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The Archaeology of the Night - Episode 35 image

The Archaeology of the Night - Episode 35

E35 ยท The Archaeology Show
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Much of archaeological site interpretation is based on a bias of not only typical male and female responsibilities, but also, activities that take place during the day time. Both of those are assumptions that need to change. Editors Nancy Gonlin and April Nowell produced a book called, "Archaeology of the Night" to get other archaeologists to consider their work from the perspective of the night. What are we missing by not considering special artifacts and features that may be designed for use at night? This is a fascinating episode that challenges our assumptions about site interpretation.

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Transcript

Introduction to the Archaeology of the Night

00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Archaeology Podcast, Episode 35. I'm Chris Webster. And I'm April Campwedeker. On today's show, we will look at the archaeology of the night with Nancy Gondlin and April Noel. Let's dig a little deeper.
00:00:35
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everyone. So my co-host, April Kampwiger, may or may not join us today. The internet and computer gods are not smiling on Arizona right now. So we'll see if she joins us. If she does, we'll bring her in and announce her. But if she doesn't, then it's just going to be me, which is interesting because April brought this interview to us and she's somewhat loosely involved with her family and this book. So she has a lot

Meet the Experts: Nancy Gondlin & April Noel

00:01:01
Speaker
more knowledge on it. So I'm going to kind of wing it today.
00:01:03
Speaker
But my guests today are the editors of this book and contributors, Nancy Gondland and April Noel. How's it going? Going great. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. So before we get started, let's introduce you guys to the audience and we'll just say a little bit about yourself and where you are so they understand where we're coming from. And Nancy, why don't you go ahead and start.
00:01:24
Speaker
Hi, I'm Nancy Gondlin, and I've got a PhD in anthropology from Penn State. I'm a senior associate professor at Bellevue College. I've taught here for about 20 years or so, and it's a teaching college, so I really enjoy all of the classes and students that I have. And I'm a Mesoamerican archaeologist, so I have done my field work in Mexico and Honduras and El Salvador.
00:01:51
Speaker
Nice, nice. Okay. And that's Bellevue Washington for all those people in the East Coast. Yes, it's Bellevue Washington near Seattle. That's right. That's right. And April, go ahead.

Overview of 'Archaeology of the Night'

00:02:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm April Noel. I did my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'm professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada.
00:02:14
Speaker
And I am a paleolithic archaeologist, so I specialize in the archaeology of our human ancestors. I've been working for the last 20 years or so in Jordan and before that in France. And I specialize in things like the origins of language, the origins of art, and the emergence of the modern mind.
00:02:35
Speaker
Okay, fantastic. The book that we're going to talk about, and then really the concepts within the book that we're going to talk about, is called Archaeology of the Night, Life After Dark in the Ancient World, and it's by University Press of Colorado. Check that out. We'll have links to that in the show notes, so you don't have to go out and check it out right now, but we'll have links in the show notes. Why don't we start off by just talking about... This is an edited volume, first off, and why don't we talk about what the book is about, what an edited volume means, and
00:03:04
Speaker
And then we'll get into a little bit more about the book. So Nancy, why don't you go ahead and tell us about that? Sure. What the book is about is how ancient people lived at night and how they navigated the dark, which is very different from what we do today. We have so much lighting and that drowns out a lot of the stars. And the night sky was extremely important to people in the past and still to many people today. And what an edited volume means is that
00:03:32
Speaker
April and I are responsible for the content in terms of the quality and the chapters that we chose, and we do the editing of each chapter. But we did not write each of the chapters because we are not experts in some of the areas that we wanted to portray in this book. So for example, we really wanted to have an expert on the Southwest.
00:03:58
Speaker
So we were fortunate to have Dr. Catherine Camp and Dr. John Whitaker of Grinnell College contribute a chapter on the Southwest and the Sinagua people. So there are 18 chapters in the book. There is also a foreword that is written by Jerry Moore, who is a preeminent archaeologist of the Peruvian area.
00:04:19
Speaker
And then there is an afterword as well, written by the eminent archaeologist Dr. Meg Conkey of UC Berkeley, and she wraps up the topic. But we've

Nighttime Activities in Ancient Rome

00:04:31
Speaker
got an introduction to the topic with that foreword and then an introductory chapter that April and I co-authored. We've got a section on what we call nightscapes.
00:04:41
Speaker
We've got a section on the night sky, and then we've got another section on nocturnal ritual and ideology, and then a final section on nighttime practices or what did people do at night. Nice. That's one of the first things I wanted to mention is that this is not necessarily a book on archaeoastronomy. This isn't a book on necessarily reading the night sky or even structures organized in a way to reflect the sky or something like that.
00:05:09
Speaker
No, I think we really wanted to, I mean, that would be, that's obviously one aspect of it. So we do have people talking about how Polynesians navigated using the stars and talk about solar eclipses and darkness and that kind of thing as well. But we really wanted to broaden what we
00:05:29
Speaker
think about when we think about the nighttime. I think for a lot of people in our daily lives today, we think of the nighttime as being a time for sleep, that everything kind of ends. And what we were finding in our research and from talking to the authors of the different chapters,
00:05:48
Speaker
was in fact that there's a whole other world that comes to life at night.

