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New Advances in Oxygen Isotope Analysis with Dr. Corey Maggiano - Ep 119
214 Plays5 years ago
Oxygen Isotope analysis has long been used to analyze a person’s skeletal material to find out where they lived and sometimes how they lived. Until now, this has been on a large time scale - often of years and decades. Now, with this new research, some cases can be analyzed down to the month or even tighter. It’s amazing research and further opens our window to the past.
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App of the Day
- Webby: Noon
- Paul: Sequel Pro
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the archaeotech podcast episode 119.
Meet the Hosts
00:00:23
Speaker
I'm your host Chris Webster with my co-host Paul Zimmerman. Today we talked to Corey Maggiano about a recent paper that discusses some improved superpowers of oxygen isotope analysis. Let's get to it.
00:00:35
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. And welcome, Paul. How's it going, man? It's going OK. We've been having an interesting last few days with my father-in-law, who's 91, and health issues. But yeah, so if I go off into Lala Land, it's from lack of sleep. But otherwise, it's OK. How have you been doing?
00:00:52
Speaker
Not too bad, not too bad. We're going to have to have an episode where I review the DJI Mavic Mini because we talked about that a while back and I've had a lot more playtime with it and I have a lot more things to say about it. Let's just put it that way. Cool. Look forward to that. Maybe that'll be our next episode, our last recording of the year since we don't have a guest scheduled.
00:01:12
Speaker
Okay. So, uh, let's get into our topic. As I mentioned in the intro and the bio, we're going to go straight in and talk about some, some pretty fun stuff. Some pretty interesting things. So, all right, to kick off this discussion, let me introduce Dr.
Oxygen Isotope Analysis in Archaeology
00:01:26
Speaker
Corey Magiano. How's it going, Corey? It's going very well. Thank you. How are you guys doing?
00:01:30
Speaker
Excellent. Excellent. So we're just trying to stay warm here in December across the country. We're recording in three different locations and that is the glory of technology right there. So we can bring you on to talk about oxygen isotope microanalysis and let's just get right into this. So we have the paper linked in our show notes. If you want to go see that's from science direct.com. So feel free to use your browser on your tablet or device or computer, whatever you're on.
00:01:56
Speaker
click on the link and follow along with the paper as we talk about this. So why don't you start and give us the abstract version of this paper and what it was about and what you guys did with it. First, I definitely wanted to say thanks for having me on. This invitation is great to have a chance to sort of geek out is always good for me.
00:02:14
Speaker
I think bones and archaeology, basically. So this project was sort of a marriage of archaeology, skeletal biology, and earth sciences, even before the beginning of it, even kind of in sort of pipe dreams discussions, late nights around a table, typically with beer about an hour, trying to figure out if we could sort of push the limits on sampling resolution in isotopic studies, specifically for bone.
00:02:44
Speaker
The reason for that interest is that bone as you're growing and adapting to your life is recording various aspects of that life. Your growth and development, mechanical adaptation to your activities, and even certain elements of your environment itself. The trouble with that record, maybe you could think of it as being locked in layers, kind of like tree rings.
00:03:08
Speaker
as a tree trunk grows in diameter, so bone grows in diameter in a similar fashion, I guess. The trouble with that, though, is that it is a record that gets constantly disrupted by growth and maintenance and repair. Specifically, a process called remodeling kind of pack man's away old bone and
00:03:27
Speaker
puts new bone in its place behind it and that kind of hits the reset button on that location as far as what it's doing and what it's what's what's recording about you. So the idea is find a place where that remodeling process happens the least and maybe in preserved lamellar primary bone you can have a sequential deposition
00:03:49
Speaker
And secondly, find a technique that allows you a small enough spot size for sampling that you can then access potentially aspects of chronology or temporal change in that isotopic signature over
Bone Sampling Techniques
00:04:06
Speaker
time.
00:04:06
Speaker
And so that's exactly what the whole study was kind of designed to do. And sort of pushed the limits at first on micromilling this tissue in long bones. And after that, I needed a much bigger machine. So I shifted over to using the secondary mass spectrometry, SIMS for short, which allowed us a very, very small spot size at 16 microns. We're getting like a
00:04:30
Speaker
a 25 micron increment, which seems to be rounding out to about a measurement per month on oxygen isotopic ratios. Which kind of changes the game as far as what questions you can ask about influence between populations, trade and travel, landscape usage, migration and mobility, pretty much anything that has to do with how you access the waters of your landscape and your climate.
00:04:56
Speaker
So what you're describing is that we all have a basic familiarity as archaeologists with studies of bones and teeth that give us a general sense of the climate that somebody was living in. But you're saying that with this technique, you're able to divide up not just where the person, for example, lived, but also like month by month, where they lived, how they lived.
