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Artifact Rowed Shows with Chris Rowe - Ep 12
343 Plays6 years ago
Have you ever wanted to listen to a jovial archaeologist talking about his interactions with collectors? Have you ever wanted to hear the co-hosts give someone grief for turning down the opportunity to be a co-host on our show? If you answered yes to the previous questions or even if you didn’t, we have got quite the episode for you. On this edition of Our Ruined Lives, we talk with our good friend Chris Rowe. We all met Chris at the University of Wyoming and discuss many things on this podcast. Give it a listen!
You can find Chris Rowe on Instagram @as_the_c.rowe_flies
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- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
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Transcript
Chaotic Beginnings and Introductions
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. It's really nice to have you on the show, finally. God damn you. God damn you so much. Guys, I'm going to be honest. Derailed at 40 seconds is exactly what I expected. This is adorable. I worked down here in Augusta, Georgia.
00:00:26
Speaker
For those of you who don't know, Chris works with me and he's currently in my studio with me and Carlton is just going to town on a Big Mac on Skype and Chris can... This is a train wreck already.
Meet Chris Rowe: Archaeological Insights
00:00:53
Speaker
Welcome to a Life in Ruins podcast, episode 12. Today we are back with another Our Ruin Lives episode with our friend from the University of Wyoming, Chris Rowe. I'm your host, Carlton Gover. And as always, I'm with my two co-hosts, David Howe and concrete John, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. So Chris, how are you doing today? I am fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on.
00:01:17
Speaker
Oh, absolutely, buddy. Thanks for joining us. So real quick, can you tell our listeners just your basic background in archaeology, what you're doing now, and then kind of go into your thesis work?
00:01:29
Speaker
Absolutely. So just graduated recently with my master's from the University of Wyoming. Worked for the Forest Service in Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota. I'm now down in Augusta, Georgia with a company called New South Associates. And I get to work with David, which is a fantastic bit of every day. You don't have to lie. What did you, uh, where did you get your undergrad, Chris?
00:01:59
Speaker
I went to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. What goes on in Nebraska other than corn? Football, baby. Go Huskers. Didn't make a bowl game, but there's always next year. I recently visited Lincoln, Nebraska. Chris, could you tell her audience what kind of message you received from me during my trip there?
00:02:16
Speaker
Um, so your first trip there, I got a drunken message about you being very upset about everything being read. And that's just a fact of life in Lincoln. I mean, there's no way to get around that. In fact, down here now, my living room is red because got to represent on your most recent trip. I got a picture of you in a Husker shirt. So I'm pretty sure you came around real quick. How did the, uh, that Husker shirt fit?
00:02:46
Speaker
Oh, it didn't. It was a friend. I refused to get my suitcase out of the car. She said, I have some clothes for you. And she had a cousin of hers played for the Husker football team a couple of years ago. So her family had like monogrammed shirts with his name on it and all that other stuff. And it was snug. That's what I heard. I'll show you the picture later. Please don't. I'm on the Instagram. Yeah, I think that goes on the Instagram.
00:03:12
Speaker
Oh, speaking of Instagram, since Chris is weird with me, he's been, to lack for a better word, a Ron Swanson about the internet with me. And I finally convinced him to make an Instagram. And Chris, do you want to tell people what your Instagram name is? If I can remember it, it's as the crow flies, but there's a bunch of underscores and some dot in there at a different point. So
00:03:39
Speaker
I just tagged the podcasts though in a, in a post about this recording. So find me there. I guess I think that's how the internet works. This is how difficult it is to get Chris to do technological things. It is as underscore the underscore C dot R O W E underscore flies. That is the most convoluted Instagram handle I've ever, ever fucking heard of.
00:04:07
Speaker
Everyone that I truly wanted was already taken. Fair enough, dude. Fair enough. Okay. So just
Artifact Scanning and Public Archaeology
00:04:15
Speaker
tie it back. You got your bachelor's at UNL. You got your master's at the University of Wyoming. And what was your master's thesis on?
00:04:23
Speaker
So I got this great introduction to a thing called Artifact Road Shows in 2015 when I was working for the Forest Service. I had that idea kind of fresh in my mind when I ended up at the University of Wyoming and wanted to pursue that as an avenue of research. So
00:04:42
Speaker
What I did was host a series of events in Northeastern Wyoming, in Crook County, where local landowners could bring in their collections of artifacts, where we would record them on scanners and through other means in order to generate a dataset from private land, which I then compared to a dataset from public land. And that dataset is projectile point frequencies because
00:05:09
Speaker
They're temporal. Just to clarify, you didn't actually take any of their artifacts. All you did was scan them, give them back to them, and have a really good conversation about where these things came from, right? That's exactly right. We decided to use just an everyday Epson photo scanner and set it at the highest resolution.
00:05:30
Speaker
It takes really fantastic images. If you zoom in, you can see flake scars and derailleur scars within those. It's a really neat way of recording a lot of artifacts in a short amount of time.
00:05:42
Speaker
For the audience who's listening and might not be aware, can you describe to us what an derailleur scar is? In the briefest sense, basically when you hit a piece of rock that is glass like, it can cause the wave of force to leave a ripple like imprint in the scar.
