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Archaeology of the AlUla region of Saudi Arabia with Dr. Rebecca Foote - Ep 255
3.1k Plays7 months ago
On today’s episode, we interview Dr. Rebecca Foote, the Director of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Research for the Royal Commission for AlUla in Saudi Arabia (RCU). Rebecca’s current role focuses on executing in-depth archaeological study unique in both geographical size and scale, assessing the rich and complex past of the AlUla region of northwest Saudi Arabia. Dr Foote develops archaeological surveys, excavations and research projects with national and international expert teams to expand understanding of AlUla’s history and prehistory.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Exploring Alula with Dr. Rebecca Foote
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 255.
00:00:20
Speaker
On today's show, we talk about the fascinating region of Alula in Saudi Arabia with Dr. Rebecca Foote. Let's dig a little deeper into the history, prehistory, and all things Saudi Arabia in this area. That was terrible. That was awful. Welcome to the show, everyone. Rachel, how's it going?
00:00:41
Speaker
Great. We are here in Mexico still, so it's lovely weather and still going great down here. I know. We're down here for four weeks and we're already into our third week. I'm pretty sure next week is our last full week. Yeah, it is. It's crazy. Well, last year we were here for two months, so we're kind of sad that we're not staying longer this year, I think, but yeah.
00:01:00
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's an awesome place and we definitely want to come back time and time again because it's really cool being down here and other places that are fun to travel that people may not think about are Saudi Arabia and dialing in for us from Saudi Arabia is Rebecca
Dr. Foote's Archaeological Journey
00:01:21
Speaker
Foote. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks very much.
00:01:25
Speaker
So tell us just a little bit about your background before we get to why you're in Saudi Arabia. What's your educational background and your archaeological background? I am an archaeologist, specializing in the early Islamic period. I have a PhD in, well, it's a long story. In the American Academy, if you work on a historic period, you don't usually end up in an archaeology department. That's more for prehistory.
00:01:50
Speaker
So I went to Harvard and I was in the history of art and architecture department. And my advisor happened to also have done archaeological research. So that's why he took me on. So what brought you to Saudi Arabia?
00:02:07
Speaker
Well, the part of the Islamic world that I focused on in my PhD was what we would call the Arab heartlands today, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Northwest Arabia. And I wrote on markets, early Islamic markets for my PhD. But at the same time, I was also excavating at a site in the south of Jordan called Humaima, which had presence there. It had been founded by the Nabataeans.
00:02:35
Speaker
and then occupied up until the early Islamic period. So I worked on a residential and mosque complex. But the landscape is basically the same national borders as we all know, our modern invention. And so, for example, the Hizma desert that starts at this site, Humima,
00:02:55
Speaker
travels into northwest Arabia and the culture groups, the Nabataeans. Some of your listeners may have heard of them because Petra is fairly well known. That was their capital, but they had this major southern city in where I am now, in Al-Ula, called Hegra. So the place was familiar to me and when
00:03:14
Speaker
even though I'd never been there because I was mostly excavating in the 90s back when tourism or even visiting was difficult to come to Saudi Arabia.
Alula's Archaeological Goals and Geography
00:03:24
Speaker
So when the opportunity was presented to me that they were starting this thing called the Royal Commission for Al-Ula, which has many aspects to it, the general aim is to develop a visitor destination.
00:03:42
Speaker
because the heritage is so rich here and the landscape is so beautiful and the interplay of the two historically that had everything to do with the type of human activity here. When the opportunity came to be able to finally come to Saudi Arabia and to be a part of formulating what we would study and how it was basically
00:04:06
Speaker
There had been some archaeological inquiry here, exploration, excavation, a bit of survey, but not very much. So it was this unknown to help reveal to the world as well as just personally for me to finally see this place that had been part of my own studies.
00:04:25
Speaker
So we were introduced to you through another organization that was, you know, seeking to get this region and the work you guys are doing out there, basically out to the world. And, and there was a, actually a conference back in September, which prompted a little bit of this reach out to that took place over there.
