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Hearth (actually Earth Oven) Huntin' with Charles Koenig - Ep 162
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On this episode of A Life in Ruins, Connor interviews Dr. Charles Koenig. Charles is a recently crowned Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming. We discuss Charles' upbringing in Summit County, Colorado and his earliest experiences in the Great Basin with archaeology. We then delve into his academic career and he recalls how a rock art field school set him along his current path. Charles then discusses his thesis/dissertation research on earth ovens.
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/162
Links
- Brief segment from Marfa Public Radio about Mescalero Apache ovens
- Photo essay of Apache earth oven cooking by Alan Ferg
- Agave is Life Documentary
Literature Recommendations
- Stephen Black and Alston Thoms, 2014, Earth Ovens in the Hunter-Gatherer Archaeological Record
- Carney et al. 2022 Bulbs and Biographies
Contact
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- More on www.archpodnet.com/ruins
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction and Host's Monologue
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to episode 162 of A Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living in life in ruins. I am your lone host this week, Connor Johnnan.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Charles Koenig
00:00:15
Speaker
Carlton is fighting mutants in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Las Vegas, and David is trying out a new career as a bus driver. Luckily, I am joined by Dr.
Life and Career in Wyoming
00:00:25
Speaker
Charles Koenig, who is a recently crowned doctor from the University of Wyoming. Charles, how are you doing? Or I should say Dr. Charles, how are you doing this day? I'm doing great. I really appreciate you having me on, Connor.
00:00:36
Speaker
I've wanted to for a while. I know you've had a busy couple of months. Some things have happened, defending your dissertation, et cetera. Yeah. I feel like my last four years here in Wyoming have been just like crammed full of different types of things.
Personal Roots in Colorado
00:00:53
Speaker
Fortunately, as I'm in this transition period from grad school moving into academic career, it's nice to have a little bit of time to do stuff like this.
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, get to enjoy a summer for a little bit before your summer's fieldwork all the time. Yeah, totally.
00:01:12
Speaker
For the audience, Charles and I currently work together in Chippo. We see each other most days. We went rafting yesterday and we're both Colorado boys, which is kind of an interesting connection. I don't think you see, you see some of that coming from the Colorado Wyoming connection a little bit, but not very often. And we both kind of took different routes to get to Wyoming, which is interesting. We chat about later, but you grew up in Summit County, right?
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, yes, I'm from Silverthorn, Silverthorn, Colorado originally. How was growing up in the mountains? I've always visited them and got to leave at the end of the day. How was it living in the mountains?
00:01:54
Speaker
I mean, looking back now, I kind of have a little bit different perspective, but it was a great place to grow up with access to all kinds of different outdoor activities. And obviously, we spent so much time on spring breaks and Thanksgiving breaks and various long weekends going out to Utah to escape the cold weather.
00:02:14
Speaker
but grew up skiing, grew up learning how to fish and hunt and camp and do all that kind of stuff. I realized, especially after leaving high school and getting into college and just being exposed to a lot more of the world and a lot more people, truly how privileged of a life I had growing
Challenges of Tourist Areas and Moving to Wyoming
00:02:32
Speaker
up. And so I'm very thankful for that, but it is certainly something that I look back on and say, wow, you had a very different life than a lot of other people.
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, you had to deal with the constant traffic through I 70. So like, yeah, people like basically invading your city every single weekend, week, et cetera. Certainly that. And I can, I can definitely appreciate having moved to Wyoming where there's a stigma against folks from Colorado coming up to recreate and in Wyoming and Wyoming folks cursing every time they see a Colorado license plate. And I understand.
00:03:07
Speaker
how it is to be now in the receiving end and recognizing that receiving end of that a little bit more too. For sure.
Early Fascination with Archaeology
00:03:14
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, we are both greenies as they call us, the green license plate, but we have, we have Wyoming plates now. So that's, we've solved that problem. You're leaving out a four letter word in front of that greenie statement that begins with an F.
00:03:29
Speaker
We will not say that on the podcast, but so growing up in Summit County, were you kind of exposed to archaeology, science, history kind of as part of your childhood or was that something that came later? Yeah, for sure. You know, I'd mentioned going out to Utah. That was a huge thing. My dad is from Frida, so he grew up going out to the BLM.
00:03:52
Speaker
lands out there and walking around looking for fossils, looking for area heads. So we, as a family, we did that same thing. So we went out, we dry camp north of Moab and just go out and hike around and walk around and look for stuff. And a lot of our vacations were kind of focused on like going to national parks and going to places like that to get exposure to history, cultural and natural history. So yeah, definitely exposed to it at early age.
00:04:18
Speaker
And it's kind of an interesting thing though, like I was, I've always been interested
College Struggles and Academic Pivot
00:04:23
Speaker
in archeology. I shouldn't say anthropology as much. And I didn't know what anthropology was in high school, but I've always been interested in archeology. But then in high school, I wanted to like make lots of money. So I went to Colorado school of mines.
00:04:38
Speaker
for the first year of my undergraduate degree. And I absolutely hated it. I didn't do well. I made some fantastic friends. But my favorite class was, I think, the liberal arts writing class, which is pretty much everyone else's least favorite class. So I think that kind of like,
00:04:58
Speaker
showed to me, at least as far as science and academia goes, how I really gravitate more towards the social side of things. And I'm not so good at just straight up numbers and things like that. That's an interesting...