00:06:05
Speaker
So essentially, I guess you could say it's like the wave that goes through the rock that knocks the flake off. And it kind of just looks like that on the lithic, right? It's like the breaks within the wave. Okay. I think I might be more confused, but, um, for those of you guys who don't know Connor,
00:06:24
Speaker
and Chris and I all took lithics class together from Bob Kelly, who is one of the best lithicists and archeologists in the world. And as they can both tell you, they listened. My favorite part about that class was you making your PowerPoint presentation during the undergrads PowerPoint presentations.
00:06:44
Speaker
I definitely remember that Bob got, he was going around the room, having us do our presentations and he was skipping the grad students to get the undergrads to go first. And I was sitting second in line for anybody and he got to me and I was like, Oh, the undergrads are going first, right? He was like, yeah, you, uh, you writing your PowerPoint right there. And I was like, well, my stats are wrong. So I'm fixing my PowerPoint. And he just like stopped talking to me and skipped to the next person. And I was like, yep.
00:07:14
Speaker
I will say in undergrad, David Anderson, if you listen to Dr. David G. Anderson at UT, if you're listening, I'm really sorry about this, but I had to do a term paper and if your semester starts in August and the term paper is due probably like the end of November, it was probably the end of November and I still didn't have a term paper and we had to do a PowerPoint on it. So I just looked up the Coates-Hine Mastodon site in Franklin, Tennessee,
00:07:38
Speaker
wrote a PowerPoint on it in 20 minutes, gave the presentation. And it was better than most of the presentations given in the class that day. And it was all just on conjecture from what I was going to write about. And then Dr. Agelsen was like, did you even write this paper yet? I didn't approve that topic. And I was like, well, I am now.
00:08:00
Speaker
Well, good stuff. Well, good stuff. So artifact road shows, those are neat. I do actually want to go into those because like, this would be the, our ruin lives episodes would be perfect to really discuss things like public archeology, community engagement.
00:08:15
Speaker
and the different vocabulary that we use to describe individuals in archaeology. And I think the four of us can really get into the weeds about this topic in particular. Let me get the mic closer to my face. Okay, so now we're here.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, so public archeology, Chris, artifact road shows, did you notice a bias in
Biases in Artifact Collection
00:08:40
Speaker
the materials that were being collected by farmers and people walking plow fields? So in the area that I was working, I just want to correct you right off the bat there, because I love correcting you, Carlton. It's more ranch land and there's not a lot of plowing going on, just FYI. These are surface artifacts.
00:08:42
Speaker
And
00:09:01
Speaker
As for the bias, they do tend to pick up projectile points at a higher frequency than other artifact types like flakes, scrapers, biface, things like that. They're easily recognizable as artifacts, which I think is part of that.
00:09:20
Speaker
But there were a number of flakes and debitage and thing like that that we did see, which was interesting to me as a result. They were able to recognize artifacts that were not exactly projectile points, but most of the time they do end up bringing, grabbing a projectile points because they're easy to recognize. That's, that's really interesting, man. That's super interesting.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, and it totally depends on the collector too. Sometimes you're getting people that like, is this an artifact? And you're like, hmm, sorry, that's a rock. But you do get people that are really knowledgeable about the prehistory of the area. And sometimes they know more about that local environment than us archaeologists that kind of move in for a little while. You mentioned projectile points and flakes, flakes being lithic to sabotage or byproducts of making projectile points. So pottery, not so much then.
00:10:12
Speaker
Not in that area. It's pretty rare on the high plains. It does exist in some fashion, but I didn't see any in our road shows.
00:10:24
Speaker
Okay, so no pottery being collected. Now with the projectile points and what was being picked up, are the rocks being used? Are they prettier? Was there also a color bias? Because I know if you find a quartz point, that is a bright white point as compared to like a rhyolite or quartzite, which is rougher. Did you notice that there was a bias in kind of like how the prettiness level, I suppose, of what was being collected?
00:10:50
Speaker
So I think that does play in at a certain level, certainly because it catches the eye as you're out walking around. But for the most part, these were local materials.
00:11:02
Speaker
There was a lot of Hartville uplift, which is kind of yellowish to red with black dendrites, which are a little fossilized plant bits and Morrison quartzite, which is something I didn't expect to see in such high levels because it's kind of a modeled gray brownish type of color. And it, I feel like it would blend in pretty well.
00:11:27
Speaker
I found a decent amount of morris and cord side up at hell gap and Mary Lou and Marcel both vehemently denied. I knew what the hell I was talking about.
00:11:37
Speaker
Anyways. I only knew about Morris and Quartzite because I worked at the University of Wyoming Archaeological Repository beforehand going up there. I'd seen specimens in the lab and it's pretty recognizable once you've seen it. Right, right, right. I'm sure you met a cast of characters doing these road shows.
00:11:58
Speaker
and meeting ranchers. Do you have any stories that pop out to you? Absolutely. My most favorite collector from the area, she was in her late 80s, early 90s. She was born in England.
00:12:14
Speaker
She came over to the U.S. because of her husband, because she had always wanted to marry a cowboy. And she happened to find one and get married. And they started out on a ranch in Montana and then eventually moved to Wyoming. And she had an incredible collection of artifacts. She actually had some of that debitage, flakes, things like that.
00:12:36
Speaker
But everything that she had was from her land. One notable exception was a gorgeous obsidian by face. And I think that came from Idaho or Montana. And she said it was given to her by a boy who fancied her. And that was the only piece that wasn't from her land. So it made it fairly accurate to plot where these artifacts were coming from.