00:04:42
Speaker
But let's back up on that a little bit because you've already mentioned Lula. Can you tell us a little bit more about I guess what this region looks like today versus what it looks like in the past and what the preservation and I guess what the what the goal of the preservation works that you guys are doing in all the archaeology moving forward.
00:05:00
Speaker
Well, so physically, it is a couple hundred miles inland from the Red Sea coast. So it's on the western side of Saudi Arabia towards the north, as I said. And there's a mountain range that comes down the west side called the Hejaz. We are just to the east side of that. And then there are uplands a bit further east. So we're in this right here, this natural, beautiful valley, kind of like Sedona.
00:05:29
Speaker
if you imagine the red sandstone, but a real Hampton Valley. And in an otherwise arid place where you have natural availability of water or water that you can manage to sustain life that has everything to do with how and why people settle wherever they do.
00:05:52
Speaker
And even though, say, more than 6,000 years ago, like 10,000 to 6,000 years ago, it was a less arid place. It was like savannah land for various degrees of aridity, but it's been quite dry here for a long time. So that water issue is everything to do about either settling somewhere or if you're passing through here, you want to get from, say, the south of the peninsula to the north.
00:06:20
Speaker
you need to plan your stops where you could get water. So that has everything to do with this place and it's important. We could talk about the domestication of the camel too, which is what enabled long distance travel with goods. So that's there's some debate, of course, exactly when that happened, but probably around 1200 BC or sometime at the later end of the second millennium BC.
Trade Routes and Pilgrimage Influence
00:06:50
Speaker
Then there were these, you've probably heard of the Incense trade, Frankincense and Murray. We all know that from certain religious contexts, if not otherwise. And so that travels through here is the first that we really know of big long distance.
00:07:10
Speaker
Trade and other goods were also traveling with that some of them of higher and lesser value like there are also semi-precious stones from the south for example and then eventually again in that first right after the domestication the camel the first millennium BC and then later as the monsoons are harnessed by better watercraft and
00:07:33
Speaker
then other things coming safe from South Asia also feed into that network. So the first big settlement here in the valley that we know of called Deben is mentioned in the Bible by Ezekiel and is mentioned as a trading post. But also one thing that people overlook when they talk about trade or other types of travel, also you need food stuff. So there's usually a lot of cultivation that's going on there as well. And the
00:08:02
Speaker
The earliest palm that we know of that was being cultivated here is about the time a little bit earlier, but then it seems to be intensified and expanded in the first millennium. That's, like I say, the first big settlement that we know about. It became rich through both the local production as well as we don't know specifically exactly how they exacted some sort of income from the trade.
00:08:30
Speaker
probably some form of tax or something to pass through. And then later after then in Hegra, which I mentioned before, which is the southern major city, at least so far revealed in the Nabataean empire, which again, was capitalizing on this trade in particularly incense. That's really high value good that we know was in, for example, very high demand in the Roman empire at the same time. So we're talking about around 100
00:08:59
Speaker
BCE to 106 when Trajan then annexes that Nabataean empire. And we know at that time, the demand was super high. Incense was being shoveled on anyone with any means for conspicuous consumption, shoveling onto pyres of funerary situations. So Hegra then is, again, another one. That's where the famous tombs, the carved facades. Are you familiar with Petra?
00:09:29
Speaker
So similar to that, that seems to be a benchmark or the touchstone for many people that they've heard of and know of those iconic, highly ornate
00:09:39
Speaker
facades for these tombs. And then there are similar ones here, but in a very different context in an open plain at the North Ora Valley. Then with the rise of Islam, the Muslim religion here in the early 7th century, that travel of a different sort, pilgrimage travel, had everything to do with the vibrance of human activity here.
00:10:06
Speaker
Because from the north and a bit from the northwest and northeast, there were routes that traveled through her on the way to Mecca and Medina for the Hajj, one of the five pillars, one of the must-dos, if you possibly can, for a Muslim at some point in their life, to visit those holy centers.
