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Dogs and Geophysics with Paul Martin - Ep 203
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On episode 189 we talked to a guest about a project in Louisiana where, as an aspect of survey, they utilized dogs to find an historic Civil War-era cemetery. Well, on today’s show, we have the gentleman that was hired for that job, Paul Martin, to talk about how he uses dogs in his work.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/203
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Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 203. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we interview Paul Martin of Martin Archaeology Consulting about using dogs to find burials in archaeological contexts. Let's get to it.
00:00:29
Speaker
Paul is the principal of Martin Archaeology Consulting, a registered professional archaeologist and has a master's in anthropology from the University of Mississippi where his research focused on archaeological geophysics. He also holds a bachelor's in science and anthropology with a concentration in forensic anthropology from Western Carolina University. Coursework has been completed for his PhD in earth sciences with a concentration in archaeological geophysics from the University of Memphis.
History Flight and Archaeological Conferences
00:00:54
Speaker
Paul has worked with the non-profit History Flight Incorporated, a private M.I.A., research and recovery team in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Philippines. He is a voting member of the American Academy of Forensic Science Standards Board Consensus Body for Dogs and Sensors, currently working with his 6K9, a chocolate Labrador, Retriever named Abby.
00:01:16
Speaker
Okay. Welcome to the AirQTech podcast, everyone. Paul, how's it going? It's going all right. Since I spoke to you last, I was off at the IKANA conference in Copenhagen, and we had a full day workshop on the work that we were all doing in Lagash. So I presented there. My colleagues presented there. We had comments and questions and such from people sitting in the room. It was really interesting. I mean, the whole conference was, you know,
00:01:41
Speaker
It was a very good conference. I enjoyed it quite a bit. But that day was kind of coming out party for our excavation. How you doing, Chris? Nice. Where are you now? Technically, well, technically, actually, I'm in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina right now. We're just kind of on a little somewhat vacation with my wife's family. They come out to the beach every year. They're from Charlotte. So we flew out and decided to come out here with them for the week. So it's been nice, despite the fact that half the time out here, it's been cloudy and raining.
00:02:11
Speaker
aside from that. There's a swimming pool here, a heated pool behind the house. So when we couldn't go hang out at the ocean, which is just across the street, we just went and hung out at the pool. So it's been, it's been good either way. It sounds rough. Yeah, I know. I know. So speaking of rough, our guest today had a long travel day yesterday because he's doing some fun things up in Alaska.
Consulting Firm Focus and Methodologies
00:02:30
Speaker
But we may get to that near the end of the show, but we're going to talk first to Paul Martin of Martin Archaeology Consulting. And we're going to talk to him about what he's doing with dogs and other things. So Paul, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what just what Martin Archaeology Consulting is. Martin Archaeology Consulting, we're a small consulting firm that
00:02:56
Speaker
works with other firms, other agencies, and so forth to provide archaeological human remains, detection dogs, and geophysical surveys. Sometimes we do archaeological excavations, and that type works.
00:03:14
Speaker
But primarily we focus on surveys and the use of dogs to help locate unmarked burials of historic and pre-contact context.
00:03:28
Speaker
Nice. And that's actually how we got to get in contact with you because episode 189 of this podcast, which is linked in the show notes called utilizing specialized docs to find historic burials had nothing to do with Paul. Well, you weren't on the show. It had everything to do with you, but it was, we interviewed somebody else and it was a project down in Louisiana
00:03:48
Speaker
where you were called in to help find some historic burials. And that was pretty cool. So we wanted to get you on to kind of talk about, you know, the actual technical, I guess, details of that. Yeah. I'm just wondering how you got into, I mean, you're, we read your bio and you've got a master's in anthropology and a concentration in forensic anthropology and, you know, interest in geophysics. How'd you get into using dogs for archeology?
00:04:14
Speaker
Actually, it was the dogs that introduced me to the world of anthropology and archeology. I fell into this world through a cold case with the sheriff's department there in Mississippi, where an investigation took us out to a Indian mall where we had an informant saying that
00:04:41
Speaker
a missing person had been buried out there two or three years prior. We did a search, didn't see any disturbance or anything of that nature that would indicate a burial of that age, but did get some behavior change.
00:05:03
Speaker
got me questioning the capabilities of the dogs. And I'd also heard about a couple of other handlers beginning to do this work in California because this is in 2002 when this search came about for the sheriff's department.