00:13:01
Speaker
But on top of that, her and her family were just absolutely wonderful. They welcomed us into their home to record this collection. They bought us pizza and she thought I was cute. So I'm not going to turn that down. She's not the only one. Aw. Yeah. How does your wife feel about that story? I'm not too sure she's worried about a almost centenarian.
00:13:29
Speaker
That's a good word. Well, good stuff, dude. So it seems like this lady was very nice and kind when meeting with you and talking about her collection. Have you encountered anybody that is a little more like reserved or a little more kind of hostile? There you go. I didn't want to use that word to, you know, be sensitive to you, but like,
00:13:56
Speaker
I'm glad you brought that up because I wouldn't say hostile. The beauty of an artifact roadshow is that it's in a public place and people can choose to participate. So they're, they're not being forced to do anything. So I would imagine the more hostile players are like, I'm going nowhere near that.
00:14:16
Speaker
That being said, there are people that we met that are a little more reserved and didn't necessarily want to give away the location of their land right away. And maybe even in the end didn't give us super precise information. And that was fine for our purposes, absolutely. But
00:14:35
Speaker
It was worth noting that in a lot of those cases, once we kind of talked about what we're doing, the science behind it, what we're trying to figure out, a lot of those people opened up to us and in some cases they would be like, okay, I'll be right back and go home and get their collection and pop in with just some absolutely amazing artifacts. That's good, man. Shut the fuck up, Connor. I'm kidding. Keep going.
00:15:01
Speaker
Um, was there ever a worry about, you know, things being trained or worried about kind of judgment from archeologists? Did you ever feel like that was something they like noted as something?
00:15:13
Speaker
I definitely had concerns about that going into this project, but what I found is that archaeologists in this area are quite supportive of working with the local collectors. And I think that's because of exactly what we were seeing with these collections is that they're from specific land. People aren't picking them up to sell them.
00:15:34
Speaker
and people have a genuine interest in the prehistory science of their land. They were excited to work with scientists. I think that's one of the better services that archaeologists can provide is to promote archaeology as a science and promote stewardship of these resources.
00:15:57
Speaker
Absolutely, man. Absolutely. Because I think it's been the history of archaeology suggests that we've been butting heads with looters for a long time. But I think there's a newer movement to change that. At least I know some people like Jason LaBelle at CSU who's doing stuff like that.
00:16:13
Speaker
So let's go ahead and take a break at this moment. We're going to come back to what Connor just talked about. Yeah, I got a question, speaking of that. Am I allowed to just pick up them airheads off my lawn? So just like that, we're going to go to segment two to answer that question.
00:16:33
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 12 of Life and Earns podcast. I'm here with my friend Chris Rowe and Connor, you had asked Chris a question about looting, right?
Laws and Cultural Perspectives on Archaeology
00:16:42
Speaker
Why is there a child? Connor? Yeah, yeah, that was not me. Thanks Carlton for the... So we were talking about...
00:16:59
Speaker
So there's a series of laws in place that protect archaeological resources, and people who break them will usually put into a bunch of different categories, usually looters, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you mind explaining some of those rules briefly, Chris? Yeah, sure thing. So let's start at the federal level.
00:17:21
Speaker
All archaeological resources are protected at the federal level. So that's any federal land, any federal project, anything requiring a federal permit is going to have some sort of protection on it, especially the land. So what should you do if you find an artifact on any Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, any of that land? You should tell the agency archaeologist
00:17:50
Speaker
And usually you can find their information on a website or if you contact the local office, they can point you in the right direction. And in those cases, what you should do is take a photo. Most phones are really good about recording GPS points now. Pop a point on your phone and you can give that information to an archeologist and they can go out there and evaluate if there's a site, what you found, and hopefully get back to you on the results of that.
00:18:17
Speaker
So this is an opportunity where the law is very firm about what the rules are. And it's also a great opportunity for everyone out there to be a citizen scientist and really help us out with our job of kind of trying to figure out what I'm in the past. And that federal law, you're saying it covers stuff on federal lands, but does that also apply to privately owned lands?
00:18:47
Speaker
It does not. So in the United States, any artifacts on private land collected with landowners' permission, be it you own the land or you have written permission to look for artifacts on that land, are technically private property.
00:19:05
Speaker
This is a lot different than most of the world where any archaeological finds are generally owned by the state and have to be reported to some sort of authority. That's really interesting. And does I don't know if you guys all know this. I don't know the answer to this. Does NAGPRA ultimately, which is the North American Graves and Repatriation Act, does that ultimately supersede that privateness? Like, if you have goods associated with Native Americans, is that something that supersedes that?
00:19:35
Speaker
I think that's on a state by state basis. For example, in Wyoming, it does not. As long as the remains are old and determined to be so by a sheriff or coroner or something like that, the landowner can technically own the human remains. I don't agree with that law.
00:19:58
Speaker
because I think that's weird to be able to own a human skeleton. Now, just to insert myself in here, Europe has different laws than the United States. For most countries in Europe, Western Europe specifically, England especially, anything archeological is federally protected. In the United States, as we've discussed, that is not the case. If you find something on private land,
00:20:24
Speaker
it's whoever owns the land. And I just want to ask you guys if you think that's because prior pretty much to 1492, the people who currently live on this land don't see the archeological record as inherently theirs. I'll take this one. You're saying that culture history was more prevalent overseas, whereas here when white people got here, it clearly wasn't white people's heritage. So therefore we're more apt to not taking it for ourselves. Is that what you're trying to say?