00:10:25
Speaker
So there've been different reasons over history why people pass through here or settled here, that it's in addition to its natural availability of water and this, like I said, this valley that sort of on the uplands, there wasn't much water. So you were sort of forced, it was also easier to pass through there than in the uplands surrounding it.
00:10:47
Speaker
It had a great localized artistic community. For example, the sculpture here is very interesting. It's got its own expression, but seems to be influenced by Egypt and Greek and Mesopotamian as well. So it's reflected here with these other cultures that had something to do with the people passing through or who came to stay.
00:11:12
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I think with that, we'll take a break and then find out a little bit more about the archaeology you guys have been doing on the other side back in a minute.
Balancing Research and Development in Alula
00:11:20
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 255. And we've got Rebecca Foote on and we're talking about a really interesting region in Saudi Arabia, Alula. And I want to talk about now there's the directive or the, I guess the way to understand it over here in the United States would be the government agency that's controlling this is the Royal Commission for Alula.
00:11:40
Speaker
And I just want to talk about the Royal Commission for our Lula's, the RCU we'll call it the 2023, the end of the field season that you guys just had. You were telling me on the break that you guys work generally the last half of, you know, the year there from like October to the end. And then people take a break because they have to, you
00:11:58
Speaker
In archaeology, you collect a lot of things and data and you have to process that data and then also go home and see your family and then come back for the winter or spring session. But summertime is not where you would work in the Middle East because it's too hot to work there. So that's when that happens for this particular region. So talking about that, your first half of your winter, fall to spring, 2023, 2024 field season, what did you guys work on? And were there any major discoveries or finds or anything like that that we want to talk about?
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, well, we had 12 projects in the field in the fall, and they are the variety of activities that people classically think of for archaeology, like excavation and survey, but then some that are less well known to people who haven't been closely following how multidisciplinary it has become. So,
00:12:53
Speaker
You also study the seeds or the animal bones so that you can understand the diet and what might have been cultivated or hunted or domesticated. Also, geoarchaeology, even a bit further afield for most people, would be studying
00:13:14
Speaker
the landscape, the dynamics of the site, physical site formation, so soil and water resources and how they established the possibilities for human occupation and then how it was, for example, water again, that we've talked about and often will because of the situation like this where, I mean, it's crucial anywhere, but it's not so available here.
00:13:37
Speaker
how people then manage that water and how it ebbed and flowed over time and maybe shifted. Like here, we have these four major settlements, two of which I mentioned before. So Dedden, then Hegre, Kor, and a place called Old Testament people actually lived in until the 1980s, are these four major settlements. There were other, because it was such a fertile valley,
00:14:02
Speaker
that other places that people lived in smaller clusters or individual farmsteads. But these four major settlements, no one of them seems to be inhabited for more than 600 years. Or at least that's what we thought. And so getting to your question about what are we finding that in that
00:14:21
Speaker
initial settlement I mentioned before back in the first millennium BCE, the Dedonites, that was the site of Dedon, and then there were these two dynasties there, kingdoms, the Dedonites and the Lichenites. Learning more and more about them, practices in burial, and again, I mentioned
00:14:43
Speaker
when the domestication of the full intensive cultivation of the date palm, but then other crops that are introduced and a part of the local diet. So it sounds like you guys are working in a lot of different areas and Chris and I have done CRM in the United States and a lot of the places that we've worked have been chosen because there's development going on there and they need to do the work ahead of building something.
00:15:12
Speaker
And so we're wondering if that is one of the reasons why you guys have chosen the sites that you're working on or if there's another reason. Yeah, just give us a little bit more information about the reasoning behind those choices.
00:15:23
Speaker
Okay, good question. So I run the research-led part of archaeology here. And so I have the luxury, in a way, of deciding where we're going to excavate that's not at risk or survey or run further studies.
00:15:42
Speaker
I do have a colleague though who runs the development led section of archaeology so exactly as you know very well when they're going to decide to build a cultural asset or a
00:15:56
Speaker
resort or a gym or something that there needs to be a full HIA and ESIA and so a heritage impact assessment and environmental impact assessment. And so that of course it still generates research if they find something.