00:05:13
Speaker
And for those who are not familiar, Colorado School of Mines is basically like the math, science, geology, engineering kind of capital of, I wouldn't say Colorado, maybe Colorado. I don't know if CSU might compete a little bit with that, but like they're definitely some of the top tier. So if you go there, you're very much going to be in that kind of realm. I don't think you, there's many liberal arts degrees that you come out of Colorado School of Mines. No, classic, classic engineering school. So I know there's a lot of kind of,
00:05:42
Speaker
cool mining history up in Summit County and those areas. Was that something that you were exposed to? You obviously got a taste of the Great Basin archaeology and Colorado archaeology as well, but was it the mining history part of it as well?
00:06:02
Speaker
You know, I really was never as interested in more recent aspects of archaeology or I mean, I like the history and stuff, but I just wasn't. I was always more interested in indigenous, the indigenous record and going out to Utah and places like that. But at the same time,
00:06:19
Speaker
I always equated going someplace else, not in some county, to look at archaeology. And then it's kind of like Full Circle coming to Wyoming, and Todd Servile and Marcel Kornfeld had done so much work just north of Silverthorne around Kremling at the Barter Gold site.
00:06:36
Speaker
And to come here and then suddenly be exposed to this incredible archaeological record that was literally right up my doorstep, it was really eye-opening to me about that.
Reflections on History Education
00:06:46
Speaker
And then to hear about all the things that Jason LaBelle and Kelton Meyer and stuff are doing at CSU, looking at those high-alpine game drives and things, it's like surely there's things like that that I probably walked by growing up that I never knew were there.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like I had the same experience because I spent some time in Bailey, but I didn't really know about the archaeology of the mountains and stuff until Jason LaBelle and kind of all the grad students at CSU really gave me the opportunity and opened my eyes to that. And I've kind of been addicted to that since because it's like you said, it's a really fascinating record, but it's not something I don't think
00:07:24
Speaker
that is talked about in Colorado as a whole. It's mostly about, I think, I feel like archeology talk is Mesa Verde, or I think that's about it, honestly.
00:07:35
Speaker
I would agree with that. It would be interesting to go back now and see what students at like Summit High School and middle schools, how much they've been exposed to that, if it's changed, if it's the same. Yeah, it'd be interesting. I mean, I think I remember my history class going back to like Pike, Zebulun Pike and doing some of that, but you never really got the indigenous stuff. You know, it was when they interacted with white people that essentially you got information about them.
00:08:04
Speaker
Right, it's like Colorado history after 1865 when white folks murdered a bunch of wrath.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, we don't want to talk about that part because that is really bad and it's awful, but we'll talk about the rest. It's a weird experience. So you kind of had this fascination with the past archaeology. You eventually went to college for it, right? Was that something you kind of knew? Did you go straight out of high school into college or did you do something in between?
00:08:35
Speaker
So I definitely I went straight out from high school, went to school minds, figured out I didn't want to be an engineer, and then was like, you know, I really enjoyed archaeology. And so I transferred up to CU Boulder and finally took my first anthropology and archaeology classes and just loved it.
00:08:53
Speaker
I wasn't necessarily the certainly was not the best student. I spent a lot more time, maybe not a lot more time, but a fair amount of my time in Boulder fishing rather than going to class. I don't think I ever, I'm not sure if I ever missed a class with Doug Banforce. Maybe I did hard to sell. There's actually a time I remember distinctly
00:09:12
Speaker
he was teaching a,
Field School Experience in Texas
00:09:13
Speaker
I think it was a Plains archeology class and it was right after lunch. One day in the room was super warm and I was struggling to just keep my eyes open and stay awake. I loved all of his classes, but that day and just everything about it was the perfect storm of I fell asleep. And even then, the crazy thing, I enjoyed all my classes, but I wasn't, I would say,
00:09:37
Speaker
as invested in anthropology, archeology at that point. And it wasn't until I took my field school down in Texas that I really realized like, okay, this is, this is fun. Like this is super awesome and learning all about that kind of stuff.
From Guiding to Archaeology Passion
00:09:53
Speaker
And then that's kind of what set me on the career track that I'm here today. Otherwise I'd be, you know, being a fly fishing guide and probably a ski patrol or ski bum or something like that, you know, very different career paths. You were telling me and your partner, Amanda mentioned it as well, that you had like invested right after your undergrad. You're like, I'm going to get into this guiding thing. This is kind of the path I see myself on. Is that what, where it kind of went?
00:10:23
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it was basically like during my undergrad, I was working at the, there's a fly shop in Silverthorne called Cutthroat Anglers. And I was working there and it was, it was awesome, right? You're like early twenties and, and fishing all day, hang out with people that love to fish, talking about fishing. And so yeah, as I got more into guiding, I bought a, I bought a raft and then I actually bought the raft right after I got back from my field school. So that would have been 2008.