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, more apt to that when people find things on their land and it belongs to American Indians, they're like, oh, this is a treasure rather than like, they don't see it as part of their past, they see it as a curiosity.
00:21:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. It depends on the person, definitely. Some of these landowners in Wyoming, they definitely see themselves as a historical extension of the use of that land. So I can understand if they were hunters, enjoyed being out hiking.
00:21:27
Speaker
that they might feel more of a connection even if it's not by blood or ancestry.
00:21:48
Speaker
and associated grave goods, of course. I thought NAGPRA does, I guess not. I don't want to go into the weeds with NAGPRA. NAGPRA, by the way, stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1991, or early 1990s. Anyways, yeah, whole thing. Signed by a Republican. Yay. Interesting tidbit.
00:22:13
Speaker
I'm going to go on a too many the side here. Is that cool with you guys for the, the, the audience listening, I had mentioned earlier, something called the culture history. And I think this is part of, I mean, Chris kind of just touched on this. It's a problem with looting these days, but in the old times and by old times, I mean pre 1900.
00:22:32
Speaker
Archaeology was largely this thing where people, and as Carlton put it, it was a curiosity. People had their curio cabinets and wanted to take things that they thought were interesting about like, you know, the Paleolithic or, you know, African, like the, the masks in Black Panther. When the guy is explaining that these masks belong to a Conda, but they're in the British museum and the British person is explaining to them what explained it, uh, which is Michael B. Jordan. I forget the character's name in the movie.
00:22:59
Speaker
Anyway, that Killmonger, there we go. Sorry, marble fans. Um, he is saying that, you know, these are African items and they're in a British museum and therefore like, you don't know what you're talking about. Well, they're from Wakanda. I'm getting on a tangent here, but early before. Are these archeological laws came into place, at least in the United States, people would just collect things because it was interesting to them.
00:23:20
Speaker
having more cool items in your house when you brought your friends over to smoke cigars and drink scotch, you had these cool things to show people. But what Carlton brought up, and I find this really interesting, just, and we learned this in our theory is that in the United States, since we didn't really, you know, we, as in
00:23:37
Speaker
uh, European Americans, when I'm speaking, got to the United States early 1600s. And it wasn't even established as the United States until the 1700s. We didn't really have a rich, deep history of like ancient curiosities that pertain to white people, the Europeans. And this gets into Eric Wolf's Europeans, the people without history. That's an auto, not autistic. That is an awesome book. If you guys want to read that, uh, Caleb, I know if you love books, uh, that's a one to read, but it's interesting that in the United States.
00:24:07
Speaker
We're more apt to adhere to these laws and create these laws, really, that help protect archaeological resources that aren't necessarily built into Western civilization. And I think that's a really neat thing. Carlton, how do you feel about that as an in between? I mean, it's it's lately just. It's it's difficult, right, because you don't want to blanket people by saying, oh, because it's not theirs, they don't care.
00:24:37
Speaker
But I think there's been like at government levels, there's definitely biases. Like if you think of the state of Utah for one, they don't care about American Indian sites, but they will go to the lengths that they can to save Mormon sites. That makes sense. Yeah, you know, so and then we kind of see that across the board and the archaeological record kind of gets pulled
Artifact Collectors and Ethical Considerations
00:24:59
Speaker
into play. So you think all the pipelines,
00:25:02
Speaker
or other infrastructure projects, you know, the archaeological record, if there's generally speaking, if it's not affecting Euro-American archaeology, people, you know, high levels of government who are not as involved in the archaeological record as we are and what it really means, they don't necessarily care. And to get down to the individual person,
00:25:24
Speaker
you know, you get it like as Chris has mentioned, you get a smorgasbord of people. Like I know near Dennebrog, Nebraska, there's a family that owns a farm and they recognize that it's ancestral Pawnee. They recognize that their land is on the old Pawnee reservation that we got duped out of. And like, that's where we do all of our burials. Anything they find, they let us know. And then when those two pass away, they're giving their land back to the tribe. So you find people like that that recognize
00:25:54
Speaker
what part they can play in writing the injustices of the past, but also like the typical rancher or typical farmer who's grown up in, you know, Midwest United States, for example, all their life and their family has lived on that land for like, what, maybe 150 years? And they recognize that their family has ties to it. And, you know, they've always collected artifacts. They've always picked our arrowheads for generations. And a lot of these people have buckets.
00:26:21
Speaker
of art of arrowheads, and they just don't know the things that we know in terms of keeping sight. For our listeners, the most important thing an artifact can ever teach us is where it was found.
00:26:37
Speaker
The most information we can ever get from something is where it was found in space. Chris, what is that called? That is provenience. It's very much like provenance, but for whatever reason, we stuck another eye in there. Yes. Meaning that if you find an arrowhead, any one of us can tell you what kind of arrowhead it is, generally speaking.