00:16:14
Speaker
So then we work to have that fed into our domain here so that it isn't lost or siloed. But those teams that come to carry that development-led workout, of course they write reports, etc., but they're
00:16:29
Speaker
their aim is not to then do the follow-up research and publish it. So those results will get fed in. So what we're choosing is, as I started to mention before, was these four main settlements, Deden, Hegra, then the others I hadn't mentioned before, Kura,
00:16:47
Speaker
which is the early Islamic big city, second only to Mecca in the early 10th century. And then this old town that was inhabited from at least around the 10th century until the 1980s. So it's a mud brick village.
00:17:04
Speaker
Which is now being adaptively, that's a big part of the development project is adaptively reusing that. So there's a boutique hotel and shops and restaurants and it's really been a rejuvenation project. Engaging the locals a lot in the learning about different parts of the city who lived where Aaron.
00:17:25
Speaker
and how it was activated and really lived in and used. And what's interesting is that there's this 900 plus houses tightly packed in this so-called old town, but it's immediately adjacent to the oasis. So it was basically their kitchen garden going out the back lanes of this town. Everyone had their own oasis farm.
00:17:51
Speaker
that they lived in in the summer for sure, because it was cooler there, but also they were tending their fields. And then they anyway, like meat and other field crops were grown in the winter months. So it isn't that they abandoned.
00:18:06
Speaker
there, but it gets quite cold here in the winter. So they wouldn't necessarily live out there. They would be living in the warmer old town. And probably historically all these, because it's basically an agrarian society and the people were living with respect to the, with close proximity to where they were cultivating the fields as well.
00:18:33
Speaker
So I'm super interested in hearing more about the city where you have kind of modern people living with the archaeology and the kind of work that you're doing to teach them about it, but also to probably preserve and maintain anything that is of significance as well. So if you want to speak more about that, that would be really awesome.
00:18:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a big challenge because the so everyone left living there in the 1980s, but okay, they all were their their homes meant a lot to them. So many of the people who work for the commission are from Alula. And many of them, their parents or their grandparents lived in Old Town. And these people who are now in their 20s, 30s, 40s, remember going there, their parents or grandparents would take them
00:19:27
Speaker
to their house and they would tell them about what life was there. They would have picnics or tea or whatever. I mean, gradually over time, because it's mud brick and it wasn't maintained, it became more and more ruinous. But they all knew about it and that's where there's a lot of positive response to the fact that it is being rejuvenated.
00:19:49
Speaker
That's very cool. It's a very unique situation because usually we're so far removed from the people that used to live in places that are being worked on, but it's really neat to have that like nostalgic connection to this place through and a relative that you actually like still have with you. That's, that's really cool. It sounds very different and unique.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yes, it's really the cultural heart. I mean many people come here because Hegre was the first UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in Saudi Arabia and it's still probably the most spectacular one and a lot of people have their bucket list of wanting to visit World Heritage Sites. But as far as the local community and physically actually a lot of the restaurants and the happenings are in and around that old town and then there's a new town
00:20:40
Speaker
grew up from there in parallel from say the early 20th century. That's also becoming quite a focal point, which hadn't been for many years either. So it's great to see how the community is engaging and it's becoming a life.
00:20:58
Speaker
That's really awesome. All right. Well, let's take a break right there and we'll come back on the other side and talk a little bit about the inaugural conference you guys had there, the world archeology summit back in 2023. So we'll do that on the other side of the break.
00:21:12
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 255. And we are wrapping up our discussion with Rebecca Foote about Lula and a region in Saudi Arabia that she's been working in. And we want to talk before we get into the end of this conversation and talk about the summit that you guys had last September.
00:21:29
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about the prehistory of the area because we've talked a little bit about some of the historical stuff and things you guys are working on, but it's also got a fascinating prehistory, which maybe you can define prehistory first because that has a slightly different definition depending on what culture and region that you're talking about. So we'll start with that and then get into some of the finds and the prehistory
Unveiling Prehistory and Stone Structures
00:21:49
Speaker
of the area.
