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Bro-ing out over Beyesian with Dr. Erick Robinson - Ep 23
338 Plays6 years ago
In this episode we interview Dr. Erick Robinson from Utah State University. The hosts met Dr. Robinson while he was a post-doc under Dr. Robert Kelly at the University of Wyoming. We chat about radiocarbon data, Bayesian analysis, and fun field stories which may or may not have involved Carlton getting more than a “base layer” tan.
Guest
- Erick.Robinson@usu.edu
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- Website: www.alifeinruins.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
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.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to
Episode Introduction and Host Introduction
00:00:25
Speaker
Episode 23 of a Life in Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and today I'm joined by my co-hosts, John Connor and David Ian Howe.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Eric Robinson
00:00:38
Speaker
Our guest tonight is Dr. Eric Robinson, postdoc at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. We are extremely excited to finally have you on a Life in Ruins podcast.
00:00:50
Speaker
Well, thanks very much for having me, guys. It's a pleasure to be here speaking with you all. Yeah, man. It's our extreme pleasure to have you here. Now, for our listeners, we all met Dr.
Postdoctoral Experiences Compared
00:01:00
Speaker
Robinson at the University of Wyoming. He was a postdoc at UW under the prestigious Dr. Robert Kelly.
00:01:09
Speaker
And that's where we got to know him. So I mean, I got to ask right off the bat, Eric, where's it better to be a postdoc at Utah State or at the University of Wyoming? There are just two very different situations, I think. You know, University of Wyoming, I was working on a single project that had an end life to it. So
00:01:27
Speaker
We were funded by the NSF for a first two-year span of time. Unfortunately, we won two other NSFs. So it was a total of a six-year project. So it's just one project, and it has a kind of an end date. And it was Bob's project. At Utah State University, I'm working on two separate projects, a few colleagues here.
00:01:49
Speaker
My main job description here is to do three things. The first is to publish papers. The second is to work with colleagues in the anthropology program and other departments at the university to submit a series of funding proposals.
00:02:06
Speaker
So essentially, while Wyoming was a single project, Utah State were really trying to build a new research program and obtain funding to continue to sustain that program. Other than the professional means everything is very different as well in Logan, between Logan and Laramie. We love both places. So professionally, it's really great. And I can still snowboard.
00:02:36
Speaker
and catch trout in the evenings, which, uh, which I need in my life as well. So which city is warmer? Well, I mean, I could get into the nitty gritty about those kinds of details. It's not a comparison. Logan is much better than Laramie in terms of the weather. There's no doubt. There's no doubt about that. So yeah, it's, uh, you know, I mean, there's one bar in town and Logan, there are one.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah. Um, yeah, dude, he's in Momoland. And so, you know, it's, it's just, it's so socially, it's a very different, you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of faculty members here that have children, young children, like I do. It's, it's almost like night and day comparing my life and Laramie from my life and in Logan. So. Which one has a better grad students that you like to hang out with? That's funny.
00:03:34
Speaker
Well, I enjoy the grad students in both places. I'm not seeing the grad students socially here at Utah State like I did in Laramie. So I think that's really different. My very first semester here, I was teaching all the grad students.
00:04:01
Speaker
And I think if I would have started out in Laramie teaching you guys, you might not have wanted anything to do with me either. So, you know, so obviously you've gotten to like a pretty awesome place in archaeology.
Origins of Interest in Archaeology
00:04:13
Speaker
Where did this, you know, this interest in archaeology kind of come from?
00:04:17
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I can't be one of those people that says since I was a little kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist. You know, my family has land in Northeast Oklahoma, that's on a site that actually William Henry Holmes recorded. It's one of the earliest sites recorded in the state of Oklahoma. It's enormous, Chert Corey complex on the Ozark plateau.
00:04:41
Speaker
My uncle had a really large projectile point collection that he obtained on this land and on the surrounding areas through hunting and things like that. And I love this collection that he had. It was really amazing to see. I was more into the outdoor side of things, but
00:05:01
Speaker
It all really started when I was in high school, I was a debater in high school. And I knew from an early age, about 14, 15, that I wanted to be a researcher. But I really didn't know archaeology could be the vehicle for that. So originally, I wanted to do philosophy and history. And so I go to the University of Kansas to debate on their debate team, which is
00:05:28
Speaker
to really, really nice debate team, one of the best in the country. Go Jayhawks.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Actually, it's funny because the team won in 08 when the basketball team did, and so really the only national champions that they're producing, the team level seems to be debate and basketball actually. So yeah, the summer before my freshman year at the University of Kansas, our debate topic was on development policy in sub-Saharan Africa.