00:10:51
Speaker
And so it was a kind of a bad timing for a guide career, right? So like go to field school and be like, I really like archeology and buy
Rock Art Research in Texas
00:10:59
Speaker
a raft, but obviously we still have the raft and it's still a lot of fun. That's interesting. So where did, where in Texas did you go for your field school and what kind of work were you doing? Yeah. So the field school, it was a, uh,
00:11:13
Speaker
Since I had to work that summer and I wanted to fish and guide, right. I was looking at field schools that were Maymester field schools, which I don't, I don't really know if that's really commonly offered anymore or not. So that's really the only reason why I didn't take Doug's field school in Nebraska.
00:11:28
Speaker
And I was choosing between a Texas Rockart field school through Schumel Archaeological Research and Education Center or a Maymester field school in Hawaii. And the price difference was like 1,500 bucks or $2,000. So I was like, I guess I'll go to Texas. And I was like, I've always liked Rockart. It still satisfies that. Again, I was looking at it really as not an archaeologist anthropologist, just as a student trying to finish my undergraduate degree. Like what is the fastest and cheapest way I can get my final six credits
00:11:57
Speaker
to finish would be.
00:11:59
Speaker
So I went to Texas with Shumla and it was a rock art specific field school, learning how to record rock art figures, record rock art sites, do illustrations, take photos,
Humanizing Archaeology
00:12:10
Speaker
and do a lot of the same types of documentation that you would do at any other archeological site, whether you have a large feature here mapping or doing artifact illustrations. But what really struck me was how you have this confluence of archeological research and archeological methods and
00:12:28
Speaker
and things coming together to address different aspects, different questions in that region specifically because you have this incredible polychromatic rock art that's all about these cosmology and religious views of indigenous folks who lived there several thousand years ago. So you have this incredible record that's showing you one thing and then you have the
00:12:49
Speaker
let's call it the dirt archeological record that is as anywhere else is, is chipstone, burned rock, fiber, perishable artifacts and things. And, and trying to seeing archeologists trying to bring those records together to learn, have a more holistic picture of what's going on in the past. And I think that was one of the major things that really just drew me in. And I think for me, especially that was probably one of the first times where, and really it's a, it's a big thing right now in archeology, but humanizing the past.
00:13:19
Speaker
in my career up to that point, it was just vague, like indigenous people, right? And at that point it's prehistoric folks, prehistoric humans, all these types of stuff. And then suddenly it's like, oh no, these really, really fired home for me, like
00:13:34
Speaker
These are indigenous people. They behaved the exact same as we do now. They had the same hopes, dreams, and aspirations. They loved, they cried, they laughed. All these things that many folks in our anthropology and archaeology kind of take for granted, but coming from the public facing stuff, you can lose that appreciation for looking at the past and looking at the archaeological record.
00:13:56
Speaker
So this place kind of gave you that little bit of both. And then obviously I think that shaped how your career went from there and how you studied things in the future. Because it seems like you still use, and we'll talk about this more later, you still use kind of those methods and try to humanize the past a little bit as part of your research.
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And in my career right now, I'm striving to do more indigenous center archaeology and incorporate more indigenous views in what I do. But I also am always remembering that not everything we see in the archaeological record is so simple as this plant food or this animal gets you 500 calories or 1500 calories or so many different cultural factors that go into people making those decisions. And we still do that today.
00:14:43
Speaker
and status symbols, right? So, the cars people drive, the accoutrement that people put on their cars, those types of things. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because we both studied underneath someone who is very much math, or two people, I should say, that are very math-oriented
00:15:05
Speaker
And that's how it kind of viewed the past. But I think the more recent generations are changing a little bit and kind of doing this new approaches and stuff, which is exciting and cool to kind of see that happening. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, I think on that note, we are going to end this segment and we'll be right back.
00:15:24
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 162 of Life in Ruins podcast. I'm here with Dr. Charles Koenig and we had finished the last segment talking about your experiences that you got from field school and what kind of happened next after field school and in your career.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, so after I did the field school, I came back to Colorado and immediately went and fished the salmon flies on the Colorado. But during that time, even though I had had so much fun at field school, and even though I'm having incredible
00:15:58
Speaker
fun catching fish, I realized that my passion was archaeology. And it wasn't, I love to fish, don't get me wrong, but it's just like that wasn't providing me as much fulfillment as archaeology
Graduate School and Practical Experience Advice
00:16:10
Speaker
did. So for the last, you know, I went back to school in the fall. I applied for grad school at Texas State University because there is a new professor that was starting there, Steve Black in fall 2008, who was going to start a research program focused in West Texas where the Rockhart Field School was hosted.
00:16:27
Speaker
At the same time, Shuma also offered me an internship that would start immediately after I graduated. So I accepted my master's program at Texas State, deferred for a year, was able to work at Shuma for a year, getting more experience designing research programs, designing different types of recording forms, running field projects, all focused on rock art. And then after I finished that year, I went to Texas State for my master's.
00:16:53
Speaker
It sounds like you got a lot of experience. Would you recommend people, if they want more experience or if they want to go to grad school, deferring is always an option. Would you recommend something like that, if possible? Yeah, absolutely. I still tell students that today, they come and ask me that opinion. I think just speaking from my own experience, I was an idiot.
