species where we have one specimen, maybe, a couple bones at the most,
00:41:37
Speaker
And in this case, we have over 1,500 skeletal pieces, and they believe that it represents over 15 people. So that's actually a lot to study, which is a lot more than they usually get to study, which is really exciting. Another big thing about this fine is that these bones were found deep within a cave in South Africa.
00:42:01
Speaker
And the context in which they were found is basically sterile other than the placement of these people, bodies. They're not found in a context where there is evidence of anything else happening. There's no food being consumed. There's no fires. There's no processing of tools or animals or anything else going on here.
00:42:25
Speaker
This cave appears to be specifically used only for the disposal of the bodies of these hominins, which is a little odd. Now, they haven't actually been dated yet. I'm sure that's probably part of the process of the study that's still ongoing. So we don't know exactly what period we're looking at here, but generally, these early Homo species and Australopithecines are not known for
00:42:54
Speaker
in their archaeological context at least, known for ritual behavior like the burial of the dead. That's something that you usually don't see come along for quite some time and is basically only associated, as far as I know, with Homo neanderthalensis, us, and perhaps one or two other of these species directly before or consecutive with the neanderthals. So
00:43:23
Speaker
not something you would really expect to see in a hominin species that appears to be as old as this one. So that is a big thing and we'll be, I'm sure, hearing much more about it as they continue to study them.
00:43:39
Speaker
Now, from an archaeological perspective, it is also very interesting to me that because this cave was very hard to get into, it's a very, very small space, the guy who, the archaeologist, paleoarchaeologist, who was basically in charge of this excavation and the discovery of this cave, his name is Lieberger, he basically, because he couldn't fit in the cave, had to hire a team of
00:44:08
Speaker
researchers and archaeologists to excavate it made up entirely of extremely small women, which is not something you hear of every day. So it's really awesome to me that the team of researchers who did this excavation was entirely made up of women in the field. It was led by a woman
00:44:28
Speaker
And I think it sounds like a really freaking awesome, awesome thing. And it's not getting a lot of, you know, coverage or if it is, it's kind of like as this weird anomaly, like, oh, they had to hire these little girls to excavate this cave. How odd. And so I don't know. I just thought that was worth mentioning because I think it's really cool. And I wish that other people thought it was really cool as well.
00:44:54
Speaker
And I think that these women need a little bit more credit. And if you'd like to hear more about this find and specifically the topic of the treatment of the women on this project, then tune into the Women in Archaeology podcast that I have been telling you about all episode because I know that they have recorded an entire podcast about this subject specifically.
00:45:14
Speaker
So yes, that is the discovery of Homo naledi in South Africa. And it's very exciting news, and it will surely be in the news again as more research is being done and comes out about this fantastic find.
00:45:31
Speaker
So yeah, and make sure you catch that episode of the Women in Archaeology podcast on the APN because I'm sure it's going to be super fun and interesting and cool. So I will definitely be listening to that one myself.
Birth Announcement and Podcast Delay
00:45:49
Speaker
Yes, hi, it's Jenny. How are you guys? Okay, so there's a thing that happened in between the last thing you heard me say and this. And that was that I had a baby. I had a baby.
00:46:08
Speaker
So yeah, in case you noticed that the earlier part of this podcast up until now seemed to be maybe a little bit dated, a couple months old. That's because it was. When I was joking in the beginning about maybe having to deliver this baby in the middle of the podcast, I was not joking.
00:46:30
Speaker
No. I set the podcast down for two days after finishing that last segment. I don't remember why, but I could not get back to finish it. And then I went into labor. So yeah. Sorry, it was not able to be published before I gave birth.
00:46:52
Speaker
And then, you know, Baby happened and I was a little bit distracted for the last three months or so being a mother. So here I am, ready to finish this darn podcast and publish it for you all now that it is 2016.
00:47:13
Speaker
And yeah, I'm a mom and my baby is amazing and wonderful and great and I am just really, really excited for the new year and to finally finish this darn podcast and get it out to you guys.
00:47:29
Speaker
Nothing really much has changed about anything that I talked about earlier in the podcast. And so that is why I am not re-recording it. I'm going to be keeping all of that in it, obviously, since you just listened to it. You knew that already. But anyway, those news stories, kind of think of it as like a top news stories of 2015 review, kind of. Because they were kind of big deals. And I don't think there's really much new news on either of them, except that I believe the initial
00:47:58
Speaker
Scans and testing they were doing on King Tut's tomb were favorable as far as indications of a hidden chamber behind one of the walls and so now I believe they are going to go forward with some type of plan to try and get in there without damaging the current tomb wall. So
00:48:20
Speaker
I will keep you updated on how that goes. But anyway, I'm not going to make you sit around very much longer because this is already a long podcast, but I just wanted to update you with that fun information. And because I thought you might find it funny. And so yeah, the only other thing I'm going to say on this podcast is for my struggling archaeology book club members,
Book Club and Listener Invitation
00:48:45
Speaker
out there. We have finished, I'm guessing you probably finished reading the book for this last discussion a long time ago, and that would be The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan. And so continuing on in 2016, we are going to be moving on to the next book in the Kane Chronicles trilogy, the sequel, which is called The Throne of Fire, also by Rick Riordan.