Inspiration Behind the Book

00:05:53
Speaker
So not only in the natural world where you have only some animals coming out and some flowers blooming, but the night shift starts. So a lot of people actually start their day, if you will, in the evening. They engage in all different kinds of work.
00:06:10
Speaker
other people are engaging in rituals and so on. And so we realized that the more we looked, the more complex and rich and really exciting nighttime was for people in the past. Especially for those ancient Romans. They were partiers at night. If you read Glenn Story's chapter on ancient Rome,
00:06:30
Speaker
you will get a lot of information. And modern humans today are not the first ones to be night owls and party through the night. This is those way back thousands of years.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah. And even more recent than that, it's just reminding me of a book I read a couple of years ago called Don't Sleep There Are Sticks by Daniel Everett. That's a great title. And I know in that, it's really great, right? And in that book, he actually started as a missionary and he went to some tribe down in South America like they all do and tried to basically learn that. He had a background in linguistics too and his idea was to learn their language and then of course translate the Bible into their language and then convert them into
00:07:10
Speaker
upstanding citizens, right? Oh goodness.
00:07:15
Speaker
It has a happy ending from an anthropological standpoint. He actually ended up leaving his church and staying down there for a long time and basically just learning from them. And that's what this whole book is about.

Challenges in Gathering Contributors

00:07:24
Speaker
But one of the things that stuck out with me is they don't have any natural enemies, really. There's no other real tribes around there. They just kind of live and eat and do things. And they don't have any exports, of course, with people around them. They don't really trade. And they don't have a cycle like we do. If somebody brings in food,
00:07:42
Speaker
They eat it until it's gone and that might be until three o'clock in the morning. And they just sleep when they want to and they get up when they want to. And that's what one of the things him and his family had a hard time adjusting to was they had a very active nighttime activity, but it wasn't, it wasn't separated between night and day. It was just, it happens to be night because that's where we're at. And we have different nighttime activities when we're doing these things at night. And it was just a really interesting way to look at it.
00:08:05
Speaker
Hmm, feasting behavior. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Thinking about that, I was thinking about Glenn Story's chapter on the Romans. And one of the things that really struck me is what you're saying, Chris, is that I sort of think about nighttime is, or in terms of our sleep patterns being fairly regulated, but there is really
00:08:27
Speaker
a cultural component to it for sure and he talks about with in Rome how there was first sleep and second sleep and that there would be time in between for you know for everything from you know sex to writing to doing other kinds of work to whatever and it and it was just a normal sort of pattern that they would break it into these two different sections or two different types of sleep.
00:08:55
Speaker
And that's one thing I learned a lot about in researching for this book is that sleep varies. And sleep is a cultural pattern and a cultural practice. And not everybody sleeps the same way where you sleep, how you sleep, when you sleep, with whom you sleep. Those are all culturally patterned, of course individually patterned as well. And there are two historians
00:09:22
Speaker
of Europe, Roger Ekirch and Craig Kozlowski, who have written a lot about this first sleep and second sleep and how modern humans today don't seem to do that, but yet we are expected to sleep eight hours straight through. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you. That's so interesting. I listened to a lot of entrepreneur and business-like podcasts as well. And the biggest thing right now that everybody's saying is, you've got to get eight hours of sleep. Now, what they're saying is,
00:09:52
Speaker
They're saying it as you need to get eight hours of continuous sleep. They are saying that. But you're right, it is kind of a cultural construct to even say that. I guess more to their point is they're saying people are only getting four or five hours of total sleep in a 24-hour period, so you need to try to get eight. But I'm not sure if eight hours within a 24-hour period would be just as effective as eight hours of straight sleep. I can vouch for that. I'm sure you too. You can too, April. Exactly.
00:10:23
Speaker
Why did you guys want this book to exist? Is there nothing out there that's like this? Like this sort of volume that has all these things in one place?
00:10:31
Speaker
As far as I know, we're really the first people to address the archaeology of night. I mean, there are people who have written about the night from different perspectives, from a historical perspective, anthropological perspective, but really in terms of an archaeology of night, Nan and I were the first ones. I'll turn it over to Nan because it was really her idea and she brought me on board and
00:10:57
Speaker
how that happened is kind of funny, but maybe Nan, start with how you came up with the idea originally. Okay, so there I was, being a good scientist, reading a book at night, doing some research, sitting by the fire, not sleeping, not even first sleep, but with a wine glass in hand. And the more wine that I'm drinking, I'm thinking,
00:11:22
Speaker
Well, wait a minute. I'm an archaeologist. I'm looking around my house and I'm sitting in a different space than I do during the day. I'm using different artifacts. There are different features around me like the fireplace. And I said as an archaeologist,
00:11:40
Speaker
We should explore this because we talk about daily lives and daily practices, and those don't necessarily exclude the night, but they're not explicit about incorporating the night. And the more I thought about it, I thought, well, I can't think of anything offhand that I know about. So I Googled
00:12:04
Speaker
Archaeology of the night, nothing. Nocturnal archaeology, nothing.

