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WIA at TAG - Episode 28
63 Plays7 years ago
The Women of Archaeology went to the TAG conference in Toronto this year and had a great conversation about theory. Check it out!
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Transcript
Introduction & Membership Details
00:00:01
Speaker
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00:00:27
Speaker
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Women in Archaeology at TAG 2017
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Women in Archaeology podcast. I'm Kirsten Lopez, and in this episode, I'm attending the TAG 2017 conference in Toronto, Canada, hosted by the University of Toronto. So like me, if you hadn't heard TAG until recently,
00:01:02
Speaker
TAG is a infamous or somewhat infamous conference in Europe or in the UK that they decided about 10 years ago to start a North American version. So TAG stands for the Theoretical Archaeological Group Conference. Chelsea Slotten and I had decided or were invited rather to co-author a paper for this conference.
Media & Archaeology Discussion
00:01:23
Speaker
and I have presented on Saturday in a session called Pop Goes the Pot, archaeology and representations of the past in different media genres. Our session was great and actually came together quite unexpectedly in a way we all hope that sessions do. The day before presented, several of us ended the evening at a local bar where Lynn Goldstein, April Bisaw and I discussed the conference as we think of it so far. Take a listen.
00:01:49
Speaker
I this notion of the other the other notion that I got from the plenary session that I thought was interesting is this I it's you know, it's like ideas tend to go around to every discipline and everybody has to
00:02:05
Speaker
So now we're all incorporating slow, you know? So slow food, slow archaeology, slow cinema.
Slow Movements in Archaeology
00:02:15
Speaker
I thought that was a really interesting one too. And you see this in Portland being a very foodie town, you see a lot of that slow food movement. And all of these Norwegian films we're all watching of hours of nothing. Oh my god. Yeah, they just get a birdcage.
00:02:32
Speaker
Well, one of the slow things was to watch a TV channel where you watch birds. Right. But you don't have to clean up after that. It's yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, I get that and I can appreciate the concept. I think it seems a little prep. I mean, I don't think it's bad. There's nothing wrong with that. But when I think you do appreciate things in a different way that I do agree with.
00:02:57
Speaker
But do we all have to go slow? But was there ever really a fast archaeology? No. The standard critique is that it's slow and tedious. So if we get even slower, where are we going? Well, I mean, I think part of her point was that
00:03:17
Speaker
It's not just that it's slow, it's that even if it's slow, people would rather watch you do that than listen to you talk about it. Yeah. Because we're all very boring. Yeah.
00:03:35
Speaker
I think watching us do what we do is probably much more boring. I think so too. Unless every now and then we scream, Yurika. That's like a hook to make it that there's a point. Like, you know, baseball's on TV right now and I love going to baseball games and I can't get anybody younger than me.
00:03:54
Speaker
to go to a baseball game because they think it's just so slow and boring. Find Norwegians. I need to find Norwegians in the Hudson Valley of New York. If you're out there, give me a call. Well, it's like, I mean, I can get it if you've only seen baseball on TV. Because yes, it's boring on TV. But I've gotten to baseball games, and it's much more fun in person. Yes, it is. There's a lot of that.
New Perspectives in Archaeology
00:04:24
Speaker
It's just this idea that whatever the new thing is, it means we're doing everything wrong and we have to fix it. I just don't buy that.
00:04:36
Speaker
I think it's good to have new perspectives and think about things in a new way and change even the way we analyze things but in do new things. But I don't think it means that you start from scratch again. Or that everything you did in the past is bad.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I can't remember the author, but I remember recently reading a paper that was going over a critique of the post-processualism and the way that they critiqued and the way that the processualist critiqued the, you know,
00:05:14
Speaker
culture historians it's it's this like you're saying it's this weird cycle that's for whatever reason every generation felt this need to like that's right trash the previous and throw it out but it's like you couldn't get there you can get there without it exactly that's my point although I will say this when I was starting to do work on my dissertation and Lewis Binford was visiting where I was working
00:05:38
Speaker
And he said to me, he said, if you want to be accepted, if you want people to say, oh yeah, what she's doing is good. He said, you have to know all of those typologies. And you have to know all of that stuff. And you've got to know it cold, because if you don't, you will have no credibility.