00:27:00
Speaker
And if they say how old it is, we can say, well, based on what we know, it's this old. However, that's all we can tell you. Because unless it's in the ground, we can't tell you much else. Because maybe you found this arrowhead next to a campsite that would predate the arrowhead from what we previously thought was possible. That happens frequently. We're always moving dates around based on new data. But if something, as we call it, is plucked or removed from its provenience,
00:27:27
Speaker
Most of the information that we can ever gain from an artifact is lost. Would you guys agree? Oh, most definitely. Couple things about that. One to that end, at the artifact road shows, I created a brochure kind of about best practices of picking things up from private land and how to store them afterwards with that provenience information, even just at a basic level is much more valuable to researchers or
00:27:55
Speaker
couple other options, your family down the road, when you die, they have this collection to go through. And a lot of times your family has no idea what to do with it. They're going to reach out to a museum. We're going to say, yeah, maybe we can use it as an educational collection. But if you have information about where everything was recorded, that becomes a valuable resource to archaeologists.
00:28:20
Speaker
No, absolutely. And just just to kind of tie in, like, we'll use these words a lot, like, lunar will come out, or amateur archaeologists. And, I mean, Chris, would you agree, like, how we describe people that that collect artifacts kind of get grouped into those two categories?
00:28:36
Speaker
I like to take a little more nuanced approach to that. And if you look at kind of three different categories of people and imagine there's like a pyramid, basically. And at the base of that, you're going to have like these casual collectors. These are people that are on vacation. They happen to find a projectile point. They keep it as a souvenir. They maybe pick up one in their lifetime, something like that.
00:29:05
Speaker
That's going to be the majority of folks that have an artifact. And then if you get to a middle level, you could consider them to be curious collectors. This is going to be like our landowners at the artifact road shows. They have collections. They know a lot about the history of the area. They're really interested in what they have. And they are looking to share that information.
00:29:27
Speaker
And then at the top, I think the smallest group is the looters. And these are folks that are going out, destroying sites, digging explicitly for profit, looking to sell the artifacts that they find. And these, I think, would be considered the real enemies of archaeologists and anyone who's interested in stewardship of the past. So it's important, in my opinion, to take
00:29:56
Speaker
a careful look at what you're dealing with. And in most cases, a polite education is probably the best route to go when someone comes to an archaeologist with an artifact. Okay. Well, thank you for that. I learned something. I like learning. Yeah. Yeah. And I liked that. I liked that diagram of it too. I mean, I think that's, it's where we like,
00:30:21
Speaker
Mr. Giggly in the back over there. Sorry, Chris and I are sitting in the same room, so like we can see my face like dying when something goes over there.
00:30:32
Speaker
No, I think it's interesting that this distinction, especially when you start getting into folks who are going and digging places, you know, Carlton mentioned space is super important and going deeper into that, um, provenance thing. Um, not space, like outer space, but like space in terms of physical space. I'd be an archeo or, you know, a space archaeologist. Okay. But I just wanted to like insert that real quick, but yeah, convenience.
00:31:00
Speaker
Prevenience is huge. Surface prevenience is good for us. We really like stuff as archaeologists that is buried, that is stratified, meaning that it's in different layers that are separated with, hopefully, sterile layers where there is nothing. And that's really important to us. And that's where we really glean a bunch of our information from, is these super buried, super stratified, very nicely
00:31:24
Speaker
layered sites. I think that's a big distinction getting into when people start digging sites. That furthers, destroys that really small record that we already have. I really liked Chris Ira, The Pyramid. I hope it stays like that, where it's this small group of looters at the top, and the rest of the people are just kind of
00:31:47
Speaker
curious about archaeology. Yeah, and I would like to include like looters do it knowing what they're doing is harmful to the archaeological record. Like that's how to classify them is like, they like what they're doing, no one's until them to stop and they bits people have tried to inform them and they're like, we don't care. We're they're artifact hunters, like they're doing Indiana Jones level stuff. They're out for the things and oftentimes they're out to sell them on eBay. They're trying to get personal gain from this.
00:32:12
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's the most important part of that distinction is that these folks are going out with the explicit motive of profit and they are going to discard all of the things that they might consider to be junky, which are actually things that archaeologists would find incredibly valuable. That'd be like your debitage or anything that's not a
00:32:34
Speaker
fully complete projectile point, right? Broken pots. Before we take this next break, I would like to mention for anybody, our professional archaeologists, amateur archaeologists, whoever, if you're going to do this and this is something you enjoy, the National Parks is offering a limited edition of field journals.
00:32:53
Speaker
They look super dope. I'm looking at them right now. And like, if you're going to do this, and if you just are, I mean, even if you just like being outside, get one of these field journals on the graph paper, you can take notes. You find something, take notes of it. Where'd you find it? When'd you find it? What's it look like? Make a drawing. They're $12.95. We're not sponsored by the national parks in any way, shape or form. But I think these are dope. So you can go to, yeah, just Google the national park series of
00:33:17
Speaker
field notes. They look great. So we'll, we'll drop that in the show notes a link in there for you guys. They look beautiful. Just like you Carlton. And on that note, we are getting out of here. Welcome back to segment three of episode 12 of life and earns podcast. We left off last session talking about looting, how to properly record things at an archeological site. And if you come across them at an archeological site or on your property, what best you could do to help learn more about the past.
00:33:46
Speaker
whatever I just said, but make it easier to understand. Connor, what I was going to ask is, so you got to take llamas up into the Wind River Reservation, or the Wind River Mountains, I'm sorry, to do your thesis work. You had to take llamas up there because I'll just let you talk. But my question is, when you were up there and looking for certain objects, and I think you were looking for lithics and soapstone, when you came across them, how did you record it?