Modern Parallels to Nighttime Activities

00:12:10
Speaker
Darkness and archaeology. And actually a couple of things came up, like Marianne Dowd's co-authored or co-edited volume. But that was a little different. Archaeology of darkness is different than archaeology of the night. So the more I looked and the more I explored, I could not find anything. And the next day I had lunch with a good friend of mine, Christine Dixon, who's also a Mesoamerican archaeologist.
00:12:34
Speaker
And I bounced this idea off her. And she said, you're nuts. Of course daily practices includes the night. And I said, but I can't find anything. So I Googled some more synonyms there and still not coming up with anything. And then I emailed my advisor from Penn State, David Webster. And I said, what do you know about the archaeology of the night?
00:12:58
Speaker
And he said, nothing, it doesn't exist. Nobody researches that and or something like that. But meaning that he had not heard of this at all ever. So in comes April. We had we both just been coming back from the SAA meetings of Society for American Archaeology meetings.
00:13:24
Speaker
in in memphis i think it was and just by accident we ended up being seated next to each other and we're both very chatty friendly people so we started talking and then i pulled out my laptop because we started talking about what papers we had given and i pulled out my laptop to show her some slides from a paper i'd given with a friend of mine melanie chang uh on um
00:13:49
Speaker
basically paleoporn, how we feel comfortable using the term pornography to describe a sage figurines and why that's wrong. And the slides were quite funny. And so we ended up having a really good laugh together about a lot of the, about, you know, all of these things. And I guess it wasn't much longer, maybe a couple of months after where Nan contacted me.
00:14:14
Speaker
and asked if I would be interested in exploring the topic of the night together because she thought maybe based on my other talk that I might be someone who would be interested in something a little unusual, a little out of the box.
00:14:31
Speaker
And at first, I wasn't sure that I had anything to say about the night, because I thought, what do I know about the night in the Ice Age? And then the more I thought about it, the more interested I got, the more I thought, this is super exciting. And then once I was on board, we had to start trying to convince our colleagues to come on board to write chapters for us. We had sort of an ideal of the time and space grids that we wanted to
00:15:00
Speaker
to cover and we just started sending out invitations to people and you know, Nan can confirm this. Most people turned us down. A lot of them. Yeah. Even some of our close friends turned us down. April Camp Whitaker's mom turned us down.
00:15:22
Speaker
We worked on her, though. We worked on her. And then she and John put together a fabulous chapter, which we're so grateful to have. But yeah, it took a little convincing. And then I think people, when they started to really think about it, started to find all kinds of interesting, creative, innovative ways to ask questions about the night. And then everyone started to get so excited about the chapters they were writing for us that it was such a
00:15:51
Speaker
a fun project to be working on. This is definitely one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on. And part of it is because of working with April. She's just absolutely sensational to work with and has the greatest sense of humor. And she can put up with me, so.
00:16:12
Speaker
That's awesome. I was going to ask a little more about how you found people to do this, because like you mentioned, with a few of your examples, people hadn't even thought about it and it actually turned you down. But you must have had, I guess, either a network of people that you were just calling, and I hate to say pestering, but that's what we do. People are right for us, right? Yeah. Have you heard of cold calling? Oh yeah.
00:16:40
Speaker
But I guess when you have to do that, the question I'm really getting at is, how did you decide without even really knowing what you were even talking about, because nobody's actually studied this, how did you decide who to even cold call to say, hey, do you want to take what you're doing and maybe talk about the archaeology of the night and kind of flip it a little bit?
00:16:58
Speaker
Well, April and I talked about this and we wanted global representation because we thought we could best illustrate this new perspective of the archaeology of the night by having archaeologists from all over the world contribute to the topic. So we wanted people who specialized in different times in different places. So we kind of came up with a list and some of the people she knew, some of the people I knew and some people we didn't know at all. So that's where the cold calling came in.
00:17:28
Speaker
And some of these people are really big names in archaeology like Anthony Avini. And I know his work that I had never met him. Nevertheless, I just sent him an email. And of course, he was interested. He is a premier archaeo astronomer. So fortunately,

Sensory Changes at Night

00:17:46
Speaker
he was on board. And we're very grateful for that. And then, of course, April did a lot of politicking on her end with her connections.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, a number of the people who are in the chapter of people in the books are your people that either.
00:18:00
Speaker
I went to grad school with, or I've done other projects with, or in the case of Erin McGuire, someone I work with, she wrote a chapter on her experimental work with Viking Lambs. And in fact, now she's going to be having, because this is a real interest of hers, the experimental archaeology aspect, she's going to do a whole course on experimental archaeology, sort of, you know, building on some of the stuff that she did for this chapter.
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah, so we just kind of put people together that way. And we also, you know, we went to people that we thought were sort of very interested in archaeological theory as well. And we didn't, as I say, always get people on board who I thought might be up for the challenge, you know.
00:18:49
Speaker
But in the end, we ended up with such a great list of authors. And some people have said to me, oh, well, why don't you have someone from this region or that time?
00:19:01
Speaker
And all I can say is that we tried. We did send out more minutes than, yeah. We really tried. Yes. We spent months trying to get people on board and convince them and like, well, what are you talking about? It's like, well, we're not sure what we're talking about yet.
00:19:20
Speaker
But we had to develop this perspective. And then we had to convince other people to be on board with it. And that was one of the biggest challenges. But now that the book has come out, so many of our authors have emailed us and said, Oh, my gosh, this is fantastic. Thank you for making me