00:05:25
Speaker
And so this was 20 years ago. And with that, I went to local archaeological park. We had just north of my hometown, started talking to archaeologists, got permission to come out, work the dogs, had train funnel responses.
00:05:45
Speaker
from my dog indicating the potential of human decomposition odor being present. And from there asked if I could bring in other handlers, other dogs, make sure I wasn't doing anything to influence my dog to give those responses, additional responses from these other dogs and took all this information to the archeologist
00:06:15
Speaker
over the park. And he looked at me and it's like, wow, how's this even possible? It's like, I don't know. I'm a dumb dog handler. I had no clue. And so we started looking at the archaeological record.
00:06:34
Speaker
And that took us back to Dr. Jeffrey Brain's dissertation where he'd excavated the site. And it took us from there to some of the excavations that Clarence Bloomfield Moore had done the early 20th century, indicating that he'd found burials along with what Dr. Jeffrey Brain had found.
00:07:02
Speaker
And these are correlating back to where the dogs are giving responses. And again, the archeologists at the park site, how is this even possible? Because once all the soft tissue has gone, bone is bone. That's, you know, this can't be possible. So I started digging around.
00:07:27
Speaker
and trying to get a better understanding of what was going on. And from there, I ran across the work that was being done at the University of Tennessee at their decomposition facility and started reaching out to a couple of researchers working on human decomposition odor.
Scientific Methodology and Canine Archeology
00:07:51
Speaker
And in the middle of the night,
00:07:53
Speaker
uh, railed off, sent off an email. And one of those researchers actually replied back to me. He's like, yeah, it's quite possible for the dogs to indicate on these remains that are not only hundreds of years old, but could be, you know, 500, 600, a thousand years old. Wow.
00:08:22
Speaker
And with that, then we started questioning is it a, you know, is it the environment? Is it about the quality of training? You know, how does all of this begin to work? And so with that, the archaeologist, John Sullivan,
00:08:44
Speaker
I was working with from the park, the two of us began questioning more and more. And they took me to other sites with my dog. And then from there, we started hosting an invitational and brought in dogs from across the country. And over a five year period of time, we brought in about 40 handlers and
00:09:13
Speaker
40 different dogs from across the country and worked multiple sites and kind of got a better understanding about when was best time of day to work the dogs. And we found that those early morning hours, you know, early evening hours tend to be the best time out of the heat of the day.
00:09:43
Speaker
From there, we started noticing that if we took the opportunity to work the dog on older and raw human bone and known graves,
00:10:06
Speaker
It was as much about instilling confidence in the handler about their dog's ability as it was about reinforcing that the dog itself. Yeah. And then from there we were able to begin tracking these metrics. So from there we found that
00:10:35
Speaker
It's not advisable to work immediately after a rainstorm. Okay. We needed to work like the next day, sometimes depending on how much rain and might be two days later. So that as the ground begins to dry out, what's actually happening? Evaporation is beginning to occur again.
00:11:02
Speaker
And as that evaporation is occurring, we've got odor being able to come back up into the air column.
00:11:11
Speaker
I'm actually, I'm fascinated, the approach to it, metrics, you know, and the comparison to geophysical tools, you know, to GPR, magnetometry, whatever, using dogs as this kind of wetware sensor is really interesting because you're approaching it from a scientific point of view. And I know people have done things like dowsing, that some archaeologists have really, you know, claimed as
00:11:38
Speaker
incredibly valid and a lot of other people have shown is probably less so, but that you set up initially to test
00:11:47
Speaker
your own relationship with your dog versus other people's relationships with their dogs and then built it out kind of in a scientific methodology to try to find out, well, you said metrics, yeah, so to try to find out what works, what doesn't work, how much influence does the handler have and so on. And this is, to me, a really fascinating approach that you're coming at it from an inherently scientific methodological way
00:12:13
Speaker
with this thing that has its own brain, it has its own learning, it has its own affections and interaction with you, which the GPR sled doesn't. That's, I think, one of the critical things. One of the things that
00:12:35
Speaker
Zach Overfield that I worked with there in Louisiana on that project. He found fascinating what's that because I'm able to approach this with one foot firmly in that canine handler.
00:12:52
Speaker
world. And then the other foot firmly in the geophys and anthropology, archaeology world is a little bit different approach.