00:05:57
Speaker
because you got to know where you're coming from. And I think that's good advice, but people don't do that anymore. How can I spend one side of the country here? And what time period you're looking at. There's nothing in historical archaeology once you're outside the colonial period that is a typology that you need to know.
Challenges in Historical Archaeology
00:06:15
Speaker
Once you're out of the pearl ware, white ware, cream ware, it's all the same stuff.
00:06:19
Speaker
And so there isn't that kind of basic entry level exam that you have to pass to be able to do anything. Yeah. There's a lot of out west. I still see a lot of that. That kind of work. Yeah. Very strong in the typology. And I was talking to someone earlier and I don't remember if it was you or what other person was going to do that. But just a base. And it is important to have a base and to reference
00:06:49
Speaker
You know, theory with actually evidence. You have to have the supporting evidence for any theoretical debate or point. But with so few, and this is sort of that objective position between historic and early prehistoric stuff, is you have so little to work with. And it's really hard to go into deep theory on various things.
00:07:11
Speaker
Or you can go totally into deep theory because you don't have data. Exactly. And you can't get back out. You're just stuck in deep theory trying to make it relevant to the site that you're talking about or the culture you're talking about. So that's where it's important to have those links with the people of the region in order to help ground your theoretical benefit. You don't have a lot of the physicality or the material.
00:07:40
Speaker
I think it's true that once you're out of graduate school, conferences like this are kind of fun because you don't really sit around and talk theory all the time. Yeah. So even if you don't agree
Posthumanism in Archaeology
00:07:51
Speaker
with it, it doesn't matter. Yeah. It's kind of just fun to see what other people are thinking. Yeah. And how people have changed what they're thinking. Yeah. So that part is okay. Yeah. Or even seeing how it resembles earlier thoughts that they may not have actually been.
00:08:11
Speaker
But what else have you? So that was the plenary, a little bit on that. And just before we were recording, when you were talking about the death bit. Well, that was partly from the plenary. But this afternoon, well, you were in that session also. Yes, this afternoon. Not all of it. So this was a session on
00:08:38
Speaker
posthumanism. Yeah, but what is it? It's doing something to posthumanism. I don't know.
00:09:04
Speaker
It's parsing. It's parsing post-humanism. It's interesting because it's kind of a new old literature. Some of it's new, some of it's not. But it's this idea that we have to move on to some new
00:09:31
Speaker
way of thinking, which is, and in some of it I really like because it moves away from the dichotomy, this sort of dichotomous approach, and that part I think is very good. But I think that, and some of the papers I thought were really especially interesting. Some of them I think were a little more tedious, but they were,
00:10:00
Speaker
But it's sort of trying to take all different kinds of, what I liked about the session was taking all different kinds of data and trying to take all these different kinds of data and put it in this post-humanist frame. Which is different. It's certainly different than Marxist. It's certainly different than processual or post-processual. But it's not horrifically different.
00:10:29
Speaker
And then, you know, I can't say, I mean, I've read most of these people, but I haven't read them so closely that I can opine on the difference between person and person. That I really can't do.
Monuments & Human-Land Interaction
00:10:46
Speaker
But the kind of work they were doing, I thought was really pretty interesting. Like the Foodways one, I thought was really interesting as well, just really
00:10:58
Speaker
you know, what the food represents and how it's conveying meaning. And it was really quite fascinating. And also then this notion of counter monumentality. I'm not sure. I mean, I thought that was an interesting paper, but I I don't know if it worked quite as beautifully as he was presenting it. I mean, he had a site that has earthworks and clearly the earthworks are not
00:11:27
Speaker
ginormous earthworks. But yet, so the question is, is this a monument if it's not something you can see very easily? And so, and so the question was like, why was it there and what was it doing? And why would, you know, can we even call it a monument? And you know what, I wouldn't have called it a monument. Yeah. That's what I would have called it.