00:05:20
Speaker
The technique as it is standing right now shows the potential to move into those types of inquiries that are more personal rather than operational and more temporal rather than summative, I guess. It is a nascent technique for sure. That's the specific reason why I was shooting for kind of a focus paper. I was really interested to kind of spur forward this discussion because it had been kind of presumed.
00:05:46
Speaker
not to be possible. I mean, bone is microscopically pretty messy, but it turns out we have technology now that can permit access to those areas that are clean.
Applications of Isotope Analysis
00:05:56
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Can you back up just for a second here?
00:06:01
Speaker
I mean, oxygen isotope analysis has been around for a while in archaeology. And I think more famously, wasn't that used on like, let's see the Iceman to determine where he came from and kind of how he ended up where he was. I think that was. And so I'm wondering, you know, what what led you guys to think or at least to this technology here and why has nobody thought of doing this before is really the big question there. You know, what what was that thought process? It's always the question of like how
00:06:29
Speaker
How far back do I go to get to the beginning of the story? So when I was a bit of child on my grandmother's knee kind of stuff. So basically when I was 14.
00:06:39
Speaker
My interest was, along with my colleagues, sort of how does bone grow when it's not unhealthy? So a lot of microscopic study of bone is focused on either pathology or kind of counting osteons and moving through a kind of interpretation of the life process. Those types of interpretations are really important to me, but I wanted to start with how does a bone get its shape? Because if everybody interested in bone is interested in some kind of way or another in bone shape, and there are
00:07:09
Speaker
five or so different ways to go from stick straight to a certain curve, and all of them are hidden. So you can add bone at both ends on one side and take it away in the middle, or you could have the whole bone shifting sideways over time at different rates, and you could get the same exact bend, but wouldn't know. So I wanted to kind of peel apart that hidden variation by tracking where's the primary bone actually getting put, which you can only know if you take a cross section.
00:07:37
Speaker
And that's what the first figure in the paper is about, is giving a person an indication of the macroscopic space commanded by these processes of bone morphological change over time, and how they indicate adaptation and development. And in doing that dissertation back in the 60s,
00:07:56
Speaker
Don Enlow and others, Harold Frost, these are the beginnings of skeletal biology in a lot of ways. We're very interested in these types of discussions about where this primary bone is getting put, and they documented it quite well, but not in the perspective that we would have in archaeology, not from a perspective of, what does it mean that it looks this way? And in asking that question, how do I measure it? How do I tell where it's at? How does it vary between people or even does it?
00:08:25
Speaker
I realized that it's a heck of a lot of tissue. I mean, sometimes it's 80% of the entire cortex on one side of the bone, which seems to be indicating that the bone is just chugging like a train sideways. Basically, you're humorous. The whole thing shifts sideways as it's getting longer and as it's getting fatter through a process called modeling drift.
00:08:46
Speaker
And what that means is that the medullary cavity has to pack on bone on one side or else it gets dumped off the backside of drift. The whole of your bone will just open up on one side of your humerus and then it'll fracture. So instead, weirdly, the medullary cavity has to mirror that growth and resorption process to stay centric. And when it does that, it leaves a wake of bone.
00:09:13
Speaker
on the lagging side of drift. And that bone is primary. It is not very highly disturbed. It's vascularized a little differently than periosteal tissue. And so it's a little more pristine and then more so it's endocortical. So it actually doesn't receive a lot of the strain that the outside of the bone receives, which would indicate it's necessary to turn that tissue over and heal it.
00:09:40
Speaker
So since it's more pristine, it leaves this large macroscopic incremental feature that's predictably locatable and preserves, in some individuals, way past the fifth decade of life. We've seen it even in centangels on occasion. It's a little sliver by then. So after having found out that there's that much
00:10:02
Speaker
incremental tissue there and that it's relatively undisturbed. I was at a conference watching Christine White give a talk on the possibilities of sort of chasing osteons with lasers in
00:10:17
Speaker
attempt to get at a time series or at least a representation of time variability in isotopic profiles and talk with her afterwards really excitedly because the prospects for sort of chasing an osteon are incredibly daunting as we were discussing. The prospects for not chasing at all but you know shooting this giant feature
00:10:38
Speaker
in something like a humerus or a femur are a lot better and would give you a lot longer time series without the need to sort of undulate and branch along with an individual osteo which you're unlikely to ever be able to do unless you have some serious equipment. I can't even really imagine it.
00:10:56
Speaker
So, in that conversation, you know, was born this notion of if there's this deposit of a large enough deposit of primary tissue less disrupted, and if we can get a sample resolution small enough, then we would theoretically be able to access that entire deposited tissue. And she asked me about how much tissue it represents. And I said, well, there's really not much of a way to tell because these are rates that are measured in non-human animal studies.