Nocturnal Footprints and Light Pollution

00:19:39
Speaker
part of this groundbreaking work. And yeah, and people want, you know, and now people are also talking to us about
00:19:46
Speaker
how they can rethink their work a little bit, the work that they're doing in light of this. So that's great. And we have a lot more questions for you guys, but I think, uh, as we go to break here, we'll just leave everybody with one thought. I think we should just turn this into a podcast and it's going to be called archeology after dark. All right. Back in a second.
00:20:12
Speaker
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00:20:26
Speaker
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00:20:47
Speaker
Okay, we are back on The Archeology Show, episode 35. And we have had some technical difficulties when you've got people in three different states and two countries trying to talk on a single system, then things happen. But we have regained control over the system and we have April Camp Whitaker on the line. So April, thanks for joining in at least the second segment of the podcast. Oh, I was excited. I wasn't here for the first.
00:21:12
Speaker
But she did hear a lot of it as she was working through her technical difficulties, so that's good. We just couldn't hear her, so that was kind of a weird thing. So I'm going to just continue on here, and I had a question that I wanted to get out early on in this segment before we kind of diverge away from this topic, when we kind of glossed over and sort of touched on
00:21:32
Speaker
sleep and sleep cycles and things like that in the first segment. So I

Material Culture of the Night

00:21:36
Speaker
wanted to ask, what in general do we think sleep cycles are tied to? Because when I imagine it, it's more tied to things like things that you can only do during the day, let's say, that determine that you're going to sleep at night, like agriculture and, you know,
00:21:50
Speaker
tending to animals and things like that would be daytime things. So if you're doing that all day, then you're probably by default going to sleep all night. So what do we think about that as an idea? Maybe I'll just jump in. And I think that's true. I think in a lot of ways we think about agriculture as being something tied to the day in that people
00:22:10
Speaker
get up with a crack of dawn to feed animals or, you know, do other tasks as they need to. But what we learned or what was a surprise to me was actually some people do agriculture at night. And one of the chapters that we have by one of our authors, Smitty Nathan, in her chapter was called Midnight at the Oasis, Past and Present Agricultural Activities in Oman.
00:22:33
Speaker
And she talked about how in some really hot climates like Oman, you might actually want to do some of your agricultural practices like irrigation at night because in fact, when you're irrigating your crops, your water doesn't evaporate as quickly. So in fact, they were doing some of their crop tending at night, which is really not how we would picture agriculture normally.
00:22:57
Speaker
It's just, you know, like I mentioned that book, and then we'll link to that other book in the show notes too, that Daniel Lifford book with those that tried that really didn't have agriculture or anything like that. So, their entire lifestyle was not based on day or night. They just had, you know, whatever it happened to be, it happened to be whatever they were doing. So, that was interesting. April Camp Whitaker, I'm sure you're burning with questions. So, we'll just throw it over to you.
00:23:21
Speaker
Well, I'm always running questions, but you know what, that idea of sleep cycles also, you know, I'm from Phoenix and we have flood irrigation still for households and you can't control when you get your water.
00:23:33
Speaker
And so you're up in the middle of the night sometimes, irrigating your yard, your crops, and interacting with neighbors really differently when you see them at 3 a.m. in their pajamas than you would when you see them at 5 p.m. coming home from work. And so there is this idea that the nighttime and these different social bonds that are created, even through common acts like agriculture or, so that was really interesting to think about.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, my husband's family is from India. And sometimes there are water shortages. And sometimes you can have water from three to five a.m. So you better be up to get it. Yeah. The night changes and it becomes your daytime for those activities that normally you don't have control over. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting is how this ties in to kind of
00:24:27
Speaker
the archaeology of the senses, you know, where archaeologists have been thinking a lot more about things like soundscapes and smellscapes. And now all of a sudden here you guys are thinking about sleepscapes or nightscapes. And I wonder if you talk a little bit more about how these are all kind of converging in some of the articles and research that you guys are drawing on.
00:24:47
Speaker
This is a theme that runs through a lot of the chapters in this volume. And if you think about humans and our evolution as primates, our visual sense predominates. But at night, other senses take over because our vision changes.
00:25:05
Speaker
And actually, your mother and father talk about this in their chapter, about the difference between cones and rods and which one takes over at night and how it affects our vision. At night, you can actually hear better, or it seems that way. So in terms of investigating other senses, in archaeology, we have for a very long time privileged our vision, but now we are switching to other kinds of senses. That's really interesting.
00:25:35
Speaker
I mean, obviously, just thinking too about night and this idea that sound moves differently, as listeners, since I always forget and