00:11:52
Speaker
Monuments are by definition something special and something different. So if there's nothing else on the landscape except for these things. And they are interesting and they are special and they are different. And clearly they're doing something to put all this effort into creating. And it also is clear they're taking advantage on one side of the natural slope of the land and drop to the river and things like that.
00:12:22
Speaker
But, you know, I wonder sometimes about that stuff if you can make quite a mark on the landscape and you could have put it there for the stupidest reason. Yeah. Well, I mean, they do that all the time. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It could be there for like a totally, you know, party or something. Yeah. The edges of the bar open or something. It was in the
00:12:46
Speaker
settler colonialism session, Vanessa Watts said something I'm trying to find in my notes. If I remembered correctly the way she said it is that we basically do what the earth wants us to do.
00:12:59
Speaker
And I don't know if that could be an extension of that. There's already some sort of ridge in the area and that you build it up, you reinforce it, you exaggerate it, that that's that sort of, I think what she was trying to say, the communication between the land and the people that isn't something that we generally think or talk about.
00:13:26
Speaker
Well, you know, we always talk at Astelland where we've got this slope, and one of the mounds, the platform mound, actually takes advantage of the slope. Well, that just seems like an excuse. Right. Why build that whole thing? You don't have to. It's like you wouldn't create a rock shelter where there wasn't already a rock shelter. Exactly. We need shelter from the rain. Here is a nice natural one. Let's build something else. Yeah, but just the
Engaging with Archaeological Theories
00:13:55
Speaker
The description of the parsing post-humanism, the first two sentences are relatively impenetrable to somebody who is not already versed in this literature. So it's not exactly welcoming. No, I don't think it's supposed to be. It was not necessarily intended to instruct. So when there's this new idea that comes out and you're already assumed to be well versed and using it and knowledgeable about it and then you sit and
00:14:24
Speaker
15 minute papers and you hear about how somebody is using it, if you don't get that introduction somewhere, there's a limited utility to that. But it does like make a certain group of people seem cool and hip and on the cutting edge and the other people not.
00:14:41
Speaker
So it's one of the reasons I avoid sessions that are that long. When there's like 15 people in a session, they're all going to be talking about something new, cool, and hip. I know there's all these other sessions that are going to be under attended that are doing things that I could wrap my head around quickly that I could make contributions to by talking to the speakers. So I was in the historical trauma session. And I think that sounds really good. Oh, I think this was interesting.
00:15:12
Speaker
You know, I don't know how new and different it is. Yeah, I came in, so as I mentioned before, I definitely missed a good chunk of most of the day due to both prior engagements and the fact that I really hadn't analyzed the thoughts.
00:15:33
Speaker
The schedule very much is since it ended fairly early in the day, but this was one that I'm like, oh, post-humanism, sorry, post-humanism, this is definitely something that's intriguing. I haven't quite wrapped my brain around it. And there's a whole, the first session is, or first talk in the session is introduction. So that was kind of a nice idea of being able to
00:15:58
Speaker
pull people in, but you have to be there for that first one. Because otherwise, I came in at the end, and I'm realizing I am so in over my head on this theory. I'm like, well, if I understood the words that we were saying, it might be really fascinating, but so far. And I was thinking, oh my goodness, maybe I should have assigned more of these things in my class. Yeah. Well, two years ago when I went to tag, the hip session was, the future is over.
00:16:29
Speaker
And that's not represented anywhere on here. So two years from now at the next tag, we might be post-posthuman already. So if the future is already over, why would we think that the post-posthuman wouldn't be over as well? So I think we have to be concerned as professors as well to not jump on the bandwagon.