00:06:04
Speaker
So that summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I spent a lot of time doing research that entailed a lot of reading of anthropological literature and economic theory literature. And so I was really influenced by three books during this period of time that really changed my perspective. I didn't even know anthropology was a possibility, really.
00:06:28
Speaker
And so I read, there were three books, Arturo Escobar's, and Cancerine Development, Frederick Ingalls, Origin of the Family, Private Property in the State, and then Jared Diamond's, Gunsters and Steel.
00:06:41
Speaker
And so I changed my major to anthropology immediately. So I always had this long-term interest in understanding why we have social and economic inequalities. It would have been my sophomore year when I took Intro to Archaeology that I finally, I had a really great conversation with a professor there
00:07:03
Speaker
about the material record. And that's really when I discovered that archaeology has such a unique long-term perspective that if I was wanting to understand the evolution of social and economic inequalities from a long-term perspective, it would need to come from archaeology. So really at that point, that's when I really dove into archaeology. So you finished your degree at the University of Kansas and then you
00:07:30
Speaker
Did you take a step across the seats, kind of like finish that, that degree, or did you go somewhere in the U S to kind of take your next step? Yeah.
Academic Journey to a PhD
00:07:41
Speaker
It's part of the strange trajectory, I guess, of all of this. And so I double majored in anthropology and history. I wrote this honors thesis that was in both history and anthropology and
00:07:58
Speaker
I graduated earlier than my best friends and so I was going to just hang out in Lawrence. It's a really awesome place. I was just going to hang out for a year while my friends graduated and I was waiting tables at a restaurant and I graduated and that summer I decided I do not want to wait tables at this restaurant any longer.
00:08:23
Speaker
At that point, I was going to take an extra year to decide whether or not I would go into grad school for archaeology or in grad school for history, because another interest of mine is modern European intellectual history, really the philosophy of science and the developments of criticisms and critiques of scientific methods. And so those were two pathways that I was contemplating
00:08:51
Speaker
But really, at the end of the day, I kind of decided, OK, well, I want to go for these programs in Europe. There were three professors that I potentially wanted to work with. I made this decision that I had had enough of waiting tables in July of after I graduated in May.
00:09:08
Speaker
And I emailed these three professors and I said, hey, you know, is there a way that you're still accepting master's applications? And they all emailed me back and they're like, you know, you're way too late to apply to a master's program that starts in September. But I attached my honors thesis to my email and fortunately one of the professors I emailed emailed me back and said, hey, would you like to come do a PhD?
00:09:32
Speaker
So that was, you know, I wasn't expecting that I was only expected to go over there for for a two year master's program. And it turned into
00:09:41
Speaker
Well, including the postdocs, it turned into a decade. So where I did my PhD was at Sheffield, which is a very well-known, very historic archaeology department. And so Colin Renfrew started the department in the 1960s. And what was your experience at Sheffield as a graduate student? Because you
00:10:04
Speaker
You got your undergrad at KU and then you ended up getting your PhD right at Sheffield. Did you get a master's while you were there or just straight PhD skip that step? Yeah, I skipped my master's. My senior honors thesis was on the
00:10:23
Speaker
Neolithic monuments of southern Britain and I was trained at the University of Kansas. I was really always interested in European archaeology and so I was trained by a Serbian who moved to the University of Kansas a few years before I got there and so I wrote a thesis on the Neolithic of southern Britain and
00:10:48
Speaker
Really, it ties into my central interests, which are, why do human populations decide to aggregate together? And why do they decide to give up hunting and gathering for farming? And at that point, I was really interested in the sort of
00:11:10
Speaker
The way it was a criticism of post-percessualism, basically, my honor's thesis. And so I went to Sheffield to work with two brilliant people on a thesis that was going to answer the question of why we see a delayed spread of agriculture to the wetland and sort of the cold and the wet margins of Northwestern Europe, specifically the
00:11:39
Speaker
the North Sea basin. What like drew you to Europe in general? Are you like interested in like? I wanted to, it was 2004 and I wanted to leave America. For no other reason than to study archaeology, right? Of course. No, so when I was like a teenager, when I was like 13, 14 years old, I started reading European continental philosophy.