Reconsidering Day vs. Night in Archaeology

00:25:49
Speaker
I always try to say readers, but as listeners, how does this potentially impact their experiences or our experiences of archaeological sites even now? If we go out to a famous archaeological site during the day,
00:26:03
Speaker
and go out again in the evening or at night, what kinds of things might change and how might we still be experiencing these fluctuating nightscapes and experiences?
00:26:15
Speaker
I think that's a really good question because I think that's part of why we have a bias towards the day when as archaeologists we're doing our research because we tend to visit our site and other people's sites during the day. And yet I'm thinking about when I work in Jordan, I sometimes go to the site of Petra, especially if I have friends visiting.
00:26:39
Speaker
And on occasion, we'll do a visit of Petra. It's called Petra by Night. And you walk from the gates at Petra all the way through the site, and they've lined little candles along the walkways. And then you get to the soup area, and they give you tea, and there's music, and so on. And I'm always struck by that, about how different the site feels, because the air is cooler.
00:27:09
Speaker
I mean, there's still people talking, but it's much, much quieter. People have sort of a sense of reverence about the place. Like there's a, I don't know how to say it, other than there's a bit more a sense of the sacred a little bit as people are walking through this space and looking at this incredible architecture that's been hewn out of the rock and
00:27:32
Speaker
the candles that they have placed all along these walkways change the colors. And as you were saying before, you interact with people differently at night than you would during the day. And so for me, I think it would be incredible for, I mean, I'm sure there are other examples where you can visit sites at night. I know that. But it might be something that if we as archaeologists and also the general public could do more often,
00:28:01
Speaker
I think it would really change our understanding of how people use this space. It feels more primal, if I may use that word, because you're more in touch with the site itself. You have to be aware of the ground beneath you because maybe you can't see it. So you get a very different feeling, as April was saying. And I agree with you that there's a certain reverence there that doesn't exist during the day.
00:28:29
Speaker
interesting. It's almost like at night, you know, we're dreaming, we're processing data and information sensory and otherwise a little bit differently. And at night, when I've been out at archaeological sites at night, it's almost like your imagination can take over a little bit more. Good way of putting it. Yeah, we're able to visualize that past and kind of reconstruct the buildings in our mind, maybe because we can't see them as clearly with our eyes. That makes sense.
00:28:58
Speaker
because you can more clearly see, if I may say that, what people might have been doing or how it would have felt to live in that particular community. And instead of an archaeological site, it becomes a house or a temple. I think that's always one of the
00:29:20
Speaker
challenges in archaeology is, you know, we're not left with a complete thing, you know, we're left with this fragmentary record and little pieces and clips. And so being able to reconstruct what's really there. So thinking even about the night, how do you how do you handle that, you know, how do you in your writing eliminate some of the modern impacts, you know,
00:29:44
Speaker
How much would the Acropolis have shadowed out or passed light? How bright would the past have been? How noisy? How do you recreate those when now we're visiting empty and abandoned spaces? One thing that I thought of in my own work thinking about the Upper Paleolithic
00:30:02
Speaker
So the Ice Age, you know, I was, in my imagination, whenever I think about people sitting, you know, early hominins sitting around campfires and so on, in my head I have this vision of a
00:30:19
Speaker
a sky full of sparkling stars, you know, glittering stars, that kind of thing. And the more I started to do research and to talk to a colleague of mine, Carlos Cordova, who is a geoarchaeologist and to ask him questions about the night, I realized that especially during certain parts of the ice age, it would have been so arid that there would have been so much, the environment would have been something that we call a mammoth step, which is
00:30:48
Speaker
There's no real analogues today for this.
00:30:53
Speaker
It was such an arid time and there was so much dust in the air and so on that the skies even at night would have been a lot hazier than we normally think of. And I had to really change the picture I had in my head of what it would be like to be sitting around this campfire at night and looking up. So yeah, there's all kinds of things that starts to make you think about when you have to think about recreating the night. And for me, that was one of the things
00:31:22
Speaker
That also occurred to me, and my specialty is the classic Maya. And during certain times of the year, fields would be cleared for planting by slash and burn. So during that time period, the air would be full of smoke, and it would not be very likely that you would be able to see the stars or the Milky Way like you had previously. And then, of course, in tropical areas, you have
00:31:50
Speaker
the rainy season. And with a cloud cover, it would be also difficult during certain time periods as well. So it's not a monolithic thing, we should not picture this idealistic, the past was all dark, and what are we doing to it today, although of course, we are doing a lot to eliminate the dark, that's a whole different subject. But we can think of it differently with the different nighttime practices,
00:32:18
Speaker
and also daytime practices that affected the night.
00:32:22
Speaker
That's really interesting to think about. When you visit the site I work at in Southeastern Colorado, when we visit it today, there's no one there. When you hang out and you watch the stars, it's really easy to automatically recreate this scene, but with buildings or maybe people, but to forget all the noise and chaos and light that happens even at night.
00:32:53
Speaker
thousands of people living in a one-mile space. You know, you hear people breathing, you hear people snoring and getting up in the night and moving around and all of those subtle nighttime activities that are really easy to erase from the record because we don't necessarily see them.
00:33:11
Speaker
and dogs barking, and insects buzzing, all of those kinds of things. Yeah, it's just really hard to recreate. You know, at the same time, though, we have the same sorts of challenges for the daytime, but we don't really see them as obstacles, or we don't worry about them as much. So I think for a lot of our colleagues, recreating the night was
00:33:38
Speaker
difficult, you know, we don't dig up night and I'm saying that in quotes, but we don't dig up day either. We're still making inferences, whether we're aware of them or not. And yet