00:16:49
Speaker
and then train a bunch of people on whatever's cool and hip, and they don't have that grounding of the things that stand the test of time. That this might have utility for certain ways of re-conceiving things, but I don't think it's in any way, you should cut something out of your syllabus to include it in. It's okay. I wasn't planning to. But I was thinking, actually, I was thinking that it would be very helpful
00:17:18
Speaker
on some of the literature to really encourage current PhD students who are writing their dissertation to sort of expand themselves a bit and look at some of this literature to see if it's helpful to the kinds of analyses they're doing. Because, I mean, that's really the bottom line. I mean, the theory can be beautiful, but if it doesn't apply to anything they're working on, it's not useful.
00:17:50
Speaker
Oh.
00:17:52
Speaker
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Professional Resources & Current Dialogues
00:18:00
Speaker
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00:18:30
Speaker
My dissertation had a lot of the archaeology of memory in it, and now that's just become kind of a standard thing, that nobody highlights it in their titles or in their talks, and several talks were just, oh, collective memory. But ten years ago, people were like, what are you talking about? How is collective memory translated and transformed?
00:18:52
Speaker
You want to be in the current dialogue, but you don't want to try to be ahead of the dialogue if you're doing something like a dissertation.
00:19:02
Speaker
Yes. We're too far in with it. You don't want to be too committed to it. Yeah. Because you want to be able to demonstrate that you can be flexible and that you can. You walk around it in the ground and the stuff that like you were saying would stay on the test of time. I'm just lucky that I stood the test of time for my decision. I didn't know it at the time. You dealt well.
00:19:26
Speaker
the trauma history. How was that session? There were three papers that were very, very different from each other. One was very almost accidental in how it came about as she presented it. It was a woman who had been living in northern Italy. My understanding is it was like a teacher exchange that she was teaching
00:19:54
Speaker
there for a short period of time. And this 80 something year old woman just befriended her and decided to tell her stories of the trauma that happened to her and her friends when they were very young. These massacres that happened in the area of Italy that was on the border with Slovenia. And then this became the anthropologists dissertation was this kind of accidental encounter that she started to
00:20:22
Speaker
investigate further and further. So there was very much
00:20:26
Speaker
It was so much more personal than most projects are. I think at some level we want to be distanced. And it gets into the whole are you studying yourself sort of thing. But that, you know, I started out the day in the settler colonialism session with several indigenous archaeologists. So it's hard to critique the one and celebrate the other. But she was talking about witness trees and that this woman
00:20:55
Speaker
showed her essentially family portraits and in the photo albums were portraits of trees and these were the tree in the town that is the witness tree and that when this massacre happened they cut down the witness trees because the trees had witnessed too much.
00:21:12
Speaker
So it was very, very poetic, but I'm not sure how it applies in a general sense to anything that's separate. But witness trees are a specific thing. But we generally don't think of them, we think of them that they stood the test of time, but not that they were a sacred spot that the town would take photos of and speak about. Well, if it's the kind of witness tree where it's the
00:21:36
Speaker
It's like this where the trees... It wasn't intentionally distorted. The only thing she talked about that was intentional is that some of them had dates carved onto them. Okay, because usually when somebody talks about a witness tree, it's the one of the distorted ones where it goes out like that. And those witness trees are all over the place, but those tend to be very different than what she's talking about. Yeah, and again, I didn't have much context other than her 15-minute presentation.
00:22:05
Speaker
And then another graduate student was presenting his work at an occupied prison speaking to the inmates of the prison about how they felt locked in and locked down, but that the prison itself was moving.
Trade Beads & Indigenous Perspectives
00:22:22
Speaker
So very, very kind of different thing as well. So the more traditional one was the
00:22:29
Speaker
looking at what Native Americans in Alabama were doing with trade beads that they would find while walking the fields and turning them into things. That's pretty bad when that is normal. That it was the standard one. But the one person didn't show up, which is John Sable, who does the seances at archaeology sites.