00:11:26
Speaker
And there aren't people doing that, you know, tetracycline labeling in bone for like 10 years. Like that's not an experiment that you can really get approval to do. So there's not really an ability to time the growth of bone over those durations. But I said, you know, gut feeling, it's a lot. It's between five years and 10 years on occasion.
00:11:50
Speaker
And she just lit off. So we tried to make that happen at the University of Western Ontario with a cobbled together postdoc once I wrapped up. We just kind of...
00:11:59
Speaker
all jumped in the boat and tried to make it work. That's fascinating. I was wondering what age range, if we're looking at human bones, what age range would this be applicable? Is it just through the major growth up through adolescence or does it continue as a process on through adulthood that you could still look at an adult's diet, I guess, with this method?
00:12:21
Speaker
So, it's going to work better in anybody who's actively packing on primary bone, which is going to favor the youthful population. That said though, there's kind of an assumption that once you hit skeletal maturity, you're done doing that. And that assumption isn't necessarily true at all, depending on the bone.
00:12:40
Speaker
in men especially up until the middle of their 30s. They're packing on a pretty decent amount of upper body bone, humoral shoulder, that whole area is still adapting and that's because the skeleton's catching up with muscular development, with good nutrition that hopefully comes from settling out in your roles in society and other things like that.
00:13:02
Speaker
you have a change in those areas of the body. So anywhere where there's still a sequential bone being put down would be fine. Otherwise, you do have the introduced question of are we sampling a 10 year span or a five year span from earlier in this individual's life or was it perimortum?
00:13:23
Speaker
And there are some little indicators that, you know, get used as rough rules of thumb by histomorphologists. You know, if, if the last layer of the bone on the endocortex, for example, is roughly contiguous. In other words, that last layer is fairly well. I know, of course, this has to do with preservation as well.
00:13:41
Speaker
That is a situation that's arguable to be perimortum because otherwise you see these sort of little undulations, additions and removals of bone and little patchwork pieces along it. That's a very common thing. And then also with, like I said, lack of preservation, that's going to kind of go away. So you'll be stuck with this question of, we don't know exactly which time segment we're at here. If you're in a younger individual though, it'll be very likely in a 25 to 30, even maybe 35 year old, that you have
00:14:11
Speaker
a representation of time up to that point. Now, is the representation of the time, is the increment chronological, right? Because it cannot always be in increments that slow down or speed up. And that's one of the most fascinating, I think, potential applications of this work moving forward is discussing growth rate and the interactions between human health, the environment, and climate.
00:14:38
Speaker
Okay. Well, on that note, that sounds like a good point. We generated a lot more questions I think just now, which is a good thing. So science is supposed to do. So let's go ahead and take our first break and we will come back and wrap up this discussion with Dr. Corey Maggiano on
00:14:55
Speaker
oxygen isotope microanalysis back in a second. Chris Webster here for the archaeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
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00:16:21
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the Architect Podcast, episode 119. And we're talking with our guest, Dr. Corey Magiano. And Corey, we were talking about before the type of research you guys are doing, some of your techniques and how you're getting these answers. But let's take a step back. And now that we have that framework,
00:16:39
Speaker
How does oxygen isotopes, or I guess how do oxygen isotopes get into
How Oxygen Isotopes Enter Bones
00:16:44
Speaker
your bones? Where are these coming from in the environment that they can actually tell us something about where and how these people lived and what they were eating and things like that? Where does this stuff come from?
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So, um, I promised myself I wouldn't sort of use this cliche, but I'm just going to, it's like something gravitational. You know, you, you are what you drink, I guess, in this case. So you have sort of tissues that are formed from your environment. You just run around your environment and encounter, you know, your sustenance and build yourself from it. And that means that in the case of water, you're going to get the lion's share of that oxygen from that water. Um, obviously it comes also from
00:17:24
Speaker
breathing and some other places, food as well. Mostly the oxygen isotopic profile of your bonus is a proxy for drinking waters and those drinking waters change in different regions. And we probably don't want me to go into all of the details, but let's start with two. For example, let's say, where are you at right now? By the way, geographically, I'm in Reno and Paul's in New York city.
00:17:48
Speaker
Okay, excellent. So, well, let's pick someone in landlocked middle America, okay? Because in comparison to anyone coastal, that individual will be experiencing rain waters that have traveled much further from their originals to sort of oceanic source or water.