00:21:49
Speaker
Okay, so prehistory generally would refer to the period before we have written accounts. So here, that's before the first millennium BC. That's when a variety of languages are actually spoken and written here.
00:22:06
Speaker
It's a really, it's one thing I haven't mentioned before, but it's a really written rich, can you say that? There's culture that there are etched and carved in stone. There are nine ancient languages here. Some that you may have heard of, if you've interviewed other people in the Middle East, Aramaic or Samudic, but then also this localized Denonitic. Then there's some later on Greek and Latin. So
00:22:30
Speaker
That's the point at which we would start saying you're getting into history or proto history because they actually weren't writing histories here. They were inscriptions, monumental inscriptions on the stone. So for us, prehistory here is mostly where we've been having most of the finds are later prehistory. So the neolithic, calcolytic,
00:22:53
Speaker
Bronze Age, these may be time periods you've heard of before. Even earlier than that, the Paleolithic, we have stone tools, some really cool stone tools, hand axes and arrowheads of all varieties. But the majority are this later prehistory. So we're talking about 6000 BCE, so 8000 years ago, is when building in stone,
00:23:21
Speaker
And then there's this explosion. So in this broad landscape survey that we ran first, most of, particularly outside the valley, most of the types of structures that were recorded out of the thousands that were,
00:23:37
Speaker
were these stone structures that are locally quarried, small stones, dry laid, and in a variety of shapes and sizes. So there are these big rectangular ones, mousta teals, which have since then been excavated. They seem to have a ritual function related to horned animals. They have a chamber at one end where deliberately they were placed.
00:24:02
Speaker
the upper cranial parts, not even lower, so not even the mandible, but the maxillariates, the upper teeth, the horns, the other parts of the cranium. And they're both wild and domestic. So there are gazelle and ibex and orex, but then also cattle and sheep and goat.
00:24:24
Speaker
and they seem to have been deliberately placed there now because there is no written word at the time and there are some hearths in front of some of those chambers. It's deliberate, it's ritual, is it religious, is there any intercessor there with a sense of
00:24:41
Speaker
a deity or, you know, there's no evidence for that at the moment. So we don't really know, even though they're very carefully butchered, there's no evidence for feasting, say, in the big courtyard that's in front of these chambers. So there's that. Then there's so-called kites, desert kites. They're called that because pilots looking at them in the early 20th century, they looked like children's, so not even a conventional kite, like a diamond.
00:25:09
Speaker
The old-fashioned children's kites that had streamers on them. So they have these kind of tentacles on them and they are probably traps for wild animals that you would drive gazelles that are traveling across the landscape into them.
00:25:29
Speaker
Sadly, they had these pits at the ends where animals would fall to their death. So those are spread throughout not just the Middle East, but as far up into Central Asia. And in fact, just yesterday in the Guardian, they mentioned one that was found overseas on the Baltic coast off of
00:25:51
Speaker
Germany that they think it looks that's how it's being interpreted if you Google that you can find that article that's how they're interpreting them that they were once obviously not under water and that they may even have had a reach that far so those all are earlier structures also these things called standing stone structures that were circular and have standing single slabs orthostats in not exactly orthostats but
00:26:18
Speaker
standing stone slabs in them that probably then supported a superstructure and they appear to be domestic. There are other kinds of enclosures that may have been pens for animals or could have been inside of which people lived with some sort of organic structure that no longer exists today that would have been the housing unit. And then the first real monumental tombs that we have
00:26:44
Speaker
are probably Bronze Age, seemed to start in the third millennium BC, so like 5,000 years ago. And there are thousands and thousands of them, there are more of them that comprise an amazing funerary landscape. But we haven't found the settlements with them. So there are all these places where people have spent a lot of time and human resource in building these various types of stone structures that must have required some form of
00:27:12
Speaker
community of some size that would have been building them. So it's helping us to rethink really the nature of society at that time, and how people cooperated and had enough time.