00:34:15
Speaker
First of all, let me preface by saying that we did not go onto any sort of wind river reservation land. You know, that's something, no, no, no, no. I just want to make sure, no, we don't go on there without permission. So first of all, let me start there. Second of all, llamas are fucking awesome.
00:34:33
Speaker
I don't care what anyone says about llamas. They're fantastic field people. Um, didn't you say they shit in a circle? No, they just, they have the most awkward, they do, they shit like deer, but they also have the most awkward, like pooping most like a motion. They get all, it looks like they're like depressed and sad and they kind of just like, well, okay.
00:34:53
Speaker
So as part of my thesis, I'm really interested in where Native American, I'd say people in prehistory lived in mountain environments. And there was folks in the 70s associated with Colorado State University who went out and did a term paper. And this is really interesting as they collected a bunch of artifacts, but they were associated with a university. So it's kind of a weird
00:35:18
Speaker
weird distinction. So they went up there, recorded all these sites on topo maps. So the USGS quads kind of roughly marking their location. And this is pre-GPS, pre anything like that. So our goal of my thesis over this trip with the llamas was to go back and find those sites.
00:35:39
Speaker
It was a beautiful journey because llamas are awesome, super cool. They don't spit, nothing like that. We used them as our pack animals, got up there, worked hard to relocate these sites where they were using these rough topo locations. When we did find stuff, we used
00:35:58
Speaker
a GPS device. It looks like an Apple watch these days. It's a Garmin four-tracks that gives us X and Y positions depending on what kind of datum you're using.
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah, so we used that information from that GPS to write down where these things are in space, took pictures of them, described them, and did all the due diligence we had to do, and then we moved on. Even in these really extreme environments, it's fairly easy for people to record this information because I had this thing on my forearm that can connect to a GPS.
00:36:34
Speaker
to global satellite systems and it was super easy to record that information and they're affordable too. So I hope that was a complete digression and might not have answered any questions, but it's easy to record stuff like that. And it's important. Did you also take pictures? Absolutely. Absolutely. Take pictures. We actually drew anything we found that any projectile points by faces or anything like that.
00:36:58
Speaker
And that's a good point, Chris, as you were mentioning, because we use that nowadays, a large portion of pictures to relocate these sites if the GPS data isn't really good. So that just adds another layer of provenience to it.
00:37:12
Speaker
To sum it up, one can say it's it's so easy to record your artifacts that it's like literally just like ordering an Uber. Like you can just put if it's if you can order an Uber, you can record an artifact and tell an archaeologist about it. Is that is that a good thing to say? Yeah, absolutely. Stupid thing to say. But no, jeez, your audience must be pretty millennial. Well, I want to try to say is if you can order a Domino's hotspot, you can you can take the time to tell an archaeologist where you found something and also
00:37:41
Speaker
Even if you pick it up and you think it's cool and you bring it home, you're only helping archaeologists tell you more about your property if you can tell us a little more about where you found it. If you just pick it up and leave it or take it somewhere, all of that's gone and it only hurts you. Well, it hurts a lot of other people.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, we want this to be like a collaborative thing. We want to work with folks who got in the field because there's a limited amount of archaeologists in the world, and we can't cover everything. So these people are more familiar with the lands. As Chris had mentioned earlier, they really know that somebody's been in their family for generations or whatnot. But please, please get some spatial information. Please, I'm begging you.
Fieldwork Adventures and Discoveries
00:38:19
Speaker
I want to piggyback on that getting some spatial information bit with this advice.
00:38:26
Speaker
When you remove something like a projectile point from a site, it may change an archaeological interpretation of that site if they are to find it, happen upon it later in the future. So what may have originally looked like a hunting kill site would now maybe look
00:38:47
Speaker
like a campsite based on the artifacts that were removed. So if you keep a record of that, you can kind of piece back together what might have been there and we can infer what the site type may have been. Speaking of campsites. Nailed it. I was waiting for someone to say that. Because we spent a lot of time out in the field, do you have any really good stories, Chris? I feel like everyone has at least one or two that are just gems.
00:39:15
Speaker
Oh, I was hoping you would ask. Let me set the scene for you here. So it's 2014. This was one of my absolute most favorite field seasons in all time. I got to work with two really great friends who later became groomsmen at my wedding.
00:39:32
Speaker
We lived in Shadron, Nebraska in a pink stucco house that we called the Pink Palace. And we just had fun every day out in the field and had fun every night back at the palace. So this was kind of one of the highlights of that season.
00:39:48
Speaker
We were out in an area just north of Shadron State Park in northwestern Nebraska. The day before, we had seen an airplane flying over as we happened to see a herd of bighorn sheep.
00:40:05
Speaker
And we found out later that that was a wildlife group that was doing bighorn surveys. So it was this neat juxtaposition of this low flying airplane with this gorgeous herd of bighorns. We actually got what I found out later is called warded out of the area. Basically, as we walked away, one male bighorn followed us probably about a mile or so
00:40:30
Speaker
on it on the next ridge line over to make sure we weren't going near the herd. And I think basically he was willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the herd if that was to be the case. Obviously it wasn't. But so the next day we're out in the same area and another low flying plane flies over and we think, oh, they're doing the wildlife surveys again. Cool. And we are hiking and all of a sudden there's a guy out on this hill.