00:18:07
Speaker
and borrowing large lakes and all that kind of thing. And so what will have happened is more of the heavier of the two isotopes will have rained out by the time that person gets that water and therefore their isotopic signature will be different than yours or mine because it will be reflective of that differential sort of evaporative and condensation process involved in the rain cycle. Likewise, your oxygen
00:18:35
Speaker
is going to be different in your drinking waters, whether it's a warmer or a cooler season. So if you're enjoying a cup of coffee, well maybe not a cup of coffee, boiled water and all that, but if you're just having a nice tea, let's say. And in the summertime that water has had more of a chance
00:18:53
Speaker
to undergo evaporation, and therefore that water would be relatively heavier having lost its lighter oxygen to evaporation. And that record, as long as you have a sensitive enough piece of equipment, gets recorded in your bone.
00:19:09
Speaker
Okay, so let me unpack that a little bit because that part confuses me a little because I understand what you're saying about how the oxygen levels in the water changes because the heavier, lighter oxygens, they come out at different stages.
00:19:24
Speaker
and with different processes, but how can we actually tie that to the prehistoric environment? We know some about the environment, but it seems like these are really wide and far-reaching processes and not hyper-localized processes unless something crazy was going on in one river or lake or something like that where people were getting their drinking water.
00:19:44
Speaker
But if they are doing things to it, and let's say later on in the archaeological record when they're making beer and wine and doing other stuff and maybe even drinking less and less water, less pure water, I should say, less pure drinking water and using water made into other things, how do we take the information that you're getting in the bones and we really define that into these environments? And I guess the side question to that is, what kind of research have we done that we know that these environments are producing these sorts of oxygen isotopes?
00:20:14
Speaker
that we can then match those up with what's reading in the bones and then say, yes, this matches up with that.
Relating Isotope Data to Archaeology
00:20:19
Speaker
Therefore, dot, dot, dot, you lived here.
00:20:23
Speaker
Right, exactly. So this is hugely complicated as far as sort of an eco-geographic question. And certain regions are going to be more telling in their oxygen geographic maps than others. And of course, there will be multiple ways of achieving one given oxygen isotopic ratio. So basically, your question is infinitely interesting because
00:20:52
Speaker
it would take a lot of study in different aspects, both ecological, geological, archaeological, etc., and in human behavior in order to truly provide a specific assessment of any given oxygen isotopic
00:21:13
Speaker
profile over time. That's exactly the science that I hope starts to grow from this. There hasn't really previous to these types of inquiries been much of a reason to be worried about very, very small fluctuations in oxygen isotopic ratios from one spot to another. I mean, in this study alone, we sampled
00:21:37
Speaker
something like four or 500 different assessments of oxygen within a few millimeters. So this just hasn't really been necessary before. You've never needed to be able to account for it. Yeah, but did she drink avian water this week or not?
00:21:53
Speaker
But you're exactly right that that does matter now. I mean, potentially, don't forget where this could be in 20 years. That little joke won't run because it'll be real. Who knows where the end of resolution on these types of techniques will go. But for right now, the paper currently is sort of provocatory. It's just saying, don't forget, we actually have these tools now. So we can actually ask a question like,
00:22:20
Speaker
Okay, we don't know everything going on, but do we see predictable rise and fall in oxygen isotopic composition that would indicate rough seasonality, for example? And after having stated, yeah, this is basically one of the only things that would be sort of most parsimonious in this context, or because we have all this other information that well describes it.
00:22:43
Speaker
we would be able to then settle into the next sort of feast of questions. Is this spike meltwater? Is that spike this other thing? I mean, these are questions that are almost unfathomable for me right now, and they're not questions that we're sort of used to asking in archaeology.
00:23:00
Speaker
How many times did she go with the trading caravan seemingly from the Nile River Valley out to the Oasis? Those are inquiries that are sort of mind-boggling. Yeah, they really are.
00:23:15
Speaker
So is it then safe to say that your study here that you published is something of a proof of concept for a direction the future research should go and not necessarily giving any conclusions about the bones that you were looking at here, but how one could look at another group of bones in the future and start to build out a whole new segment of archaeology, of archaeological science?
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, I would say that's a very safe summary. The intention here is definitely exploratory. Let's put it that way. If we had a perfect storm of the exact right tissue, the exact right age of individual, and we have no problems with diagenesis, and we can show that. If the bone is roughly similar to what we might recover in archaeological context in that it's dry and hopefully well enough preserved for oxygen isotopic analysis, and we have this new technique,
00:24:10
Speaker
that will get at that scale of inquiry, what could we theoretically do? It's only a question you could ask after you find out, hey, you can do this. You can get a resolution of 16 microns. You could maybe have a measurement every month.
00:24:26
Speaker
Now, there's going to be a lot of knowledge that needs to come together from very, very different fields. A lot of this stuff is ecological, human ecological, a lot of it is climatological, a lot of it is skeletal biological.