00:13:06
Speaker
then has been taken a lot of times. That's because I had five years experience behind me as a handler before I was ever introduced to any of this. And then from there, once I started down this pathway, John Sullivan had been exposing me more and more to the world of archeology.
00:13:35
Speaker
through readings, taking me to different sides. I began volunteering. I got exposure to different field schools, to University of Mississippi field schools with Dr. Jay Johnson. I was introduced to the world of geophysics through Ron Haley and seeing how those components could really begin working together.
00:14:04
Speaker
And from there, it was just a matter of time that in 2010, 2009, 2010, when the opportunity presented for me to be able to go back to school, I returned to school and completed my undergrad in anthropology there at Western Carolina. And there I was able to
00:14:32
Speaker
focus strictly in on the forensic anthropology bow art aspect, really hone in on the decomposition and what's kind of going on there.
Training and Techniques in Canine Archaeology
00:14:50
Speaker
and so forth and began working also with a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Cheryl Johnston, who gave me a lot of leeway because I was an older student. I did have a lot of experience.
00:15:09
Speaker
Well, Paul, that sounds like a good opportunity to take a break here because this being the archaeo tech podcast, the other Paul and I have a lot of technical questions related to using canines for archaeological purposes. So let's take a break and continue this discussion on the other side back in a minute.
00:15:27
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the architect podcast episode 203. Wow. That's a lot. Talking with Paul Martin about using dogs for forensic archaeology. We were talking a lot about the dogs. You know, I was saying that it's kind of analogous to the GPR sled that you're using. I have a Dachshund, you know, and they are their hounds. They've got a great big nose. And so a few years ago, I was out on the lake behind our house. We was frozen in the middle of winter and
00:15:57
Speaker
coyote or fox had gone across some days prior. I could tell by how melted the tracks were in the ice. The dog just picked up the scent of that and followed it on across the entire lake and into the woods. I was really impressed that after a couple of days, this dog had found this track, the scent of this animal that walked past there. But you were talking before about finding pre-contact burials, which is
00:16:26
Speaker
Really much longer than two days ago. So I was wondering, do you have a general sense of what kind of dog breeds are best for this work? And I guess that would probably be a combination of their ability to smell, but also their ability to do the work with you. So the breed that I personally work with is a lab.
00:16:48
Speaker
I personally like working with Labrador Retrievers. Nice size dog that can cover the area but they travel well. They train easy. The maintenance training is very easy.
00:17:03
Speaker
In general, what we're looking for for this type work is a medium to large size dog. When I say medium, that could be a dog 25-30 pounds all the way up to a dog 75-80 pounds. We want a dog
00:17:27
Speaker
is able to really cover the terrain that you're asked to work in. And at the same point in time, not so large or so gregarious that if the environmental conditions are such or if it's extremely hot or, you know, we've got to be cautious anyway, but you don't want the dog to be
00:17:57
Speaker
overly large that you're having to worry excessively about, are we trying to cover too much area? In general, we're trying to cover between a half acre to an acre in an hour, depending on the amount of vegetation. And also, depending on, are we searching for
00:18:23
Speaker
historic burials or are we doing work for pre-contact stuff?
00:18:31
Speaker
I'm just wondering, so you, you prefer labs and, but if you get a dog that's within that, you know, within that weight range, so they have the stamina, but they're not too big. And just side note, I mentioned I'm out here in North Carolina with my wife's family. There are three great Danes in this family. Three of her siblings have great Danes and they are gigantic. I'm a big guy and these great Danes could easily like push me over. At least one of them could.
00:18:56
Speaker
Anyway, so if you have a dog that fits within that range and maybe has a short hair, it's not going to overheat in the hotter temperatures, can it really be any dog that can be trained to do this or are some just way better at it?
00:19:12
Speaker
I think some are better out of it. You've got to look at what was the dog originally bred for. You know, obviously your gray hounds are not going to be suitable for this because they're a side hound.
00:19:31
Speaker
Right, they won't do it faster than any other dog? They won't do it faster than any other dog, but the nose is not as well defined as some of the other breeds. I personally try to work my dogs and I like that medium range, you know, 65 semi-pounds
00:19:57
Speaker
Okay, 75 in the largest because I also have traveled internationally with my dogs. And they don't fly in cargo, they actually fly in cabin with me because I've done work searching for MIAs. And so doing that work through history flight,
00:20:23
Speaker
I want a dog that is, you know, going fit under an airplane seat. Sure. Yeah. So it fits in an overhead bin. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. And I take the approach of searching the area as a traditional transect type grid grid.