00:17:16
Speaker
Like I didn't, I still barely know how to write and coming straight out of undergrad where my papers were total trash, you know, five to seven pages of just utter BS and then going straight into a master's program, I would have failed. Like I couldn't, I was incapable of doing that, but having that year to just kind of like
00:17:38
Speaker
get more experience and understand like how do you actually do a research design, how maybe get a little bit better with writing. I certainly did not get, I didn't get a lot of exposure writing in that year, but just get more experience how to ask like different types of questions that maybe are a little bit more nuanced than if you didn't have that background to understand like, oh, this question is really, really simple and basic, but I can get to the next level.
00:18:05
Speaker
of asking something that might get a little bit more interesting and have a little bit more depth to it.
00:18:10
Speaker
And it seems like that's recommended and we've talked about this on the podcast that we say you can go into CRM, but it also sounds like if you go to internships and other things, you might get more experience. I think you need a little bit of both. You need like the dirt archeology, like you're mentioning, but you also need like, you're also mentioning that theoretical writing, thinking about the past kind of experience as well. And if I think it sounds like internships and other things like that can give you a little bit of both in that sense.
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah. And especially right now with all the CRM jobs, like if you're coming straight out of undergrad and you can get into a, like a summer gig doing survey and shovel tests in a place you really want to be, that'd be awesome. And then for the next, like go into the winter months, if you can help write reports or help fill out site forms, just to kind of get both sides of that, but certainly just experience, however paid, paid, paid, paid experience, however you can get it.
00:19:08
Speaker
I mean, unpaid if it's really good, but if you get a publication at the end of it or something like that. But yeah, I was really fortunate. That internship, it didn't pay a lot, but it paid my, it paid me to live. So I wasn't saving money, but I wasn't, I certainly wasn't starving to death. I think I know the answer to this, but would you recommend Texas State as a place to go in terms of the city and the archeology, et cetera?
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, if you've never been to San Marcos, Texas, and it isn't a beautiful place, the San Marcos river runs right through there. It's a great college town. It's 45 minutes from Austin. It's 45 minutes from San Antonio. So you have this incredible blending of cultures, incredible food, and the anthropology department is really great. They have some incredible faculty in archeology and bio
00:20:01
Speaker
archaeology and forensic anthropology and primatology. They're doing some incredible work down there. So yeah, like Texas State, like I got my I got my master's there. My wife got her master's there. We have tons of friends that have been in the Texas State Program and or are in the Texas State Program. So it's yeah, it's a it's a great place. Like I certainly don't regret
00:20:24
Speaker
I don't regret coming to Wyoming at all for my PhD, but right when I moved up here to start my PhD at Wyoming in 2019, Texas State had just started a PhD program this year before 2018, I think, or maybe, I think it was fall 2018, and the reason
00:20:44
Speaker
the main reason I came up here was to get different experiences. At Texas, like I said, my master's advisor, Steve Black, who was still at Texas State at the time, he's since retired, but I had gotten some incredible mentorship from Steve. I got some incredible mentorship for other folks in the department, but I wasn't necessarily, the PhD program there wasn't necessarily gonna challenge me in the ways I needed to be challenged just to think about earth ovens and hot rock cooking.
00:21:13
Speaker
which is the focus of my dissertation in ways that I needed to be challenged. And so that was what brought me to Wyoming, working with Todd Servile, working with Bob Kelly and the rest of the faculty and challenging how I'm thinking about things. And even though I don't necessarily always agree about human behavioral ecology and return rates and all those things, it is a really useful way of looking at the past. So did you write your thesis on hearths?
00:21:40
Speaker
Yeah. So this has been, I mean, seriously at my field school is when I built my first earth oven. And there's a huge shout out that has to go to two people, Phil Daring and Jack Johnson. And Phil is an established archeologist who's done a ton of earth oven research, her research over the past.
00:21:58
Speaker
Oh, 50 years. He did his master's at Texas A&M University in the 70s. He's a paleoethnobotanist, but Jack Johnson is a little bit younger. He's a little bit older than you and I are, but he's one of the most enthusiastic people that you'll ever meet in your life.
00:22:14
Speaker
And that his excitement, Jack's excitement and it was like Jack's excitement and knowledge and Phil's knowledge and experience at those, if those two things, it just made a great pairing to get a 22 year old super pumped about building big fires and heating up rocks and cooking plants.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so, so after, after I did that first oven in field school, I knew that's what I wanted to do for my masters. And the funny thing was I told Steve this ahead of time via an email and I went down for my visit. This would have been, I think Thanksgiving or Christmas sometime around there of fall 2008. And I walk into Steve's office.
00:22:53
Speaker
And he had just started. So he was looking back now. I know that he was frazzled. And I was like, oh, I really want to look at burned rock mittens, as a lot of Texas archaeologists and other folks call these different types of sight types. And he looks at me, and he leans back, and he grabs this book off his shelf, and he slaps it on my lap. And he says, what the hell else are you going to learn about earth ovens and burned rock mittens that you haven't already written down here? And I was just like, oh my god, what am I doing?
00:23:20
Speaker
Like I want to, I want to learn something about these and my advisor I'm looking to work with is like, basically you're an idiot. How are you asking these types of questions? What I did was there's some incredible landowners, Rick and Mary Rylander.