00:24:41
Speaker
We had, we thought it had a really great grasp on, you know, primary lamellar bone growth. It's about the most simple thing you can talk about in bone until you start really caring. Yeah. But didn't this lamella disappear just now and up here, it's not there, but down there it is there. And what did that just do to our signal? And you know, you're only sampling seven lamella or something like that per spot. So, you know, it's, it's pretty serious need for future research for sure.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, speaking of future research, you've kind of alluded to some of this, but what are some applications or other things that maybe could be invented or developed based on what you guys have been talking about or furthering other types of technologies and making them more refined like what you've done here? What are some applications like that or further refinements do you see coming in the future or do you hope to see coming in the future? Yeah, so I think maybe both of you have even already kind of instinctively touched on
00:25:34
Speaker
on the ones that I think if I have my finger on that pulse, I'd say diet, right? So if we could get something similar going for carbon or nitrogen or both of them, now the scales wouldn't be the same, you know, the relative abundance of the isotope itself is an interesting factor. But yeah, I mean, some kind of treatment that would expand the inquiry to include other stable isotopes would be amazing.
00:26:00
Speaker
We don't have great known controls or standards for using sims on bone in general. There's a lot of technical knowledge that we need to gain moving forward in order to increase our accuracy and make better interpretations. And so that's an area of completely different sort of expertise. That would also include kind of, well, archeologically as well, known positive or negative controls. I mean, I kind of joked about the Nile River versus
00:26:29
Speaker
Oasis kind of thing, but in one case you have seasonal climate and in the other place you're drinking well water. And that well water should be flat line. As far as oxygen goes, it should be bee. And so that person then moves every couple of months towards the Nile River Valley. Theoretically speaking, you should be able to see some change like that now, knowing that that's what happened or not depends on a whole host of other factors.
00:26:58
Speaker
But those positive and negative controls are now something that we should go hunt down. We know we have the right technique. We know we have the right scale of inquiry. So all that would be very interesting. For me, though, personally, I am incredibly interested in
00:27:17
Speaker
ways that we can use this to also estimate or interpret impacts on human health. There's a section in the paper that deals with lines of arrested growth. And these are microscopic features that we've talked about for a very, very long time. In some other non-human animals, they indicate seasonality or annulations, yearly cycles, sometimes day-night cycles, all kinds of different cycles in humans.
00:27:45
Speaker
seemingly not so much. But theoretically, these pauses in growth can happen because of serious health stress, or, you know, dietary stress, other other kind of aspects of stress that would be measured by the body and a decrease of net growth during that time period. So we basically have these spots where we have either slower bone growth, like you mentioned, or none.
00:28:07
Speaker
if you're hurt bad enough. This individual that we assessed in the current project has many lines of arrested growth. Some of them are what I would call partial, and I'm sort of not convinced that they're indicating sort of a general health trend because of where they exist, but others are going through the entire feature itself, running the course of that industrial deposit.
00:28:32
Speaker
And, you know, they seem to indicate significant amounts of lost time. If you sort of analyze the rises and falls in this sinusoidal pattern, there are areas where, you know, two bumps seem a little too close and that could indicate lost time. How much lost time is a completely different question.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. I'm just trying to wrap my head around the variables associated with this because you mentioned, for example, rainwater and distance from the ocean and presumably the primary source of many rain clouds aside from big lakes and stuff like you said. But even that, you have to know so much about the paleo or prehistoric environment to say, okay, here's what was going on to then be able to suss out this
00:29:19
Speaker
individual likely lived and did these things in this area. And then the rivers and how things change and how the environment changes and just all that stuff. But I think one of my last questions before we get to a couple final ones at the end of the segment here is, like some other disciplines, I know there's libraries, I guess, for say radiocarbon levels and there's dendrochronology libraries for tree ring dating and things like that.
00:29:43
Speaker
Do you know if there are, say, oxygen isotopic level libraries around? So when you start gathering this data, you can start correlating that to these other places around the world where saying, hey, presumably the individual where they were found is where they were lived, but maybe not in all cases. So you kind of localize it regionally there. But then in that area, are there these libraries that you can go to databases to help start correlating these things?
00:30:11
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So these are all things that are under constant building in Earth science. So in general, most of what we talked about is fairly broad stroke type maps of latitude, longitude, altitude, and things like this, and how it would affect oxygen isotopic composition. But regionally, yes.