00:20:43
Speaker
versus just I might start off with a loose undirected search, see if the dog picks up anything directly on their own. And if not, I did go into, you know, a more prescribed transect pattern and
00:21:04
Speaker
I'm tracking that with a GPS collar so that I can then look at, okay, what kind of coverage pattern do I have? One of the things that I have issues with right now is the
00:21:23
Speaker
available accuracy for the K9 GPS receivers, but we're working on some things to enhance the accuracy of the receivers that we put on the K9s. I'm going to back this up just a little bit here because we're talking a lot about dogs, obviously.
00:21:46
Speaker
You know, my dog who I mentioned has fear of all big dogs because he's tiny, except for one dog they grew up with who lives down the street from us here. And he's a lab, a great big golden lab that was originally trained. We've got a scene guide dog training facility a couple miles from where we live. And he was originally there, but he failed out of school.
00:22:10
Speaker
So he became a pet and he's humongous. He's like a hundred pounds. He's a great, big, very gentle giant. But that's a particular kind of dog and he failed out of school. And I'm wondering, how do the dogs that you use for
00:22:27
Speaker
archaeological perspective for, you know, lack of a better term for your forensic work. How are they different than your typical pet like mine or another working dog, you know, a dog that's tied to a specific person like these Seeing Eye dogs like Atticus down the street? How are they different? Typically, these dogs have been socialized to you. Are they specifically trained to be forensic dogs?
00:22:53
Speaker
What we're trying to do is move away from dogs that have been traditionally used to work for law enforcement and work on criminal case work. And now are moving towards working with dogs and dog handler teams that are specifically being trained to work for on archaeological investigations. And with that,
00:23:23
Speaker
The dogs and the handlers are being trained in a way that, one, they need to understand how to operate out on an archaeological site. They will have the socialization skills to be around multiple people.
00:23:42
Speaker
and so forth and for the most part ignore those people while they are working from there they will be used to other things going on or around them if need be because sometimes you even own
00:24:04
Speaker
One of the smaller dogs that I've seen do this work is a little Jack Russell. It's a larger Jack outside of the Cincinnati area. And with it, that archaeological site sits in the middle of a construction project. So even though they've got excavations and things like that going on,
00:24:31
Speaker
with them. They've also got heavy equipment being operated around them. The project that we were working on there in Louisiana, we had a train, you know, trussle right there with a train that went by. We had dump trucks running up and down and the dogs just ignore all of that. Dogs are trained to ignore the other dogs. And the
00:25:00
Speaker
airports, our dogs are trained to completely ignore another dog. That's one of the big differences between these dogs is they understand when they're in a work environment versus, okay, now you're out in the wild to go play.
00:25:20
Speaker
And you can go run with, with your, your friend and go swim in the lake or go play in the string. I don't, I don't know people that can do that. You know, usually they're just messing around at work too. So, you know, that's impressive. The dogs are much better workers than, than some of the
00:25:42
Speaker
The people. Indeed, indeed. All right. Well, we've got some follow ups for this. I've got a specific one. Let's take a last break and we'll wrap this up on segment three. Back in a minute.
00:25:53
Speaker
Welcome back to the Architect podcast, episode 203, and we are wrapping up this discussion with Paul Martin on his use of dogs in basically forensic archaeology. Paul, some of the things you said on the last segment got me thinking about, you know, when you said running the dogs on a transect and how they're trained not to be distracted by other dogs.
00:26:13
Speaker
You know, when a person is on a transect, on like say a wider transect, like a 30 meter transect or something, you know you're not looking 15 meters either side of you. You're looking only a couple meters either side of you at best, maybe one to two. And then that's your sample size, right? With a dog.
00:26:28
Speaker
Do they weave around a transect? Do you keep them within a certain parameter? Like a person generally walks roughly in a straight line. Well, they try to anyway, but does a dog like weave on a transect and, uh, you know, how, how wide is their field of sense? And then how do you keep them basically on that transect if they catch a scent that's maybe, maybe off of it? Yes. We try to.
00:26:51
Speaker
let them weave that transect and weaving that transect, there's a variance of two to three meters each side from that center because there's a lot about canine olfaction that we don't have fully narrowed down. Same thing with
00:27:18
Speaker
human decomposition and human decomposition odor, especially this older odor. And with that, I try to provide a variance of two to possibly four meters for the canine to be able to possibly pick up that odor.