00:23:35
Speaker
and they have a big ranch on the Devil's River and they have some incredible rock art. And that's how I got to know Rick and Mary was recording rock art on their property. And I was like, I'd really like to do a survey of your ranch and look for sites. And I had a vague idea of like, I wanted to look at settlement patterns, right? How vague is that? Just looking at how sites are distributed on the landscape.
00:23:58
Speaker
And so I did that and I spent, I don't know, 12 weeks or 15 weeks surveying that ranch over the summer and into the next fall. And yeah, I looked at how those specific sites, so these burned rock middens, what they are on the landscape are massive piles of burned and fire cracked rock.
00:24:17
Speaker
And so if you can imagine, if you've been to a campfire and there's a ring, a rock ring around the campfire, those rocks get a little red or maybe carbon stained in black. And if they're in the, directly in the fire, they'll start to fracture.
00:24:31
Speaker
And so what happens at these burned rock forbidden sites is people intentionally use rocks as thermal heating elements for cooking foods underground. And basically what they do is they would dig a pit in the ground, you insight into that pit, you put a bunch of wood and on top of the wood, you put a bunch of rocks.
00:24:49
Speaker
And then you light it on fire. And as that wood burns, those rocks are going to heat up. They might fracture if there's water is in there and starts to expand and fractures out the rocks. But as those rocks sit on top, that pile of wood and the wood burns down, they start to get really, really hot. And just, you know, you can imagine like this is the reason why you cut a piece of steak or cut your your baked potato. If your baked potato has been the oven for an hour at 375, if you tried to bite into it, it's going to be really hot. You're going to burn the shit out of your mouth.
00:25:18
Speaker
So, we cut those into pieces to help them cool down. So, the same principle applies where the larger the rock you have, the more heat it can hold. The smaller the rock, the less heat it can hold. And so, for different types of plants and animals all across the world, indigenous people for
00:25:36
Speaker
Tens of thousands of years have used this technology, Earth Ovens, to cook different types of plants. And so once the wood burns down, you have this bed of hot rocks in the bottom of your pit. You put a bunch of green packing material on top of that bed of hot rocks that's going to provide a barrier between your food and what's your heating element. It's going to provide a lot of moisture, too. So you put your food on top of packing material, cover it with more packing material, and then seal it all with Earth. So if you've ever done a,
00:26:04
Speaker
like goat roast or a sheep roast or a pig roast underground, or even done a barbecue pit. It's the same type of idea where you seal that in so all the heat and all the moisture stays in that environment. And in an earth oven with all that green packing material, everything essentially heats up to around the boiling point of water. So around 100 degrees Celsius, 190 degrees Fahrenheit, 200 degrees Fahrenheit,
00:26:27
Speaker
and it cooks at that temperature for a really long time. So you can think of an earth oven as a pre-industrial crock pot. And so when you look at the landscape in Texas and across the Southwest and arguably all over North America, you have these locations that are these massive piles of firecrack and burned rock, a burned rock midden, a roasting pit, an earth oven facility, and what they represent are places where
00:26:49
Speaker
indigenous folks returned to many times to build earth ovens. And a lot of depending on what foods they're cooking, if they're cooking plants like agave or canvas or things with lots of Inulin, a really complex carbohydrate or complex chain carbohydrate that has to be broken down so we can digest it. They had to have really big rocks because those have to cook for 36 plus hours. If you're cooking a few rabbits or some like
00:27:15
Speaker
biscuit root or segolilier things you can cook for a shorter amount of time so you can use a little bit smaller rocks. And so we can look at where these sites located on the landscape, what were indigenous people, kind of why were they choosing to use those specific locations, how does this play into the bigger picture of their settlement patterns, mobility, cosmology, so on and so forth.
00:27:36
Speaker
I don't know if a lot of people think about hearts or these earth ovens as something like that, but they are. And you've, you've fully convinced me through your research is that they are kind of an interesting, and I do touch on all those aspects of culture and of human life ways, et cetera. It's really interesting. Um, and this kind of like transitions. So you, you, you're doing some of this work and you're looking at this kind of larger landscape. And then that kind of continues, right? When you go into Wyoming and that's kind of
00:28:04
Speaker
part of your larger dissertation. I was fortunate enough after I finished my master's to go back and help Steve Black. I helped to run excavations at several big rock shelter sites out there, one of them being Eagle Cave. At Eagle Cave, we have this incredible stratified record going back
00:28:22
Speaker
10,000 years of indigenous folks returning to build earth ovens there. And so what I wanted to do my dissertation on the first thing was like, why are folks choosing to go back to that site? And a major aspect of this is we know from contemporary folks and the ethnographic record that earth ovens were used a lot of times to provision feasts. It's a really good way to get a
00:28:44
Speaker
big amount of food that you can use to feed a larger amount of people. And a good example of this in the Mezcaler Apache still to this day have every year do a girls puberty ceremony, which is a really important core aspect of their culture and tradition and maintaining their identity.
00:29:03
Speaker
And so this still happens, and they build a massive earth oven, and they cook a ton of agave. And so we have this rich ethnographic and contemporary accounts that say people are doing earth ovens not just to scrape by. And this is one of those ideas, when you look at the calories that you get out of these features, normally you don't get very much. And so especially Western archaeologists, we have often looked at these and saying, oh, these are probably for starvation, or this is a signature that folks are barely scraping by.