00:30:31
Speaker
as information is necessary on a certain area with whatever fidelity for the question at hand, that information gets stored. And to the degree that we begin making use of it, it will be stored and shared more effectively. Right now there are places where if you want to ask an oxygen isotopic based question bioarchaeologically, you'll have to start by mapping the local waterways and making the exact argument and complexity that you're
00:31:00
Speaker
that you're pointing to a parent. And after that, your interpretations, as long as your sciences sound, are much, much better informed than, for example, using a broad stroke for an entire geographic region. And those maps, hopefully, will come together, especially as techniques that use a higher resolution or will require that landscape sort of fidelity to point to. Nice, nice.
00:31:27
Speaker
So, hey, we're wrapping up here, Corey, but I just want to highlight the uber-collaborative nature of science.
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
00:31:34
Speaker
I like to point out that people aren't working in a vacuum. You're not like the lone scientist working in a lab, right? So, what are the disciplines came together to help make this paper possible? There's an incredible list of people that are acknowledged at the end of this paper, but what other major scientific disciplines came together to help make all this work?
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah, we joked all the time about the holy trinity in this paper was archaeology, skeletal biology, and earth sciences. And for all that to come together in one small space of bone for an inquiry like this was just really exciting. And to really see the necessity, because knowing that you could use this type of a technique in general and other applications doesn't get you to this sort of result. You have to also know quite a lot about
00:32:20
Speaker
how bone grows and interpreting it and targeting that tissue friendly. And knowing both of those things doesn't help you at all with archaeological inquiry unless you're also equally versed there. So my colleagues, Christine White, Richard Stern, Sal Peralta, and Fred Longstaff were monuments of information within their respective fields. I think Sal would agree he might have felt like the odd man being a political scientist, but
00:32:48
Speaker
he interprets time series data and archaeologists don't often need to interpret a lot of time series data and similar sort of fidelities and we entertain all kinds of notions of stats that we might need to use and they all infuriate him because as you pointed out at one point I think during our conversation what if time isn't time you know what if there are small disruptions and what if there's slowdowns and speed ups and this tends to ruin sort of mathematical predictions but
00:33:17
Speaker
We really all needed to be in the room on this and until I was there in Canada and even afterwards working on the analysis here at the University of West Georgia and the write-up, it was a lot of tight cooperation.
00:33:31
Speaker
I'm just going to reiterate what Chris was saying. The way that this brings together different disciplines that normally wouldn't necessarily be in the same paper, it almost feels like the origins of carbon-14 for our field. You have to know about the atmosphere, you have to know about biology, and you have to know
00:33:52
Speaker
physics and chemistry and how they all interplay to come up with a new way of looking at time. And this is interesting. This is very, very cutting edge stuff, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think the only thing, the only other thing I would ask is that Paul and I get to do the first interview, actually, you guys accept your Nobel prize. So when we
00:34:14
Speaker
You can just keep us on your contact list. That'd be great. All right. Well, thanks, Corey. This has been fascinating. And if you guys, even the other disciplines associated with this, feel free to contact us again with any other developments that have led off of this or anything like that. We'd be fascinated and happy to talk to you guys. Yeah, absolutely.
00:34:40
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:35:00
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the Architect podcast, episode 119. And before we get to the app of the day segment, we just had a great, I wish we were recording conversation with, uh, with Corey. Yeah. And I just wanted to mention cause something he was pretty fired up about is, is that Paul and I were really talking about the, the regional implications of the, uh, of the isotopes. And I think that's because that's what we're used to from hearing about isotopes is like, where did they come from? What did they do?
00:35:26
Speaker
But he was pointing out and didn't really get a chance to explain this in the actual interview that what the paper really showed was how they can drill down on time and how they can really get down into a time variation thing here and say this, you know, we talked about the monthly aspect of it, but I don't think we talked about it enough. Right. So I just wanted to to point out when you read the paper, you'll get it. But we just, you know, our questions just didn't really flow in that direction or we didn't have enough time to get there. So I wanted to point that out because Corey's pretty fired up about it.
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah, for a good reason. It's it's really exactly the possibilities that this opens up. Yeah, absolutely. So all right. Well, let's kick off our app of the day. And Paul, why don't you take us through some crazy random coding thing or whatever it is or database. And I don't even know.
SQL Pro App Overview
00:36:11
Speaker
Wow. You actually guessed it. OK, so I don't have an
00:36:16
Speaker
app, per se, because I've just been killing apps off my phone lately. I don't have anything new to talk about. But it dawned on me, I should actually mention one of my favorite tools that I use. I use it absolutely daily in my job. It's called SQL Pro. It's a client, macOS only. It's open source and it's a client for MySQL. I think also probably MariaDB because that's very close to MySQL.
00:36:40
Speaker
And I just wanted to put it on people's radars if they don't already know about it and they're using a SQL, MySQL database on a Mac. Okay, so I've limited it down to three people.