00:27:47
Speaker
But we do have, you know, sometimes where if we're, we're downhill, we've got runoff, dogs can possibly pick up odor from that runoff and then work it uphill and pull up to it. We do see that. We see it in forensic cases. We see it in,
00:28:12
Speaker
I've seen it in archaeological projects and so forth. So we do know that is occurring. So we don't have exact hard or fast parameters because there is the variations that occur with the temperature during the day, the humidity during the day, even the barometric pressure.
00:28:41
Speaker
that varies throughout the day. We try to keep those variables to see if there's something that's going on there. The other things sometimes, depending on what the project is, we might take the approach that we will run this area with one dog at this time because we know we'll have
00:29:10
Speaker
one set of conditions where we'll run it that same area 24 hours or 40, not 24, but 36 hours later, because we know we'll have a completely different set of environmental conditions and see if it's presenting differently to the adult.
00:29:39
Speaker
That's interesting to me because one of the things I just presented at that Econa conference was about drone flights that I do and the changing environmental conditions. I have some pre-programmed flights so I can see subsurface architecture. If I have a little bit of time, I'll send the drone up and do its 20-minute flight over an area.
00:30:03
Speaker
What I'm starting to see are patterns of the amount of moisture. Did it rain the day before or two days before? Is the sun directly overhead or is it glancing? Whatnot to try to get a sense of when we're going to see these things. It's interesting to me in a very
00:30:20
Speaker
amorphous sort of sense that you're doing the same thing with the dogs. Is it better shortly after a rainfall or a couple of days after a rainfall? Dates of high pressure or low pressure, sun up, sun down, whatever. Again, that goes back to this
00:30:38
Speaker
funny notion that I hadn't thought of before as the dogs as being these data collection vehicles. It's not digital data, which is what we primarily talk about, Chris and I, on this channel. It's very similar even though it's all wetware. It's all the dogs and you have to filter it through what the dogs do.
00:30:59
Speaker
So the dogs do what dogs do. And one of the things that dogs do is they dig. I've had enough hounds. I've seen them catch us and decide to make a mess out of the yard. Is that a thing that you have to train out of your work dogs or do they somehow know not to dig?
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's correct. We're training the dogs to offer a passive response, such as a set or a down or a sometimes a hold and stare. And sometimes you have a dog that might offer just a low investigatory swipe.
00:31:48
Speaker
That's completely different than a dog that's in the backyard digging to China. We don't want that type of response from the dog because again, we don't want to create this type of disturbance.
00:32:05
Speaker
Okay. Speaking of that, you know, when you see people out there like metal detecting and stuff, right, they'll, they'll put pin flags around and then they'll go check what they've, uh, what they flagged and see what's there. I imagine you guys do a similar thing with the dogs. You know, you mark where they're, where they've alerted on and then you come back and take a look at it. What percentage of those would you say on the average is an actual thing like the hit rate? What, you know, how good are they doing basically? So one of the things that I try to do.
00:32:34
Speaker
with every response we are marking those responses with some meter GPS or RTK GPS and then coming back in and if possible depending on the terrain
00:32:51
Speaker
I'm trying to go in and collect GPR over an area. That could be a 5 meter, a square could be even a 10 meter.
00:33:04
Speaker
square over that area to give us an understanding of what's going on in there. We can have multiple responses in the same area. If we have that, usually we've got multiple grades that will show up in there. Our success and partnering that together has shown that we've got a response or a success rate of
00:33:35
Speaker
between 75 and 85%, something actually being there that in the data at least appears to be a grave. And from there and ground truth, I think that's up to each agency or, and sometimes we have
00:33:59
Speaker
responses that come back that we do want to ground trace. I've got a project in Nashville right now that's going on for a year and a half. We've got a row of burials that the dog
00:34:17
Speaker
initially identified here are your graves. It shows up in the GPR. Once we stripped off the surface, it literally shows up, bam, bam, bam, bam. You can see the outline of the grave shafts and it's an enslaved cemetery right there. Wow. Wow. That's dramatic.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that really is. You know, we're running out of time here on this podcast. We could probably go on about this. Like we mentioned, I think I had that camera if we did on the recording or not, but we definitely need a forensic archeology or anthropology podcast on the APN. So if anybody listening to this, you included Paul, it's interested.