00:29:30
Speaker
But that's probably not always the case. I'm not trying to paint with a very big brush, but it's like sometimes it's probably for that that people need food to eat and they're probably struggling. But at the same time, there's other instances where folks are coming together. They're using these big features to provision feasts and aggregations and have big parties.
00:29:50
Speaker
That was the lens I was looking at. Eagle Cave is trying to evaluate, can we look at these two different hypotheses of why folks spent so much time in that site and invested so much time in building ovens? At Wyoming, this is the beauty of coming to a new place that folks are going to challenge you.
00:30:08
Speaker
And that was one of the things that Todd said was, well, how does this, you need to take a bigger picture stab at this. Like, what can you do that's going to eat? He was like, I don't remember the exact conversation, but it's like Eagle cave is really cool. But what does this mean for the rest of North America? Let's say that.
00:30:24
Speaker
And so then, fortunately, Bob Kelly was compiling his radiocarbon database with a lot of folks. That was a way that I could take a sample of dated earth oven features from Wyoming is what I ended up focusing on my dissertation and trying to say something a little bit broader about when people started to use this technology in the Northern Plains.
00:30:45
Speaker
How does the morphology of these features change? Do they go, is it always the same amount of rock? Is it the same size of pit? Does it change your time? If it does change, what does that mean for the different types of foods that are being cooked? Yeah, and I think we'll continue this a little bit and hopefully talk about your results in the next segment. So we will be right back.
00:31:06
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 162. I'm here with Charles. We were talking hearths as a, I also want to tell everyone this that I had a brilliant idea. We're going to get Charles on a TLC show or HGTV or something like that. And it's a show called hearth hunter. You go around.
00:31:25
Speaker
trying to find hearts within your time range, within your budget, et cetera. It's going to make millions. So DLC, HDTV, all those things, call me. We can negotiate this. But continuing on, how did you analyze all these features and what did you ultimately kind of find out about feature morphology shape in Wyoming?
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a really great question because I'm going to take a probably long, roundabout way to answer this. First off, the data that I was collecting was features that had been directly radiocarbon dated. That's where I was starting with. I had this list of something like, I think it was 1,200 radiocarbon dates.
00:32:09
Speaker
And then I had to go back into the records in the SHPO database where Connor and I work right now and pull out the actual feature morphology. How linked with depth was there rock? If there was rock, how much did it weigh? And I had really grand ambitions that I was hoping that every single one of these features had recorded the amount of rock that was the mass, the total mass of rock. Because from my work in Texas, I knew that and ongoing experimental work that
00:32:37
Speaker
As I kind of mentioned before, the bigger, the more rock that you have, the larger that earth of a heating element, the longer it's going to be able to cook or the more food you're going to be able to cook. So if you have really big features, that's probably going to indicate something different behaviorally than if you have a bunch of little small features. And from my outside perspective on Wyoming, I thought that it was probably mostly a bunch of really small features. And so as I get into the Chippewa records, though, there's a ton of variation. The problem is archaeologists have done
00:33:06
Speaker
kind of bad job about being really systematic and consistent about how we record that information. So some folks would give length, width, depth, mass of burned rock, size class of burned rock within that, you know, identification of macro botanical remains, fallen remains, all this type of analysis, but at the other end of the spectrum, it would basically be, this is a hearth feature. It is 50 centimeters by 50 by 10, and there's a rate of carbon date. And you'd have very, very little information.
00:33:34
Speaker
What I had to do was in my data collection, just narrow it down. Ultimately, some of the main key points were just basic morphology, length with depth, and presence and absence of burned rock, because less than 30% of the features that I know had burned rock actually had accompanying rock mass. What I ended up finding out was
00:33:56
Speaker
As other folks who've worked in Wyoming, Craig Smith, Lance McNeese, Russell Richards, and many others had noticed during their long careers doing contract archaeology that late Pleistocene, the earliest Holocene around 11,000 years ago, those features have almost no rock. You still have pit features. They're probably using just charcoal as their heating element, cooking things like rabbits potentially,
00:34:20
Speaker
small amount of meat or starchy geophytes like biscuit root. And then as you get into the Holocene around 7,500 years ago, suddenly there's like a drastic increase in the amount of rock that's showing up in these features, suggesting that it's either a different type of food, potentially more of us an Indian rich geophyte. So maybe Sago lilies, they have a little bit more complex carbohydrates or more, more starch, geophytes, biscuit root, more rabbits,
00:34:47
Speaker
And one of the really cool things looking at the final record is that it's very clear that indigenous folks were cooking large games. So deer, antelope, bison, probably elk and earth ovens beginning at least 7500 years ago in the northern plains.
00:35:02
Speaker
And the first Canvas oven, so Canvas is a really important geophyte resource for folks in the Pacific Northwest and especially along the Columbia Plateau and into Canada. And the earliest Canvas oven that it looks like we have in Wyoming that came out of the Tetons around Jackson Lake is around 4,500 years ago, and that has over 100 kilograms of rock.
00:35:25
Speaker
220 pounds of rock, something like that. And I only looked at that early first half of the Holocene record, but at the end of the day, it just shows indigenous people change their technology, and we can see that archeologically to cook different types and different amounts of food. And more work needs to be done. There's a ton of additional research questions as well. I feel like that's the end of all dissertations and theses.