00:22:50
Speaker
So it could have gotten a little differently. I've been looking forward to hearing him talk at some point. I know he always goes to TAG two years ago at NYU. He had three different papers that he submitted for it. I do ghost hunting in my work, but in a metaphorical way. And he does it in a literal way.
00:23:17
Speaker
that he wants archaeologists to collect the stories of the spirits from the spirits, which is a very different thing. So I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to actually get to see and hear from him. But yeah, I think those two, the historical trauma and the settler colonialism, kind of went together in an interesting way. But they were all very personal and very unique. So it's hard to take that work and go home and apply it to what you're doing.
00:23:50
Speaker
I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Because you're speaking? Yes, I am. And we know that will be excellent. And when we'll be speaking as well, so that will be excellent. So that means Saturdays can be the best day, right? Well, I don't know what's in the morning. You're not in the morning, though, right? No, no. And that's where we'll see.
00:24:08
Speaker
Let's see. I don't have a whole lot. Oh, this one looks really interesting. So there's a session here listed. A first nation's elder and an archaeologist walk into a museum. I think it's time to make some changes around here. Re-evaluating perceptions of material culture. So it's got a fun title. Very long. Very long. Very, very long. And something that people have talked about a lot. Yes.
00:24:36
Speaker
So the opening talk is experiences and traditions, artifact interpretation through the perspective of an indigenous elder. So that kind of sets the stage quite a bit for the rest of it, which is something that was very thematic, I think, perspective at the SAA this year, too. So it's good to see a little bit of continuity between the different conferences. Right.
00:25:04
Speaker
And then I have one marked that is the last paper here is things, us and them, affiliative curation of the archaeological record in the digital continuum.
Digital Curation Challenges
00:25:15
Speaker
So that I think should be interesting. I did some work doing some digital curation a number of years ago and I find the choosing in the process of which
00:25:32
Speaker
artifacts are chosen in how to filter through access and what can and can't be shown, especially for things that were obtained historically, or you have to parse out any NAGPRA items. Because generally it's collections that are in for digital creation or those that are not in the general rotation of the exhibit hall. So it'll be interesting to see
00:26:00
Speaker
Oh that goes.
00:26:07
Speaker
where I'm gonna be in the archaeology as resistance session very short title and now what archaeology is resistance that's me to the point I don't need a lot of song and dance I don't need a two line long title there yes it'll be a good one I think that when I have two marked on all of course we did an episode on this
00:26:33
Speaker
In January, one or two, I think, episodes on Trump. But so there's a paper here from Trump to trigger warnings, teaching an engaged archaeology in times of trouble. And that should be kind of fascinating. I hope. That's after bodies at contact zones. So I think more dead bodies will be talked about. Yes.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's a small, fairly intimate conference.
North American Archaeology Focus
00:27:05
Speaker
It's new to me, so it's a pretty good experience. There is a session tomorrow on water, but none of it is North American water. I noticed that. I'm just a die-hard North Americanist. I'll go to things that are general and can be applied, but I don't have the cultural knowledge to relate.
00:27:27
Speaker
deeply understand when you're talking about Crete or when you're, you know, all these other places. I can't know everything so I stick to what I could know very well. I would pretty much agree. And then the last
00:27:45
Speaker
Well, it's not the last session listed. No. I think the one I'm in is the last one. That's it. Right there. Right before the individual abstracts. I am the last thing in the last session. Yes. So the dead and the living, where is the archaeological theory today? Yes. Can you tell us where it is?
00:28:12
Speaker
Well, it's interesting because obviously they're not really talking about where, you know, identifying where it is today in that sense. But there are three different categories of papers in that. One paper is generally on bioarchaeology and mortuary stuff. Another set of papers is on using ethnographic materials, either doing ethnography or somehow using ethnographic materials.