00:35:01
Speaker
just get in touch with me and we can talk about it. Let's actually shift gears just a little bit because I want to bring this up because it's a tie-in to episode 189. And again, that link is in the show notes if you guys haven't heard it from the Architect podcast. And we had the
00:35:16
Speaker
lead archeologist on for this project. And it was for a spillway, a bridge, a railroad bridge over a spillway near North Carolina that needed to be replaced. And there was an oral history, somewhat of a tenuous oral history of a civil war era cemetery in the project area. So of course they wanted to make sure that wasn't actually there. If it was there, find it. So can you give us just a little brief synopsis over how you prepared for that project and what you guys ended up finding?
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah, with a project in their background research, they, they found there was a potential civil war colored troop cemetery there in that area. And with that, we brought in four different T9 teams and then they already identified three of the teams.
00:36:13
Speaker
And then they brought me in to bring my dog along with the geophys package, which was ground penetrating radar and the gradientometry. So with it, we took the project area and set it up just as a traditional grid and then worked the dogs individually through that grid area.
00:36:42
Speaker
mapping in any of the, if we got any type of response from the dogs. They are collected, radiometry out away from the trussle and then ground penetrating radar directly under the trussle. And with that, we had standing water and most under the trussle and most of the
00:37:12
Speaker
standing water, I did notice that the couple of responses we had from the dogs were associated in the boundary of the standing water. As we drained that standing water so I could do the ground penetrating radar survey underneath those trestles, it was filling up.
00:37:40
Speaker
as fast as we were doing it. And they were literally having to redrain some of the space units for me as I was doing it. And so what that highlighted
00:38:06
Speaker
to me was that the odor that the dogs were responding to wasn't directly there, but was coming in from outside the area. Also, when I looked at all of the geophys that I collected in the area, there was nothing that stood out that appeared to be a grave feature. The dogs,
00:38:33
Speaker
or at least I can't speak to the training of the other dogs for my dog. She is specifically trained to work nothing but 75 years and older. Oh, okay. Oh my goodness. You can train them that specifically, huh? All she works is
00:38:58
Speaker
Old draw bone and great, historic and pre-contact.
00:39:05
Speaker
So she never works any type of active decomposition or self-tissue decomposition. With that, she's very specific to searching out those older remains and older graves.
00:39:28
Speaker
those in the industry of this, this fledgling law industry niche that we're carving out for archeological human remains detection dogs are focusing on is that the dogs need to be specifically trained to work just that the handlers need to be used to working in those type of environments. This year, uh,
00:39:56
Speaker
the SAA meeting, we actually were able to have a symposium with seven, eight different papers from across the country focused on the adults and projects that they've worked in. And it's not all my work. You know, one of the researchers, one of the soil scientists,
00:40:23
Speaker
that's also a handler that's approaching the question of how's all this possible is thinking part of this might be related to recalcitrant fats that are still holding on into the soils.
00:40:37
Speaker
you know, years later. So yeah, which makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So Paul, I think that we could probably talk about this for hours and hours at this point, but we're going to wrap it up now. And I just wanted to thank you for really opening my eyes because
00:40:55
Speaker
For me, the notion of using dogs makes sense on some place as a dog lover and somebody who knows that dogs have this incredible nose and this incredible ability to be trained and this incredible ability to have bonds with their handlers. You've demonstrated for us, I think, and certainly for me, how this can actually work in archaeology in ways I wouldn't expect.
00:41:20
Speaker
but also in ways that are really familiar to me because you're using them like you use geophis. So thanks for exposing me to something brand new. And also, I understand your latest co-worker is a chocolate lab named Abby. So if it's appropriate, give her some extra scritches for us and tell her she's a good girl because I'm sure she is. And thank you for coming on the podcast tonight.
00:41:49
Speaker
Thank you all for having me and I certainly will. All right. Well, yes, thank you. And I literally, I just, I know we're over time, but I got one more thing to ask you, Paul. A lot of people take like a, like an air tag or a tile and put that on their keys. If they lose them, do you just put like a, like a really old chicken bone or something on your keys and have your dog find them for you when you lose them? Cause that would be genius.
00:42:14
Speaker
You got to separate work and play. All right. Well, again, thanks a lot. And this has been great. And I'd love to have you back on to talk about some of the interesting stuff you're working on. So thanks again, Paul. Thank you.
00:42:31
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:42:56
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.