00:12:09
Speaker
And it was what I like to read and what I wanted to learn about. So I was always really interested in classical European culture. I lived in my sophomore year as part of the Honors College at the University of Kansas. I spent a semester living in Paris and in Florence, Italy, where
00:12:27
Speaker
we would do art history classes in the Uffizi and the Louvre. And we would spend time in Rome, seeing archaeological sites in Rome. And then I would also, the summer after my junior year in college, I basically
00:12:48
Speaker
hitched buses and hitchhiked around Greece looking at as many archaeological sites as I could. So, you know, I was already really, really just interested in
00:13:00
Speaker
kind of, right, how the trajectory of European culture, right, how the first villages form, how population grows, how you start to get, you know, state level, then empire level sort of groups forming, and how that eventually created the leisure time for
00:13:22
Speaker
you know, as you said it before, bougie, you know, how did, how did someone like Goethe have all of the free leisure time to write beautiful works, right? Like, how did these people actually have these time to develop this time and this leisure time to develop this culture? Well, I mean, there's a there's a fundamental economic element to that, right? Like,
00:13:45
Speaker
Some kid that's some 16 year old kid or well even 16 some 10 year old kid that's working in a coal mine in Yorkshire in England is certainly not going to you know go home in the evening and write beautiful poetry for example. So I think it's just you know that trajectory of just like general interest. So you're interested in like these bigger questions you know like in archaeology in general.
00:14:14
Speaker
Like you're interested in these kind of like, you know, how things develop from like super small scale to like something larger. I would describe it as big history.
00:14:26
Speaker
you know, just the biggest time scales as possible. I'm interested in. Well, good stuff. And we'll get more to this big history here on segment two of the Life Reminds podcast, episode 23. Stay tuned, folks. 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.
00:14:48
Speaker
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So don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com. And look for the link in the show notes to this episode. Welcome back to a Life in Ruins podcast, episode 23, segment two. We're here with Dr. Eric Robinson. And we're going to talk about some stuff. Carlton?
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So as we mentioned in the first segment, Dr. Robinson was a postdoc when we were at University of Wyoming. And, you know, part of our relationship with Eric was he was kind of like an older brother to a lot of us because he wasn't necessarily a grad student, but he wasn't necessarily a professor. Dr. Robinson, I know that your daughter's birthday is June 4th. Do you know how I know that? How? Because that was the date of my thesis. Hi.
00:16:43
Speaker
I'm just remembering that now. I had a great excuse not to be there, didn't I? Honestly, my thesis defense is probably better for you not being there to grill me on all my mathematics. But yeah, Dr. Robinson's baby girl was born on my thesis defense date and Dr. Robinson was a committee member on my thesis and he's continued to hang on to be a committee member on my dissertation. So I'm in it with the long run with old Robrow here.
00:17:13
Speaker
Well, it's great to be in it with you for the long haul, Carlton. Well, thank you, Dr. Robinson. That means a lot. Did you actually get a chance to be at Wyoming while Connor was a student or did you arrive after Connor had left? Connor was there when I came. I might have arrived in his second year, but I know I was there for at least a year that Connor was there. Yeah, we overlapped.
00:17:41
Speaker
I'm so sorry that yet I think he even showed up for my thesis defense, you know, so I'm, I apologize either way because it was a thing that happened. You know, so, you know, bridging off of that. So I remember being good, actually. I don't know about that, but I appreciate it either way. Were you there for mine? I can't remember. It doesn't matter. Okay.
00:18:09
Speaker
I just can't, there were a lot of people, I can't remember. It just happened so fast. Anyway. So in, in general, uh, you know, what, what kind of questions are you asking of the archeological record at this point? Because you obviously went to Sheffield and we're interested in kind of these long time spans coming to the university of Wyoming. Where does that lead you into your, the questions you were asking?
00:18:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, so I did my PhD on the cultural transmission and contact between hunter-gatherers and farmers during the spread of agriculture. So as I went on my PhD, I realized that this was a fundamental sort of ecological problem.
00:18:58
Speaker
where hunter-gatherers had land use systems that were not consistent at all with farming land use systems. And there was a long trajectory of hunter-gatherer adaptation to environmental change.