00:28:41
Speaker
that materials and then the third set of papers is on forensic anthropology but forensic archaeology yes not forensic anthropology forensic archaeology and that's not something you think of this theoretical yeah yeah and so that's that's so that's very interesting it's a very different way of looking at it but Zoe Crossland does a lot of that
00:29:05
Speaker
And the other paper that's in that part also does, but does it differently. So it's kind of interesting, it's an interesting contrast. The thing is, is if they were, if they're successful in sort of the kinds of points they wanna make, and it is applied more broadly to forensic anthropology,
00:29:32
Speaker
they're gonna have a problem because those people won't be able to testify in court. There's a specific application it's almost like a technical field and you have to know the standard methods and do it the same way. Otherwise nobody's ever gonna want to use you. And if you're gonna do something new it's got to be
00:29:58
Speaker
So to question some of the basics of it and say it needs these additional theoretical underpinnings,
00:30:06
Speaker
To me, intellectually, that's really interesting. But practically speaking, I wonder if anybody's gonna pay attention to it. Yeah, we'll make everybody put it in their dissertation and then not do it once they do a real, actual forensic case. I mean, and some of the points they raise are totally spot on. I mean, I don't disagree with anything they're saying. It's just that the nature of forensic anthropology is such that they can't afford
00:30:36
Speaker
to do that, so it's an interesting problem. I mean, one of the examples she brings up is, Zoe Crossman brings up, is how suddenly now fingerprints are not the be-all-end-all that everybody thought they were. And that's a great example. And it's not that fingerprints themselves are so bad, it's that we generally don't have complete fingerprints.
00:31:02
Speaker
and how many matches is good and all of that sort of stuff. And so the same sort of way, in the other paper in that forensics section, he cites, the author cites testimony from an archeologist about whether or not these graves were the result of a,
00:31:30
Speaker
you know, a traumatic event or whether it could just be something else. And what's interesting to me is that the person testified couldn't really adequately answer it because he had not done enough work on that specific society.
00:31:50
Speaker
He went in and did what he does, but he didn't know enough to be able to answer detailed questions. So it's intriguing. I mean, it's an interesting problem. Theoretically, it's interesting. Intellectually, it's interesting. Whether anybody will.
00:32:09
Speaker
follow through on it, I don't know. It'll make a lovely edited volume that will cost $200. They're interesting questions. And it raises for me one of the things that makes me crazy that I am going to talk about in my discussion tomorrow, and that is this notion that if we do isotopes or if we do DNA or if we do any of these techniques, you know,
00:32:35
Speaker
that suddenly that data has preference over all other data. That's believable. What you did over here that you spent 30 years doing, not believable, even though you used multiple lines of evidence. This little thing I did over here, that makes everything you did wrong. So what if in a mound we find that an individual wasn't born in that area? Does that really mean that everybody migrated there? Because that's what they're saying.
00:33:06
Speaker
I mean, that is what people are concluding. They're basing it because it takes a lot to do it. So they're basing it on a few skeletons. And it's like there are all kinds of problems with the technique itself, but I'm not even going there. I'm willing to say it's correct.
00:33:22
Speaker
Even if it is, okay, so a person can come somewhere else. And we've all been moving as long as humans have existed or we wouldn't have populated the planet.
Interpreting Migration & Reading Lists
00:33:31
Speaker
We'd all be totally inbred. Exactly. It'd be like the British people in our heat. So say, you know, that's why it just drives me nuts. It's like... And the propensity to migrate personally in my family, like I need to be on the move at all times and most of my family does if ever want to move.
00:33:48
Speaker
We're not a different culture, but I can be found in a different place almost every month. So if I wind up dying in Toronto, does that mean that I was this huge cultural inversion? Or was it just that I was somebody who was sent somewhere to go do something? And that's all. And really if you have, you know, from any of the big sites that we're talking about, we may have hundreds of skeletons.
00:34:15
Speaker
And they're looking at for? Because that's all the money they have, right? Or the samples are only good enough for those. And the DNA stuff has even worse problems. Because there's nothing to compare it to. Yeah, that's the biggest challenge. I mean, I do isotope work, and that's where it's so important to have either a big enough sample size to make those presumptions, which is almost impossible, even with enough money, just because the nature of the evidence. Of course, yeah.