Future of Nighttime Archaeology

00:33:50
Speaker
they're not any more difficult than doing it for the nighttime, really. But we just have to sort of switch our way of thinking about it.
00:33:58
Speaker
So how much did working on this volume about the night change how you think about day and the archeology of the daytime? It changed it drastically for me because I didn't realize all of these a priori.
00:34:13
Speaker
assumptions that I have about the day. I don't have to prove that something was used during the day. Why should I have to prove that it was used during the night? Well, I had to in this case because this was a new perspective and people are saying, well, where's the evidence? But they never said that for the day. Sure. Is it possible that they weren't
00:34:38
Speaker
Well, I guess when we see like recreations and sketches and things like that, things are often presented, you know, in the day because we like to be able to see them in these sorts of circumstances. But is it possible that there wasn't a day and a night in the interpretation until you brought up the question of the night? You know what I mean? Like people weren't even thinking.
00:34:59
Speaker
Specifically, necessarily, I'm trying to think of the archaeology I've done here in this country and especially here in the Great Basin in the last few years. Am I even thinking of day and night when I see stuff or is it maybe just a bias in my head and I'm just assuming that. But now when I look at stuff, I'm going to be thinking, well, can we assign some sort of temporal significance to this in just a 24-hour period? Did the question exist before you asked it is my real question. That's very philosophical.
00:35:30
Speaker
Maybe more coffee. I was just reaching for my tea. Well, you know what I mean? If people weren't really thinking about a day and a night until you said, hey, what about the archaeology of the night? Then they started looking at their stuff a little more clearly, or maybe a little more cloudy, and saying, well, now I don't really know. I guess my logical assumption was day, but I wasn't really actually saying that because it was just inferred maybe, or maybe you were thinking that.
00:35:56
Speaker
Definitely a lot of inference. And I came up with this catchy little phrase that I ran by April. And if you think about what a carbon footprint is, what about the nocturnal footprint? And modern humans have this huge nocturnal footprint that can be viewed from outer space. It's so big.
00:36:16
Speaker
And if you look at the nocturnal footprint of the past, then this is material evidence produced directly or indirectly from nocturnal human activities that we can recover in the archaeological record.
00:36:29
Speaker
Okay, that is a really great point to stop on because that was going to be one of my next big questions. It's really talking about the archaeology and the material culture of the night, but we're right up against a break. So I think we're going to take that break so we can talk about that unobstructed. In the meantime, if you're interested in supporting shows like this and the archaeology podcast network, go to archpodnet.com forward slash members to see how you can support us and maybe get a coffee mug and a t-shirt, depending on what you're doing. So, all right, we'll be back in a second.
00:36:57
Speaker
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00:37:11
Speaker
Okay, we're back for our final segment on The Archaeology Show, episode 35. And we're still talking to April Newell and Nancy Gondland about Archaeology of the Night, their latest volume that they've put out. So, one of the things you guys started to talk about right at the end was
00:37:27
Speaker
the actual archaeology of the night. We've kind of been leading up to it, but what I want to know as a field archaeologist, somebody who looks for material culture, looks for actual things that were altered or created or affected by humans in some way or another, what are some of the things that either you in your own research or the people that wrote in your chapters
00:37:48
Speaker
What are some of the things they're starting to recognize as archaeological either features or artifacts or some other material culture that you can actually tie to the night? I mean, right now, if you were to look around you, I would say, hey, I see a flashlight and a lamp and light emitting things are clearly tied to darkness, but not necessarily the night.
00:38:08
Speaker
I'm in a room that would be pitch dark right now if I didn't have lights on, but that doesn't mean it's nighttime, it's broad daylight out. So what are some things you guys can point to or your authors can point to that are really archeology of the night?
00:38:21
Speaker
But one of those does have to do with illumination. And there's something called the anthropology of luminosity and how different lighting affects us and how different lighting is used for different kinds of tasks. And different lighting is used at different times of the day for different moods.
00:38:40
Speaker
And we can find archaeological evidence of different kinds of lighting practices. There's a chapter, for example, on ancient Egypt by Megan Strong. And she