00:35:54
Speaker
Yeah. There's some, there's some really, I'm, I really resonate with a lot of the memes I've seen recently in, in like academic pages of like at the end of a PhD, you just feel like a total idiot. And you, you realize that, you know, you start an undergrad. Oh, you know so much about the world. You get to a masters. Oh, I don't know that much about the world. You get to end your PhD and you're like, shit, I know almost nothing. You're back to feeling like an idiot again.
00:36:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's just like that lessening of the field. You know a lot about a little, but not a little about a lot anymore. So another part of your dissertation was also doing experimental archaeology and using mathematical equations. Do you mind talking about that? Because I found that super fascinating, being a Colorado person who's never studied Texas archaeology and never knowing what a lechigia is.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll start there. Lechegia is agave. Lechegia is a scientific name. It's one of the smallest species of agave in North America. Whenever folks would cook agave, what you do is, if you've seen a picture of agave on a bottle of tequila or something like that, it has really long leaves.
00:37:10
Speaker
you cut all the leaves down till you get to the leaf bases and all the edible material in agave it's kind of like an artichoke it's it's above ground storage so it's at the bottom of that leafs it's not a geophyte like a camis bulb or a biscuit or anything like that when you trim agave leche gia it looks like
00:37:26
Speaker
truly looks like an artichoke that you get from the store. And so that is one of the plants that folks in along the Rio Grande in Texas and Northern Mexico and further down in Mexico, that's one of the different plants that they would cook in earth ovens. And so one of the questions that we have archeologically, and this is where is experimental archaeology is really good is, is understanding the basic physical processes that go into it. Like we, we know archeologically, we know ethnographically, we know from contemporary folks that these are plants are cooking.
00:37:56
Speaker
The question is, how much food could be cooked? How hot does X amount of rock stay given using Y amount of wood? And so those are kind of the idea that I went into my experiments with, was trying to understand ultimately how much food could the features that we see in Southwest Texas, based on the overall amount of rock that's in the earth oven features, if you have an earth oven feature with 100 kilos of rock, could that cook the same amount of food as one with 350 kilos of rock?
00:38:25
Speaker
And we didn't really know. The only experiments that have been done had basically just been to kind of proof of concept, like this is how an oven works, build a fire, heat up the rock, cook food underground, and you get 30 lechegia plants. And so to kind of get to that point, though, how much food can we cook? I started the basic very beginning asking how much wood does it take to heat up differing amounts of rock to see if we can minimize. And this goes, like you just said, goes back to these
00:38:52
Speaker
mathematical equations looking at return rates and inputs and outputs and trying to minimize the amount of work that you're putting into it. And so I built three different ovens at a time with differing amounts of rock, heated those with differing amounts of wood, found that regardless of the amount of rock you have up to at least 250 kilograms, it takes about 100 to 120 kilograms of wood to heat those rocks up hot enough to cook something for at least 36 hours.
00:39:20
Speaker
And so then using that data, which is that amount of wood was about 50% less than it had been previously used. 100, like 125 kilos, 50% less than previous experiments. And then what we found is, especially with our biggest oven, one with 250 kilos of wood, we could cook probably between, we kind of max, we maxed out our experiment a little bit. We cook 62 plants, 62 lechegia plants.
00:39:47
Speaker
we could have cooked a lot more. The lechegia almost burned. There was so much heat in the rocks. There was agave syrup, agave molasses dripping down out of the plants. It coated all the heating element rocks. So that's all the sugar that you really don't want to cook out, right? Because that's all the good stuff. What it really opened our eyes to is that, and this is again, one of these, of course, stop being an idiot gringo,
00:40:12
Speaker
looking at these things, right? Indigenous people knew exactly how to do all these things. And, you know, unfortunately, we don't have generations of traditional knowledge to kind of help us figure out how to do these different types of features specifically with Lechugia. And so what it looks like is number one,
00:40:31
Speaker
people are cooking a lot of food in these plants. So depending on the size of the, so if we take our 250 kilogram heating element, we're probably looking at somewhere in the order of like 40 to 60,000 calories, which is equivalent of like a white tail deer.
00:40:46
Speaker
So it's a lot of food at one time based on plants. Obviously, it's a lot of work to get there. There's still a lot of investment, but you can get a lot of food. And then for a lot of experiments, and this is true with a lot of return rates, it's always considered from the standpoint of one person doing it. And earth ovens and this type of technology is something that this is, and again, we know from contemporary ovens, we know from ethnographic counts, this is never something you do by yourself.
00:41:12
Speaker
And so what we realized is these are communal features. We didn't realize it. We just provided numbers behind that assertion to say it makes a lot more sense to work together to do this. And by working together, you get a lot more bang for your investment buck.
00:41:28
Speaker
let's say, and that even though you have these tiny little lechegia plants that are this big and don't provide a lot of calories by themselves, if you pool your energy and pool your resources, you can provision arguably some sort of feast and aggregation, especially if you had other foods like a deer, let's say, or a bison to go along with it.
00:41:48
Speaker
And I think that's kind of the beauty with experimental archaeology is that it does create that kind of baseline, or it creates the science, or it does that, but also there's culture involved and things like that change it. But I think that's the kind of beauty of experimental archaeology, the record and kind of the ethnographic record as well.