00:41:01
Speaker
And we're like, why is anyone else out here? We're in the middle of nowhere. What is this dude doing? And so we started approaching cause I mean, why not? We're going to say hi to this guy and we get closer and closer. And all of a sudden he's, he's saying, Hey guys, come over here. I'm like, okay. And as we're getting closer and closer, we're noticing this, uh, long, well,
00:41:27
Speaker
turned out to be the barrel of an AR-15 slung across his shoulder. And as we get closer and closer, we realize that he is a Shadron police officer. So we're wondering why this city cop is out in the middle of nowhere. And he's asking us, what are you guys doing out here? And we're telling him that we're archaeologists with the Forest Service. We're just out doing some survey. And we're like, what are you doing out here?
00:41:53
Speaker
Well, it turned out that there was an active manhunt in the area. And, um, so he asked us which way we might be heading. And apparently our, um, chosen direction was directly into the, the area of this manhunt. So he decided to have some of the state park folks drive us out of there on a, uh, like basically a UTV or a gator. And so we got this great tour of the park from the back of this gator.
00:42:23
Speaker
There was like on every ridge line, there was a, there's a spotter scope and a, and a rifle. They were looking for these guys. So anyway, we, we finally get out of this situation. There's a million cop cars in Chatterin state park and we're like, what is going on? Well, we came to find out from the local news that some meth heads from Wyoming had stolen a truck in Cheyenne, Wyoming, driven it
00:42:49
Speaker
into Nebraska and then started heading up 385, which is the main highway that runs into Shadron. And in this stolen vehicle, a sheriff had noticed it as reported stolen and attempted to pull them over. Well, they took off running into Shadron State Park, which they clearly did not know is a loop. So in their attempt to escape, they drove this stolen truck down
00:43:19
Speaker
what can only be described as an incredibly steep bank, somehow missed every tree along the way, got out and tried to run, and they found them an hour or two later hiding in some brush, maybe about 10 yards away from the vehicle. One of them had a prosthetic leg, and that was that. So that was my most
00:43:45
Speaker
a memorable day in the field of that season and maybe ever. Oh my god. Archaeology out west surprisingly or unsurprisingly involves a lot of guns. And meth. Yeah I never ran into a meth lab but there's definitely been. Those are out there though. I'm sure in the middle of nowhere breaking bad stuff. That's a safety training. Wait what?
00:44:10
Speaker
You had to do a whole, uh, they're called single use meth pots. And basically there's a big chemical dump out in the woods and you're supposed to market on your GPS and GTFO bail. Basically we had on our field school, this isn't even like really a field story, but just.
00:44:29
Speaker
on the topic of what we talked about earlier, it was in the field, it happened. Our field school was in Nashville on the Bellsbend River or Cumberland River in Bellsbend Park and we were all water screening near the site doing our stuff and there was a visitor center there and a local came by and showed my, he asked where the professor was and showed my professor, Dr. David Anderson, this obsidian projectile point that he had claimed to have found on the trail there
00:44:57
Speaker
in Nashville, Tennessee. And my professor was like, oh, you found this here? And the guy like went on this whole story about how he found it right there on the trail. Not a trail that we had passed by, you know, multiple times the whole month we were there every day, twice a day, going up and down this trail to find it. And he found it and wanted to know. So what I'm trying to get out here is if you're trying to pull a fast one, an archeologist to get him to appraise your, your artifact, like we know, like we know there's not obsidian in Nashville, Tennessee on the surface.
00:45:27
Speaker
It's like I don't know it turns out we're really good at looking at the ground and wouldn't have missed that stuff
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know, Carlton. You did walk over that thing. I found a hell gap right behind you. Damn it. I forgot about that. I'm not sure about this, but call back to episode one with Dr. Spencer Pelton, now the Wyoming City archaeologist.
00:45:57
Speaker
Chris Rowe decided to visit me and the Hell Gap crew two years ago, I guess it feels season 2018. And there is, it was just after some rain and the rain's pretty, when it rains at Hell Gap, especially at locality four. So Hell Gap has a different localities for different things. Locality four is on a riverbank or a cut bank. So when it rains, it like washes away.
00:46:26
Speaker
the sediment and exposes new archeological content. Well, Spencer Pelton brought his crew out there from the Ochre site. I forget the names, Powers Ochre site, Powers 2 Ochre site. And fuck me if Chris Rowe doesn't just, he's just fucking bumbling along my fucking site and he finds a floated, a fluted point.
00:46:56
Speaker
that should not have fucking been there. And we're like, oh, sweet. We were really excited. And not to mention this entire time, like Chris is excavating with us, not really finding much.
00:47:10
Speaker
doing an okay job and then he's just walking the field and finds this point. So we're like, this shouldn't be here. So we do what everyone should do. We put a flag on it, took photos of where it was in provenience. And that led to Spencer coming over and me asking what he should do and then him telling me to put in a sample trench like right next to it where it was found to see what's back there so we can cut back more of the bank.