Distinguishing Night from Darkness

00:38:51
Speaker
talks about artificial light in the New Kingdom and how that was a transformative aspect. And then I have a chapter coming out in my next book,
00:39:01
Speaker
on illumination among the classic Maya and what kind of evidence do we have? Torches are portrayed on ceramic vessels that show rituals or other kinds of political gatherings that took place at night. You have hearths which are a very obvious sort of source of light and
00:39:22
Speaker
hearts are features, unlike the torches, which are mobile, so to speak. And I know April has done a lot of research on the hearths and the Paleolithic. Yeah, I mean, that was in the Paleolithic, we have three main sources of light. So we have torches, which are evidence through torchwipes and other sorts of things.
00:39:46
Speaker
And then we have three different kinds of stone lamps in the Upper Paleolithic. And again, those were probably for navigating through dark caves and so on. But, you know, again, it's another source of light.
00:40:01
Speaker
and then of course the campfire. And we assume that while people may have been using it for cooking at different times of day and heat treating their flints and so on, it probably was a gathering place for people at night. And one of the articles that really inspired both Nan and myself in this work was some work by Polly Wiesner looking at the difference between day talk and night talk.
00:40:28
Speaker
in a number of different contemporary hunter-gatherer groups. And looking at the difference between what people were doing during the day, which is things like more gossiping and economic stuff and so on. And at night, they had things that seemed to bring people together, more songs and stories and that kind of thing. So by inference, with all the caveats that involves
00:40:54
Speaker
I started to use that idea a little bit for my understanding of night in the past. But in addition to the examples of lighting and so on, that again, as you say, or maybe not only just for nighttime, but darkness more generally, but certainly do speak to what people would have used at night.
00:41:15
Speaker
We have other things. So, for instance, artifacts that might have a dual purpose. So, one example that we had from Southern Africa was a bring that would be for sweeping during the day, but would also be a witches mode of transportation at night.
00:41:37
Speaker
So with this, do you find that there are artifacts that you've kind of rethought and or, you know, in every archaeological context are sort of these mystery objects where we're not quite sure what they're for? Oh, well, they're definitely ritual in nature, whatever they are. You know, now can we connect them to nighttime rituals? That's a good question because we don't want to give the mistaken impression that
00:42:07
Speaker
This is an object that was used only in one context and only during certain time of the day because we've already done that with the day. So we don't want to go there in the sense that we need to keep an open mind and there are multiple uses for the same type of object, but we have to consider that maybe it was used at night, which we have not done before.
00:42:32
Speaker
This seems to me like it leads to a whole realm, a new realm of kind of experimental archaeology, sort of taking all these things that we have, set ideas about how they were used and function, and trying them out, using them at night, using them in new settings to see how that changes their functionality.
00:42:51
Speaker
That's a great point. And some of the authors in our chapters have done that in terms of lighting. Aaron Maguire, for example, did that with Viking Lights and Experimental Archaeology. And I know Megan Strong is working on another paper on doing that with Egyptian lighting. That makes me think too, especially when you brought up Egyptian, because I was thinking with the discussion about the Paleolithic.
00:43:20
Speaker
Is it necessary, and when I say Egyptian, I really mean like going into say even like, you know, pyramids and burial chambers and things like that, where it's always going to be dark in there. Is it necessary