00:27:27
Speaker
or division of labor or something, a more segment society than many people have thought they would have been to as well someone else is out hunting and gathering, others are building or whatever. I mean, that's just an idea.
00:27:43
Speaker
I'm not a specialist of that period, but I'm following the steep learning curve by leading this whole enterprise here in archaeology. Yeah. So it seems like, and we've talked about desert kites on this show before, so we have a little bit of familiarity with them. So it seems like they are kind of like just out in the desert, right? So is it possible that
00:28:05
Speaker
multiple communities maybe came together and built them in a location that they could all access. And it wasn't necessarily associated with just one settlement. And they were sort of shared structures between a bunch of different ones. Is that possible? Have you guys looked at that kind of a thing? Sure. Sure. That's possible. What's interesting is that there can sometimes be sort of clusters if they're not. So then you wonder if they aren't for different communities.
00:28:34
Speaker
but there isn't a real regularity in the way they're distributed across the landscape. So that's a good point. It's a good thought. Really, so many possibilities come to mind. Yeah, right. Okay. Well, as we're wrapping this up,
00:28:50
Speaker
Let's talk about the World Archaeology Summit, the inaugural World Archaeology Summit, 2023, that was held in Alula back in September, I believe it was. We've talked, I think, just in general on this show before about some conferences that Rachel and I attend occasionally.
00:29:05
Speaker
And those conferences are generally data and paper driven and they're generally for, you know, usually just archeologists or people even specialized in a certain region. And you go there, you present your research, your findings, you talk to your colleagues and things like that. But this was something a little bit
World Archaeology Summit: A Collaborative Platform
00:29:20
Speaker
different. Can you tell us a little bit about the style and format of this conference and the intent behind it or summit? We'll call it a summit because it wasn't a conference. Yeah.
00:29:29
Speaker
Sure. So yes, exactly as you say, there are plenty of conferences out there that are more regional focused or thematic focused or and data driven. But the reason why we were thinking that we would do something different that's not only interdisciplinary, but intersectoral, so to bring government, non government, profit, nonprofit, media, tourism,
00:29:56
Speaker
technology, all kinds of different organizations from different sectors together to rethink
00:30:05
Speaker
what archaeology can bring to those sectors, what those sectors can do to enhance our work, how we can make it more relevant, more accessible, more dynamic in the modern world, hope to solve problems, maybe make the world a better place, as idealistic as that sounds. But learning about and engaging with the past
00:30:32
Speaker
can and should help to inform the future, we think. And because we are this multi-polar kind of a organization where we are developing a visitor destination, but also helping to refashion the city, we have a county operations department, we have a planning
00:30:55
Speaker
department where we engage with them for master planning, not only to help identify where the heritage is so it's protected, but also to help inform as they're planning what to build there and how to create its profile thematically or something that if it has more to do with place, I think many people who come to a place or who live in a place want what there is here to offer
00:31:19
Speaker
be reflective of that place too. So we're through our work here and elsewhere in the world trying to engage with other people to brainstorm. So that's one reason why it's an international summit, to get an infusion of how they're dealing with the same issues.
00:31:35
Speaker
in south america or east asia or australia and bring that all together to it was basically a brainstorming session of various types of interactive so there were these. More plenary sessions where there was a panel of.
00:31:56
Speaker
four or five people with a moderator where there were questions that they had had before and a theme. So there were four themes to it, which were identity, run escapes, resilience, and accessibility. And they're broad enough that
00:32:15
Speaker
many people from many different disciplines, although it was a lot of archaeologists who were members of these panels. There were also people from other parts of cultural heritage, so museum, conservation, cultural heritage management.
00:32:30
Speaker
resource management. But then also we had some people from the media, from governmental institutions, from technology, database developers. And we want to broaden that out even more. We were on a tight timescale. So we did our best to come up with ticking all the boxes we wanted to, but we're working very hard to access people from more places in the world. We also had students who come because it's one of the huge things that we are engaged in is
00:33:00
Speaker
investing in this big part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, which is investing in the next generation, particularly here for Saudis to train them to early career professionals to enhance their professional development.