00:42:08
Speaker
So where we really kind of get good information from is really combining those three different places and really analyzing it like that. And I think it's really cool that you found out that white people aren't as efficient and might not be as good at doing this stuff, but yeah, it's really interesting.
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, it was cool. And I'm really excited. The one thing that's happening is I'm again at a transition period where I'm technically a student intern at SHPO right now. And in the fall, I started a position at Sol Ross State University in Alpine as an assistant professor. And so I'm really excited about continuing to do this research and continue the experimental work.
00:42:49
Speaker
and continuing all of this Earth Oven, like these various Earth Oven things we've talked about, other projects, and working with a lot of different collaborators and building relationships, especially with the Mesblor Apache, who are just up the road in Riodosa right now, to get a broader idea of what was going on with Earth Ovens in the past.
00:43:08
Speaker
Very cool. I know you're passionate about hearths or earth ovens. What is the one attribute you would have people record when they're finding scattered rock, FCR, whatever you want to call it, like a thermal feature? What would you recommend they record?
00:43:24
Speaker
I think the most important one is going to be the total mass of rock. A secondary really also important is the size of rock that's in those features. And what we've done, we've kind of done some cool studies. We did this procedure called rock sort, and this is kind of
00:43:41
Speaker
in one version or another is becoming more common within contract and academic spheres where you size sort the rocks into different size classes and then weigh the rocks by that size class. Because no one in any project has the time to weigh and count every single rock that comes out of a giant pile of burned rock in FCR. It's not feasible to do.
00:44:03
Speaker
Number one, if you can just get an overall weight, but number two, size class and weight by size class. Oh, why is the size class important? Because again, the larger the rocks, that means the longer that cooking time is going to be occurring for. Smaller rocks are just going to cook for less time. And one thing that's really cool also is if you have deflated features, so deflated earth oven that is no longer in a pit,
00:44:27
Speaker
It's just exposed on a sand dune or something like that. You can pay attention to where does the largest set of rocks cluster. And that was probably where that oven originated and everything else is eroded out from there.
00:44:39
Speaker
Very cool. Well, thank you. And you hear that CRM folks find a way to do it. It'd be appreciated by all of us. We're studying these things. Thank you, Charles so much, you know, for coming on and chatting with me. I really appreciate it. Before we end the show, do you have a couple of sources, um, books, articles, videos that you would kind of recommend for anyone who's interested in lechegia, hearth, uh, earth ovens, et cetera?
00:45:06
Speaker
Yeah. Well, first off, thank you again for having me on. This has been a lot of fun. It's always fun to talk about this type of stuff, especially with a friendly audience. But I would certainly also say there's a ton of information out there about this type of cooking technology, earth ovens. Some people call them roasting pits. Other people call them earth ovens. Other people, as Connor's been saying, call them hers.
00:45:32
Speaker
But I definitely recommend checking out a lot of the public newspaper articles in magazine and radio clips specifically about the Mescolar Apache and a lot of their Earth Oven. So it's a really cool one from Marfa Public Radio. It's pretty short.
00:45:49
Speaker
If you can get access to the documentary that's called Agave is Life, it's not always free online. I don't know how to get it a free version, but you can look at trailers and things. Actually, it's over 10 years old at this point, but Agave is Life is a good one. There's a cool photo essay that was compiled by Alan Ferg and published in Desert Plants, which is
00:46:12
Speaker
available for free. I can give Connor the link, but it's hosted by the University of Arizona. And it just is a really cool compilation of ethnographic photos showing different groups of Mescalero, or not just Mescalero, different groups of Apache building earth ovens.
00:46:29
Speaker
is a ton of academic articles on this. One of the foundational ones, especially it's fairly recent is by Steve Black and Austin Toms, Earth Ovens, and the Hunter Gather archaeological record. If you Google that, you can find it for free through the Texas Beyond History website or download directly from American Antiquity.
00:46:46
Speaker
and a little self advertisement. I was just a co-editor on a book that was published at University of Utah Press called Earth Ovens Desert Lifeways that is available as a hard copy or a ebook right now. So yeah, tons of references. And I'd also like to say that there's some incredible work coming out of the Pacific Northwest looking at camis ovens. And so check out like Shannon Tushingham and her students work on camis ovens.
00:47:16
Speaker
in Washington and Oregon. Very cool. And all those links for those and the information about those will be in the show notes. We are going to do something a little corny. So because this show is called a life in ruins, I have to ask you, would you choose if you had to do it all over again, would you choose to live a life in ruins?
00:47:37
Speaker
I would. The biggest change I would make is just more fishing. Well, we hope that you can get a lot of that in Texas and get some rafts going and some floats. Yeah. So we just interviewed. I just interviewed Dr. Charles Koenig. This is the part where David's promised he was a sticker. And you give us a review on iTunes. He's a liar. And I hope he doesn't listen to this. Carlton usually says something here about us being out. But I guess we're out.
00:48:13
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. All right, Connor, tell us a joke. It's your joke time, Connor. OK, fine. I just got fired from the keyword factory. They said I wasn't putting in enough shifts. Nice.
00:48:42
Speaker
And with that, we are actually out.
00:48:57
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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.