00:36:56
Speaker
Head and Shoulder is the best client that I've used. I've used it for a number of years. I'm actually using development versions of it. The version that's available from the main download on the website is a couple years old, but it is under active though slow development. It is, like I said, an open source project. And it basically allows you to do all the management that you could do with something like the MySQL Workbench, which is what MySQL itself puts out.
00:37:24
Speaker
But it just does it in a much more clean, comprehensive little way. So the main view lets you log on to the server of your choice, attach the database of your choice, see the
00:37:38
Speaker
see the tables, get a spreadsheet view of the contents of the tables, open up a query, or all the same sort of stuff that you used to from any other of a million different database clients. But it just does it all a little bit faster, a little bit smoother, and it has far and away the best import and exports that I've ever seen on any of the clients that I've used. So I do a lot of imports of SQL tables, or entire tables or schemas from one database to another.
00:38:06
Speaker
or one install to another rather, and a lot of exports of CSV files to then move from one system to another. And it just does it right almost always. And the only thing that I wish it did differently is I wish that it could attach to PostgreSQL databases and probably SQLite. If it could do those, then I'd be in heaven with this because it's been just an invaluable tool for years for me. And so you should know about it. SQL Pro.
00:38:34
Speaker
Nice. Well, there you go. We'll have that link in the show notes. Of course. So, all right. So mine is something that, uh,
00:38:42
Speaker
I don't even know how to describe to be honest, uh, as far as costs and all that stuff goes, but it's called noom and OOM.
Noom App Discussion
00:38:48
Speaker
And if you've seen this, uh, they're, they're blasting out Facebook and I don't know about Twitter, but definitely Instagram, things like that with sponsored ads. And I've been seeing them for months and months and months. And basically what this is for they, if you go to their website, noom.com, M N O O M.com, you'll see two things and it's losing weight or getting fit. And basically what it is, I don't want to say it's like a diet programmer application, but it's more of a,
00:39:13
Speaker
lifestyle readjustment application or so they would explain it but
00:39:17
Speaker
Basically what this is is trying to treat, because I've always had, for anybody who's seen me knows that I've always had problems with weight, right? I mean, that's just my ongoing thing. I have a Peloton bike and I've biked many days in a row now and I bike every day and yet I still just, it's not like I'm eating a 4,000 calorie diet. I don't know what it is. So I need some sort of mental or some of the readjustment and I've done lots of different things. I don't really diet because I know that those don't work. I know enough about science to know that,
00:39:46
Speaker
changing your habits for a short period of time is not going to do it. So having a behavioral or psychological or attitude adjustment is really what you need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. And that's what Noom is focused on. I joined the program just in the trial period, and I think I'm coming out of that now. So I'm almost about two weeks into it. And right now, I do like the way that it works. And the app, when you have it on your phone,
00:40:09
Speaker
you log in, it'll prompt you. It'll ask you how you want to be prompted too. Do you want to be pestered, anything like that? You have like a goal specialist that will text you within the Noom app. And I haven't figured out whether this is a human or not yet. I've tried quizzing it a few times and it's pretty good if it's not a human.
00:40:29
Speaker
So it passes the Turing test? It does a little bit, yeah. It even passes it in the sense that it's highly delayed too because I know they're on the East Coast because the person came on and said, oh, I'm in New York City or something like that. And I was like, okay, but are you giving me canned responses or real responses? So I've tried to ask it questions that
00:40:45
Speaker
that require a non-canned response and I've gotten them back. Anyway, they're not like sitting there at your beck and call, but basically the whole idea behind the application is every day you have a couple things that are ongoing like doing a weigh-in and logging your meals and doing stuff like that. But they have a different way of looking at meal logging. I've used MyFitnessPal for years to log meals and try calories, but they really focus on calorie density.
00:41:12
Speaker
For example, the weight versus the calories of the food. If it's a lower calories, but a heavier food, like something that has a lot of water in it, like fruit, like grapes or something like that, then it's green. If it's a lower calorie density, which means it has more calories and less weight, like say, I don't know, candy or something like that,
00:41:30
Speaker
then it's red. So it goes from green, yellow and red. And they just say, you know, limit the number of red foods, have the green foods. They don't say red foods are bad, but you just got to limit them because they don't give you a full feeling, right? You get fewer calories and you don't feel full, which means you want to eat more. And that's basically how they're kind of changing that behavior. Because I haven't seen it actually depicted like that before.