00:34:46
Speaker
just being able, and I think it's important for archaeologists to really be willing and able to admit that they can't predict everything. You can't make these broad sweeping claims about things or a whole population based off of four skeletons. One of my original master's theses that I was going to do, and there were complications kind of going into it, but
00:35:17
Speaker
was looking at a monograph I've read in my undergrad, which I found fascinating, visited the site, realized that there was so much more that could be learned. There was evidence there. The type of analysis that they had done had gotten cheaper. So you could then draw a larger sample and actually say something about it because what they had tried to say sounded, it was very controversial to me, like very
00:35:47
Speaker
And that it really needed to be tested further because that was it. I just really am uncomfortable with the primacy of it. That this takes precedence over everything else. Yeah. But our culture is doing that with the new Ancestry.com commercials that
00:36:06
Speaker
You take one sample and nobody's even really thinking about where does that data come from. So the interpretation for somebody just watching the commercial is that they actually think there's something in your DNA that somehow links to a country. And so when you're doing that with one sample and not thinking about it and then an archaeologist says, I have this one skeleton and this proves something.
00:36:30
Speaker
those two things reinforce each other in popular culture. So if we want to critique Ancestry.com and things like that, we can't keep doing these studies on one skeleton and saying that, oh, this changes everything, and vice versa. And if we're going to critique the one, we have to critique the other.
00:36:49
Speaker
We've been critiquing identity as long as anthropology has existed, and clearly we're not getting anywhere. If people think as soon as you send $100 away, you suddenly need to buy Lederhosen at an Acoma pot, right? Because suddenly you've discovered something that was always there to start with.
00:37:09
Speaker
And not to mention, even if that was accurate, and it did actually pinpoint that, you're only looking at, say, the mitochondrial DNA. That is one branch of one tree of one side. 90% of all of it is not. And it's very misleading, because I'm not even questioning the accuracy.
00:37:29
Speaker
It's accurate, but it's based on a very small proportion and also the population. They don't have that much data on the population to really make it that clear either.
00:37:44
Speaker
If we took the DNA of everybody in Wisconsin and classified that as what Wisconsin is like and then sampled somebody in New York to find out if they were from Wisconsin, how come we don't do that? But we assume that that's accurate for Ireland and Scotland. It's the same thing.
00:37:59
Speaker
So how come Ancestry DNA never comes out with American? How come it never comes out with New Yorker? So there's like a theory underlying it that these other nations are identities and America and New York and Wisconsin are not identities and just that simple thing needs to be challenged. It's true.
00:38:21
Speaker
So identity, posthumanism, theory versus method, application of theory. These are all pretty juicy concepts that are fun to think about. I don't know about you, but I now have a growing reading list that I need to work on this summer. So if you're interested in any of these topics or we're at tag or just have something to say, feel free to contact us on Twitter at womenarchies and on our
00:38:50
Speaker
website. You can find links for our Facebook page, the Twitter handle that I mentioned, and our email address. So don't be shy, we love hearing from you and if you have any ideas for show topics that you'd like to hear or would like to be a guest, we'd love to have you. Thanks again for listening and we hope to hear from you again soon. Bye.
00:39:19
Speaker
We hope you have enjoyed the show. Please be sure to subscribe and rate our show wherever you listen. We are available on iTunes, Stitcher, and probably whatever your favorite podcasting app is. Remember to like and share. If you have questions or comments, you can post them in the comment section for the show at the Women in Archaeology page on the Archaeology Podcasting Network site, or email them to us at womeninarchaeologypodcast.com. This show is part of the Archaeology Podcasting Network,
00:39:47
Speaker
and is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle. You can reach them at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. Music for the show was Retro Future by Kevin MacLeod, available at Incomtep and Royalty Free Music. Thanks for listening.
00:40:07
Speaker
The show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com