00:49:13
Speaker
And so I will be getting a review slash discussion of the Red Pyramid up on YouTube for you very shortly. And I will have that link up on my blog and Facebook and all that. But in case you didn't get a chance to read the Red Pyramid yet, there's still time. So get on it. Join the struggling archaeologists.
00:49:34
Speaker
book club on goodreads.com and you can find out what other books we're reading on there, give me suggestions, take part in a discussion on what we are reading at the moment. And if you're not into that, then you can do all of those things on YouTube as well under the Struggling Archaeologist YouTube page.
00:49:54
Speaker
So, in case you were interested in a quick rundown of the King Chronicles and what the Red Pyramid is about, it is the story of Carter and Sadie Kane. They are the children of Dr. Julius Kane, who is an Egyptologist who, you could say, is a struggling archaeologist himself.
00:50:17
Speaker
Because he's having some problems, some very dramatic stuff is going on in his life. His wife has died a while ago. She was an anthropologist. And he is involved in some type of mystery and bad things and people are chasing him. And Sadie and Carter have to try and figure out what he was up to after his disappearance. And that brings them into this whole underworld of
00:50:46
Speaker
Egyptian history, they find out that they are part of a pharaonic bloodline and that they have also connections to the Per'onc, the House of Life, which was a very old branch of Egyptian magicians.
00:51:05
Speaker
back in the olden days and so they are also magical and they also have the ability to see and interact with the gods of the ancient Egyptian world and so as they are trying to save their father they realize they are also on a mission to save the world and from the evil gods set
00:51:30
Speaker
and this brings them into all types of adventures and hijinks and along the way if you are reading and
00:51:37
Speaker
uh you know taking part in this journey with them you get to learn a little bit about egyptian history about different gods and and egyptian um traditions and history pharaohs a lot of other type of things sort of like one big egyptology 101 lesson over the course of the book you learn about egyptian figures other egyptologists gods and belief systems cosmology important symbols um like the ankh the eye of Horus
00:52:08
Speaker
concepts like the ma'at and the ba. You get to see a bunch of sacred Egyptian animals like Khufu, the baboon, muffin, the cat, the goddess Bast, the white crocodile named Philip of Macedonia. You also get to learn about important items like shop tea obelisks, canopic jars, and important Egyptian places like Aswan, Cairo, Memphis, and the Valley of the Kings.
00:52:35
Speaker
So yeah, it's a pretty exciting book, I'd say, if you're into Egypt, which I always was from a very young age. I had a kind of crazy obsession with Egypt for a while. And so even though this book is kind of aimed at some younger readers, I would say if you have teenagers or tweens in your house who like to read, you should read it with them.
00:52:59
Speaker
very similar to Rick Riordan's Gods of Olympus and the Percy Jackson series, except instead of Greek mythology this time, his adventure is playing out in the world of Egyptian mythology.
00:53:14
Speaker
So with that, I will just say if you'd like to take part in that group and read the book, enjoy it, and take part in the discussion, then to go get your hands on the Red Pyramid. And I will have that video out shortly so you will be able to watch and respond with what you thought of the book and any questions or points that you thought should be considered by me. And so yeah, I will be,
00:53:42
Speaker
posting that soon, and if you are ready to move on to the next book in the Struggling Archaeologist book club with me, then you should also get your hands on the second book in the series, The Throne of Fire, again. And we will be hopefully reading that and finishing it up by the end of February, so keep that in mind for future discussion on that one.
Conclusion and Future Content
00:54:05
Speaker
And so that brings this 24th podcast of the struggling archeologists guide to getting dirty to an end just under the one hour mark. Once again, I apologize for being so lax on getting these out to you in the last year, but we're human and I'm human and I have had a lot of other stuff going on in my life and that I have been focused on.
00:54:34
Speaker
But coming up in 2016, I think I am going to have some more time to be able to focus on getting podcasts out to you guys. So I'm very excited about that. So keep listening for more struggling archaeologists and make sure you go to the APN to listen to all of the other wonderful archaeology podcasts coming out of the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:54:55
Speaker
And with that, I will see you guys next time. Well, I won't see you. You'll hear me. And that'll be about it. So we'll catch you next time with episode 25, which should hopefully be out sometime before 2017. And we'll see you then. Bye.
00:55:26
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com