00:41:50
Speaker
And then they go through these, there's usually a handful, they call them articles that you click through for the day and they're teaching you these like psychology tricks and all these other things and they're interactive. They're really well written. They're not written in a boring way. They're written sort of a funny, humorous way sometimes. And I just, I like the way the presentation is. I don't know if it's going to do anything for me. I don't know if it's going to help me, but I thought I would mention it because I know a lot of people out there
00:42:16
Speaker
You don't have to be 400 pounds to struggle from weight gain or anything like that. People at all levels do, depending on your psychology and how you look at it. I thought I would mention it and see if it would help anybody else out there. My mom just told me yesterday on the phone that she just signed up for it. Have a comparison, your experience with it versus hers. Maybe circle back in a couple months
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I will tell you that it still requires the same thing that any program would, and that's you to actually follow it.
00:42:52
Speaker
That's the hard part though, right? Like it's saying, oh, you know, do this and do that. And it's, I mean, it's not like that, but it's, it's giving you ideas and pointers on how to do things. But then, you know, I'm reading through all these things on how to, how to, you know, analyze what you're eating and how to, how to look at a thing of food and kind of determine the portions. If you don't have the guide in front of you, like if you're out at a restaurant or something like that and trying to figure out your portion control and not even everything you're going to play. And then I've had a series of like holiday parties, like three or four in a row.
00:43:19
Speaker
with different things that I belong to. And you can't, you can't determine anything at those things. Like I don't know how many glasses of wine I had. I don't know how many little candies I had, you know, maybe I know how many glasses of wine I had, but I had one more. Exactly. Well, like, for example, this one we were at with my civil air patrol group, it was actually at a, one of our, uh, one of our members' houses, but it was just a whole bunch of different people.
00:43:45
Speaker
But they brought this Irish whiskey, Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey, and I'll tell you what, that stuff is delicious. And every time I turned around, one of my guys was just filling my glass. He wasn't even empty yet, and he was just putting more in my glass. I literally have no eye concept of how much of that I drank.
00:44:03
Speaker
How do you write that down? You know, I'm just calling it a, and this is what they say in the thing here too. They're like, don't focus on the losses because that's going to happen. And I'm just calling this whole, like last four days, a loss and, uh, we'll move on from there. But then of course, Christmas is coming up. Going to be a family. So who knows? Who knows?
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah. So we'll see. Anyway, that's mine. The link for that is in the show notes, but really it gets a little irritating. I'll tell you that the first thing, if you just want to know how much it costs, you can't find that anywhere. I will tell you that the two week is a free trial. They waived the setup fee, but then they ask you, they give you three choices basically. And they said, Hey, it basically costs this much money to set up your account. Which one do you want to pay? And it goes from like $5 to $18 and they just give you a choice.
00:44:49
Speaker
I was like, well, shit, if you're giving me the choice, I'll give you the $18. So I paid that for the setup basically of the account and all that stuff. And then to be honest, I don't even know what the monthly is going on because you can add on a bunch of different things. You can add on meal planning and exercise plan and stuff like that. That's not part of the base thing that you're getting. But to even see any of that,
00:45:09
Speaker
You've got to click on whether or not you want to lose weight or get fit here on the main webpage, and it's similar on the app when you sign up, and then answer this whole questionnaire about yourself. Then enter your email address, and then they send you a thing. You confirm that, and then it all comes back. Then near the end, you end up finding out what the price is. Again, I don't even remember, so I'll find out when I look at my credit card statement, I guess. It wasn't enough for me to say no, apparently.
00:45:34
Speaker
So yeah, but it's nowhere on their website. I'm looking on it right now and you can't find pricing anywhere. So I'm sure if you emailed support, you'd find out. But yeah, anyway, they put a lot of science in it, a lot of references, things like that. So I like that. But yeah, anyway, that's what I've got. Okay. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. Good luck coming into the holidays and everything with an Italian Catholic family. I'm sure I'll lose a ton of weight over the next week.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah. I got you there. We got the Italian Catholic alcoholic family. Oh my God. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. A good thing is we're staying with my sister-in-law and she has a Peloton and that's how I first came in contact with it. So I started an account on her bike and then over in May, in May we got our own bike, but my account's still on her bike as well. So I have no excuse if I don't continue my workouts. Let's just put it that way. So
00:46:28
Speaker
Yeah. All right. So that's it for today. Maybe next time we'll talk some more drones at the end of the year recording. I don't know. We'll figure it out. But because I definitely want to talk about the Mavic Mini and my experiences with that so far and how that's gone. Yeah. So all right. Well, thanks a lot, Paul. All right. Thank you, Chris.
00:46:48
Speaker
Yeah, and hopefully everybody had a good holiday because this is releasing the day after Christmas, but we're of course recording it a week before Christmas. So hopefully everything went well and everybody have a happy new year. Take care.
00:47:07
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:47:32
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded 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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:47:54
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.