Vision 2030: Cultivating Archaeological Expertise
00:33:17
Speaker
There's a scholarships program they go abroad to study formally and informally, but that we also bring institutions and individuals here.
00:33:26
Speaker
To train people in bespoke programs for things like conservation which isn't already available here so we wanted to bring that to the larger stage and so had twenty five students here from around the world as well as twenty five that were from Saudi Arabia itself.
00:33:43
Speaker
And so we don't want it to just be the more mature scholars, but that whole range to get the ideas that you get from someone seasoned, but someone new, as well as the perspectives from all the different sectors, as I mentioned. So it's hoping to find a new platform that isn't anywhere else.
00:34:06
Speaker
number one, who wants to do what anybody else is doing and who would want to come if there's somebody else doing it, but also because it helps inform what we're doing here that's so multifaceted and hoping to share what some of the things are that we've learned maybe the hard way and sharing the solutions that we found.
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah, we'll come up with more themes for the next one and more and different people from a broader spectrum, we hope. Awesome. Yeah, that's great. I love when archaeologists kind of like leave the ivory tower a little bit, you know, and make it more accessible to people who
00:34:51
Speaker
maybe wouldn't have considered archaeology as a career. And I think this is a constant conversation that happens in a lot of different places around the world is how to get people from the actual country from the place to get interested in the work and then become archaeologists and then become the next generation of archaeologists doing the work. I think that's one of the most important things
00:35:11
Speaker
that you can do in an area like Saudi Arabia or anywhere else that doesn't have a really like strong academic presence yet but it can have it and it will have it with programs like this so it's really cool to hear that that's what you guys are doing and you know also the public outreach part of it like because you know Chris and I we're always trying to talk archaeology to people who aren't archaeologists so like
00:35:33
Speaker
So just like making the information more accessible sounds amazing. So it sounds like you guys are doing some really, really great work over there to that end. Thank you. Yeah, we're trying and we appreciate you, but also, you know, lots of people to build a village. Yeah. So I'm curious for when you are trying to muster up interest, is it met with enthusiasm?
00:35:56
Speaker
Oh, always. I would say. Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. We talked to a lot of people in our little RVing lifestyle that, you know, are outside of our normal sphere of colleagues and friends, which are mostly archaeologists. And nobody here is an archaeologist in front of me right now. And they're always all very fascinated. In fact, we've gotten a lot of our RVing friends to be listeners. So welcome to the show, guys.
00:36:18
Speaker
listeners of the show because they're, because ever, I feel like everybody's interested in archeology in some way, shape, or they might be more interested in a region or something like that, but I feel like everybody's interested in history and prehistory and just learning more about it. So it's, it's, it's always met with some enthusiasm.
00:36:34
Speaker
the information just has to be presented in a way that is interesting, not boring academic papers. I'm sorry, but like, it can be so dry sometimes, you know? So yeah, making it more accessible I think is so great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and one thing that we're going to be doing very soon
00:36:55
Speaker
is setting up the Indiana Jones experience that someone could have who always wanted to, but ended up being a banker instead. Oh boy, you are speaking our language. One of the excavations is going to include what could be called a work holiday or something where you come for a couple of weeks and are trained
00:37:17
Speaker
out the basics of archeology. And then you're actually in the trenches and, and helping us reveal that. Cool. Well, if only, if only you guys knew some archeologists that happened to be podcasters, they could come there and also talk about it. We are good at talking probably more so than digging at this point, but
00:37:42
Speaker
I know that feeling. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. And I think there's plans to do some more podcasts, possibly even with yourself, but definitely about the region and with people working over there through this same organization. So I look forward to hearing more good information coming out of there and just learning more about the area. So Rebecca, thanks for joining us on the show today. Well, thanks, Chris and Rachel, for your interest. It's been a great conversation. For sure.
00:38:11
Speaker
Awesome, and we'll see everybody else next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening, and have an awesome day.
00:38:45
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. 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.