Impact and Final Reflections on the Book

00:43:30
Speaker
for what you're talking about to distinguish between actually the archaeology of the night and the archaeology of darkness, just because the things that may be used in the night or whatever in the material culture would also be used just in the dark if you're in a cave or some sort of environment like that?
00:43:45
Speaker
Well, I think it maybe goes beyond that. I'm just thinking of a chapter by Jane Baxter who works on 19th century Bahamian plantations, or 18th and 19th century, I should say, plantations.
00:44:00
Speaker
And one of the things that she talks about in her chapter is how the nighttime actually brings a sense of privacy and a sense of freedom to people, to enslaved peoples during this time period. So, whereas during the day, they're under great surveillance and so on, at nighttime, they're actually able to move between plantations to visit family, to visit friends, to
00:44:25
Speaker
maintain their aspects of their culture and, you know, in some cases, perhaps, you know, plot rebellions and that kind of thing. So we're not just focusing on objects that could be used at night, such as lamps and so on, but we're also, it's a much broader thing. So in the sense that
00:44:48
Speaker
you could only do the kinds of behaviors that she's talking about at nighttime. So it has nothing to do with, say, being in a dark cave or something like that, but it's actually the night itself that provides this affordance. There is a lot of research on the archaeology of darkness, and that is also another field that is burgeoning. But darkness is connected to the night, but it's not the same. If you think of
00:45:16
Speaker
northern or very southern latitudes and how nighttime is light. You're still going to do different things and you're still going to have a different signature. You're still going to have a nocturnal footprint, even though it might not
00:45:32
Speaker
be physically done. That's a really good point. That's a good point. I should ask Jane Baxter, I know her on Twitter and I've seen her at conferences. I should ask her if in reference to this archaeology of the night in the, you know, thinking about enslaved people and things like that, it just made me think, especially since we were talking about jazz a little bit before this recording, could jazz instruments and like blues music, I mean, it's almost could be considered archaeology of the night because, you know, it was invented by slaves in the southeast and
00:46:02
Speaker
they weren't doing this during the day because they were in the fields during the day. So, when they went home at night and were around, it seems like this could have been born out of an evening or nighttime activity. Well, that's what we want to get people to think about. Right. Yes, exactly. Nice. I was also thinking about, back to the Paleolithic again, I've heard different things and it'd be interesting to get your take on this.
00:46:25
Speaker
April is, you know, like paleo-the-cave art that can, you know, it's really kind of seems to be designed to be viewed because this is how it was created in like a torch light sort of environment. And when they come into things like, you know, some of the big famous ones like Glasgow and things like that with strobe lights, if they come in with big lights on these things, they don't look as right. They don't look right. But you come in there with a torch and they almost move and dance across the thing. So it's interesting to think about.
00:46:53
Speaker
It totally is because they do try to have as low a light in these caves as possible, but certainly there'd be a real difference between the kind of light cast from these stone lamps or from these torches
00:47:09
Speaker
than the ones that they are using to bring tourists through however low light it's supposed to be, but it changes the colors. And also the flickering of a torch or stone lamp is going to change your perception of the images too. People write about this quite a bit, that it gives this sense that the images are moving, it gives that illusion. And I had always read about it, and it wasn't until I visited my first cave when
00:47:38
Speaker
The tour guide took out her flashlight and tried to emulate that and it was absolutely incredible where these images did seem to project off the wall. There are other things where people have found that if they project light onto certain stones that it projects a shadow onto the cave wall that
00:48:02
Speaker
then becomes part of the larger composition on the panel. So there's all kinds of neat things with ease of light. And that was an excellent point you made in your chapter, April, about how some of the panels where you find cave paintings aren't necessarily the flattest or the best, but in terms of other aspects that people were looking for. That's why those places were chosen.
00:48:30
Speaker
It's making me actually rethink some things about rock art and different rock formations that we have here in the Great Basin and then of course in California. Because I have actually a neighbor that lives in my building and he's blind and I see him in the hallways and he has a dog but he's often feeling along the walls and he knows what it feels like and it makes me think
00:48:54
Speaker
Well, could some of these things where people have to go out at night for whatever reason and it's dark, could some of these tactile things on rocks and near areas really just be so you could find your way around in a moonless cloudy night and it's just dark and maybe your torch is out or something like that. But then when you feel all these holes in the rock or you feel these particular lines, you know, you're on the right track. You know, I see we've got you on board, Chris.
00:49:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's just really interesting to look at that stuff in that sort of light to not use the wording correctly. But I should bring this to a friend of mine. He's Dr. Alan Gold. He's one of the big rock art experts here in the West Coast and in California in the Great Basin, and he just studies rock. I'm interested to get his thoughts on this concept. A highly recommended book is Carolyn Boyd's White Shaman Mural, if you haven't already seen that.
00:49:53
Speaker
All right. Well, we will include that in the show notes for sure as well. We've only got a few minutes left in this show. So I want to talk about, you know, what do you guys have following on with this book? It sounds like you sparked almost a new field of archeology with people thinking about this. So do you have, I know you guys are going to the SAAs in April. Do you have any conference sessions planned to, you know, talk about things like this or other research that's being specifically looked at to address these questions?
00:50:20
Speaker
Well, I have roped in more people and they are Mesoamerican archaeologists. So I will have another co-edited volume coming out on Night and Darkness in Ancient Mexico and Central America with my co-editor, David Reed, who we've known each other from grad school. So he was an easy convert and he's just amazing to work with. So I've got that coming up and that was based on
00:50:49
Speaker
a previous symposium that we put together on this topic. And then, of course, this has just really changed my whole perspective. I'm known as a household archaeologist. I specialize in household archaeology. Well, my bent on this now is nighttime household archaeology.
00:51:10
Speaker
I'm not actually doing anything more on the night at this particular moment. My, one of my other research hats is on the archaeology of children, which is another, which is actually how, well, I know your mom and Jane Baxter as well. So I'm, my session I'm participating in at the SAAs will be on the archaeology of children.
00:51:32
Speaker
But I'm also working on a volume right now with Ian Davidson on how you identify scenes in rock art. What makes a scene? Can one figure be a scene or do you have to have interactions and so on? And again, we're bringing people from all over the world in all different time periods to address this question. And hopefully that'll be out sometime in the summer. Okay. April, do you know George, not George, Jeff Connor? I know the name.
00:52:01
Speaker
Yeah, he was one of the first people I knew was looking at the archaeology of children in reference to flint knapping and learning how to make projectile points and stuff and how can you identify that maybe this was a practice piece.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah, apprenticeship, skill, all those kinds of things, especially with lithics, but also with pottery is a huge, huge area. So yeah, we haven't met, but I definitely know the work. Yeah. Excellent. Well, ladies, this has been fantastic. Is there anything you wanted to mention about this book that you just, that we just didn't ask you that you want to get out on the podcast?
00:52:37
Speaker
I think you should go buy it. Fantastic. We had another author on one time that said, go buy it, burn it, and then buy another copy. Only if you do that at night. That's right. Then they should probably write to you about how the illumination of the book changed their experiences of the night. Yes, and measure those lumens.
00:53:06
Speaker
That's right. It would be really cool to put a nice chemical into this thing. You know how chemicals burn different colors, so you could really spice up the night if you were to really burn it when you were done. That would just be completing the circle, I think.
00:53:18
Speaker
All right, so this has been a fascinating podcast, and I think there's a lot more that we could dig into. We could probably have every book chapter author for your book actually come on and do their own podcast about different chapters in the book. There's so much to talk about. So do we have any final comments regarding this topic and the book? April.
00:53:38
Speaker
Well, one thing I thought was important to mention in terms of putting all of this into perspective was that Margaret Conkey, who writes our Afterword, as a lot of you know, I'm sure, was a pioneer in doing feminist archaeology and
00:53:54
Speaker
asking questions about gender, about women in the past. And she writes in her Afterword that basically what Nan and I have done with this volume is the same kind of thing that we've brought in a whole half of the past that people never thought about. So in the way that people made assumptions about the artifact speaking to men's experiences,
00:54:16
Speaker
And that didn't give us a true, rich understanding of the past. The same way making default assumptions about artifacts speaking only to the day really limits our understanding of people's behaviors. Nice, nice. Excellent. Okay. And I've talked to actually a big conky about some of this stuff over in San Francisco for a little bit. So it's a fascinating topic.
00:54:40
Speaker
Thank you both so much. We really appreciate being on your show. Yeah, it was so much fun. Yeah, well it was fabulous having you guys and we look forward to seeing what you guys come out with next. Thank you. So do I. Thank you.
00:55:00
Speaker
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00:55:16
Speaker
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00:55:39
Speaker
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00:55:54
Speaker
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00:56:16
Speaker
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