00:19:11
Speaker
So the two interests that I had was how do you adopt agriculture in a marginal ecosystem? So how do you take wheat that was domesticated in the Near East? So in an arid ecosystem and how do you adopt that into a very different ecosystem on the sort of the wet cold margins of
00:19:34
Speaker
Northern and Northwestern Europe and in that in my postdoc at Ghent University in Belgium, I started doing a lot of work with radiocarbon dates and
00:19:47
Speaker
doing some really high precision work, Bayesian modeling, looking at changes in landscapes from the Late Glacial through the Holocene. So starting to develop methods for integrating environmental and archaeological records. I was continuously, during that postdoc, I was starting to zoom out a lot geographically.
00:20:11
Speaker
Before I got to Wyoming, I published a paper that it was actually critical of the dates as data approach, the use of large radiocarbon data sets as a population proxy. I'm surprised that Bob hired me because I was pretty critical of the approach in the
00:20:30
Speaker
in this paper. But Bob hired me and I came to Wyoming. I discovered that we had some really interesting things already happening with the Wyoming archaeological record, the radiocarbon record specifically, where we see events where hunter-gatherers are potentially intensifying their resource use at periods of time, particularly the middle Holocene. So became really interested in that. And then also started to kind of
00:20:58
Speaker
Look at these larger continental scales of population growth and decline and the first study that we did was kind of harkening back kind of created a bridge between Europe and North America where we reconstructed the population growth rates of hunter-gatherers in Colorado and Wyoming and
00:21:22
Speaker
And we compared those population growth rates to early agriculturalists in Europe.
Comparing Population Growth Rates
00:21:27
Speaker
And what we found was that hunter-gatherer populations are actually growing at greater rates than the earliest agriculturalists in Europe.
00:21:37
Speaker
So at that point, we were starting to compare really large radiocarbon data sets at these intercontinental scales of analysis using these data sets that we kind of haven't ever had access to until very recently and what we were developing, the data sets we were developing involves project. Right. And so for our listeners, the reason why I do Bayesian statistics and use large
00:22:03
Speaker
datasets of radiocarbon is directly because of Dr. Robinson in a class I took where I realized how useful it is. And Bayesian statistics, although it sounds scary, it's like common sense statistics in terms of how you approach a problem and how you weight different forms of evidence. But I actually have a question for you, Dr. Robinson, because I'm interested in terms of how you're calculating energy consumption
00:22:26
Speaker
between hunter-gatherers and farmers? Is this solely based on a radiocarbon date that's given as occupation? And if so, wouldn't one radiocarbon date from an agricultural community, which is comprised of maybe an extended family,
00:22:42
Speaker
consume more energy than a hunter-gatherer camp? Or how are you calculating energy consumption? We first were looking at the radiocarbon record as being able to derive raw relative human population growth rates.
00:23:00
Speaker
Later studies, we kind of had the hunch that there is actually more efficient usage of datable materials in farming societies. Now what that means is that hunter-gatherers will, you know, they have residential mobility systems in which every new camp they have to build a campfire.
00:23:24
Speaker
Whereas in agricultural systems, when you have some new folks that come into the village or a new generation is born, you don't necessarily have to create a new campfire for those groups of people.
00:23:39
Speaker
And so what we identified were these what we would call these scalar relationships between the frequencies of radiocarbon dates and the relative technological and economic complexity of these societies.
00:23:55
Speaker
What we are finding is that there's actually a not a direct one-to-one relationship between the deposition of carbon in the archaeological record and the number of people there were on a site and this is especially the case for for agriculturalists. They're using
00:24:18
Speaker
using energy much more efficiently. And so there's a sublinear relationship actually between the frequency of radiocarbon dates and the actual size of populations, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me it does, but you make me read all these articles so I am forced to understand these concepts that you're talking about.
00:24:42
Speaker
I mean I just want to stress that like the you know the Bayesian side of things really comes into what your question is right and if you have a question that relies on that requires if you're if your research question requires that you have high precision analysis of time high resolution analysis of time
00:25:01
Speaker
then you're not going to get much out of aggregating thousands of radiocarbon dates because your temporal scale of resolution is going to be on centennial scales.
00:25:14
Speaker
not on decadal scales, not on really fine human generational scales. So that's where we really want to use Bayesian approaches is that we can add in all kinds of other prior information, right? Non-archaeological information, we can use the expert
00:25:34
Speaker
knowledge of the excavators and what the stratigraphy is, we can basically formalize the calibration of radiocarbon dates according to these models that we can add all these other information in and we can construct the models with other non-radiocarbon based information.