00:47:36
Speaker
And out of this little test trench, it's not even a unit really, it was basically as wide as a shovel, came out over 700 artifacts on top of a hearth. And it was projectile points, it was flakes. So basically, Chris Rowe had inadvertently found a new Paleo-Indian locality, that Hell Gap,
00:47:59
Speaker
He left the next day, Spencer left like immediately. And I got left with this, like how like the field directors were gone at a conference and they told me explicitly like not to excavate out of locality four. The other field director there was having none of it. Like she was having absolutely none of it, wanted nothing to do with it. And she was going to pin all blame on me if things went well, wrong. It's like fine. I mean, it was totally justified. Things went well, showed Marcel it was fine, but like,
00:48:29
Speaker
Yeah, that was, yep. That's my Chris Rose story. The one time I worked with Chris, the one time. That was my first paleo point too. So that was an exciting day for me.
00:48:46
Speaker
I have one more field story about Chris Rowe before we wrap up the session. We were at LaPrel Maniscite in Wyoming, and we had Andrew Lintz with us, who is from the University of Edmonton, Alberta. Canadian, if you didn't catch that. And when you're in the field, you all crowd into one truck to go to the town, and we went to a liquor store. And Andrew
00:49:09
Speaker
And I was sitting in the truck and he was like, man, Americans are like really loud all the time. And I was like, yeah, I mean, we can't be so, but like in the store, you guys just talked at top volume and like.
00:49:20
Speaker
with no regard for anyone else in the store. And I was like, that's just kind of what we do. And as he was, I had this conversation with the Chris Rowe bust in the car. He's like, guys, check it out. They had this buy one, get one free. If you got this rum, you all are vodka. You also got a brown stainless steel mug so you can have yourself mod scale mules. And like this came in guns blazing screaming this as we had the, it was hilarious to me. It's just Chris in a nutshell.
00:49:44
Speaker
I want to point out that that was a solid copper Moscow mule mug that I got for $15 bottle of vodka included. Chris is also ready to bring them to movie theaters. One of my favorites time ever went to a movie theater, me and him watch super troopers to when it came out and easily.
00:50:00
Speaker
Easily one of my favorite moments of my life. Next to David when I went with him screaming at some poor girl who was just crying behind us during it. So I didn't know she was crying. All I heard was someone talking behind me for 40 straight minutes and I turned around and said, he's like, dude, they're being so fucking annoying. And David's going through a time at this moment and I'm like, dude, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. And finally, like, she's like, she's crying and David just gets up out of his chair and goes, hey, could you shut the fuck up?
00:50:29
Speaker
And I had his arms ready to go like we're about to brawl. And this girl just gets up and left the movie theater. My New York comes out sometimes. I was going to say, you went to Old New York in a state that has what, I don't know what the population of New York is, but I know that Wyoming is like half a mil. And David, what, you're like five eight, five ten?
00:50:54
Speaker
You're giving me too much credit, man. I'm 5'4". I'm 6'1", like, oh, here we go. This is what we're doing with our evening. We're having a fight over a serial killer clown.
00:51:10
Speaker
Um, yes, I pick fights that I should not pick sometimes. Uh, but that's what, that's what I learned when I lived out West, you know, it's small town. You just got it. You gotta do it. I'm, I'm done. So, uh, Connor, can you wrap us up by quizzing Chris? I know he knows these, uh, about three archeological laws that we learned today that we can
Quiz on Archaeological Laws
00:51:31
Speaker
reiterate. Hit me with it, Chris.
00:51:34
Speaker
What are the three archeological laws we learned about today? All right. So ARPA, the Archeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, that's what protects all artifacts on federal land. The NAGPRA, which is the Native American Graves, Repatriation,
00:52:03
Speaker
Native American grace protection and repatriation. Repatriation. God. Oh, you guys are. It's too late. It's too late. That one. Yeah.
00:52:18
Speaker
Ah, what was our third law? We didn't do. What is the Antiquities Act of 19? Oh, that one's like sort of important, but the law that gives us jobs is the National Historic Preservation Act. Yeah, if they get rid of that one, I hope you're listening, politicians. If you get rid of that one, I will be at your doorstep with a picket sign.
00:52:43
Speaker
We'll bring David, too, and he'll yell at you. Give me a job! And then the American Antiquities Act. I mean, that's kept things from getting taken out of the country. So that one still is important. And I believe that also established national parks and monuments. Hey, quit taking our shit! And passed a law that said you can't take our shit anymore.
00:53:10
Speaker
Because people from Scandinavia would just show up dynamite Mesa Verde and take everything and they're like, you can't stop me. And we were like, fuck. Anyway, so I started blasted.
00:53:30
Speaker
Who's Heinrich Lehman, the Troy guy? Yes. Yeah. I love that gift running around. Okay. Anyway. Instead of digging, just blasted through the sand to get to Troy. Great stuff. Yes. That's why we have these laws now. Christopher Rowe, pleasure to have you on a Life in Ruins podcast. Thank you so much. And Mr. Rowe, if you had your opportunity, would you live your life in ruins over again?
00:53:56
Speaker
Well, I was originally gonna be a mechanical archaeologist. Jeez. A mechanical engineer. And then I hit Calc too. So no, this is my life in a ruin. And I'm happy about it. That was a great answer, Chris. Thank you. This has been episode 12. My Life in Ruins podcast. Chris Rowe killed it. Thank you. We are out!
00:54:26
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. Hey, guys. Hey, Connor, what do you call someone who steals artifacts from a hoarder? Hooter. Oh,
00:54:54
Speaker
Yeah, and then I was gonna say don't But then I was gonna say don't worry I'll see myself out Okay, so Chris a monument monuments Perfect
00:55:30
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.