00:25:56
Speaker
In a way, I mean, these approaches are sometimes seen as contradictory, but they're really not. They can be complementary. And again, it all goes back to what your research question is and what the temporal scale you're interested in is. So I totally know what Bayesian statistics are, totally. I'm not lying. What are Bayesian statistics for the audiences listening? Because I totally know. In 1761,
00:26:25
Speaker
There was a guy in Scotland in the 18th, there was a guy in Scotland in the 1800s and he was in the clergy and he was a Reverend, Reverend Thomas Bayes and he was interested in a proposition that was created by the philosopher David Hume about miracles. David Hume published a thing in 1840 or 1748 about called On Miracles and Thomas Bayes
00:26:52
Speaker
basically said, how can I prove that an event is a miracle if I was not there? Now, we didn't have the computational power to seize upon the mathematics, the Bayes theorem that he created.
00:27:10
Speaker
The easiest way to think about it is this, is that classical statistics work from hypotheses. So if you think about what a normal distribution is, what an exponential distribution is, right? You fit the model to your data. So you go from a hypothesis to a conclusion, right? You go from basically looking at a cause to then
00:27:40
Speaker
thinking about its effects. Bayesian analysis is the exact opposite of classical statistics where it works from data
00:27:51
Speaker
back to hypotheses. It works from looking at the effects of something back to an inference of the cause. So if you just think about deductive reasoning, classical statistics are carried out within a deductive approach. You're working from a hypothesis to the data. Whereas with Bayesian statistics, you're doing the opposite. You are working inductively
00:28:18
Speaker
And so you're working from the data and working up and inducing a causal effect, if that makes sense. And so, I mean, what we use this for in archaeology is for us to, again, the radiocarbon date is not a date. It's an age estimate based on how much C14 is left in the sample, right, is remaining in the sample.
00:28:48
Speaker
we have to make that a calendar date and we make that a calendar date through using this thing called the radiocarbon calibration curve.
00:28:57
Speaker
Well, that curve is complicated. It creates a series of very, very complicated calendar dates where we don't get a simple normal distribution of a date. We get these very funky kinds of dates with really large errors sometimes. And so where Bayesian statistics comes in, it's really valuable, is it enables us to constrain
00:29:22
Speaker
the calibration process itself and try to further refine the way that we produce chronologies because if we're not structuring the way that we calibrate dates, if we don't formalize, create a formal model for the way that we construct our chronologies, then we're always going to overestimate the span of our targeted event that we want to date.
00:29:50
Speaker
So you're basically asking archaeologists to deal with the uncertainty, you know, using a sort of model that can deal with the uncertainty because a lot of people are, we're dating things in a way that has uncertainty.
00:30:07
Speaker
You're on point so we basically use uncertainty to our benefit to our advantage right we embrace uncertainty right rather than right rather than neglect like sort of neglect or forget about uncertainty. We actually use uncertainty to our own advantage and what we argue you know what the what the.
00:30:26
Speaker
The real benefit of this approach is that you get to include all kinds of other information. You get to use your expert opinion of typology, stratigraphy, all kinds of other processes going on at the site that you observe as you excavate it that you can use to say that's not a good date or this date is related to
00:30:50
Speaker
This period of occupation. I know it because the projectile points are different right and it's a different shaped house or
00:30:58
Speaker
you know, whatever that diagnostic information that you have is. And so, in a way, it enables you to use your expert information, to use all of your other toolbox of knowledge to try to better get at what the real targeted span of occupation that you're interested in was. Yeah, I think like when Dr. Robinson is talking about refining chronologies, what's important about that is gaining precision into
00:31:28
Speaker
when archaeological cultures occurred, when they disappeared, because the more precise your timeframes are for different events in the past, you can more accurately tie those into environmental factors or other regional culture changes to have a better grasp and understanding of past human behavior and how different populations
00:31:55
Speaker
Globally, or even, you know, you know, maybe not necessarily globally but regionally interacted with each other like, you know, for instance, I use Bayesian to figure out when farmers moved into the central Great Plains and a big aspect of that is figuring out, okay, did they
00:32:10
Speaker
immigrate into the Great Plains because of the collapse of Cahokia? Because that's, you know, that's, that's a very important question to know, you know, Cahokia collapses around the 13th century. And so we start seeing maize farmers come up in the central plains across the Missouri.
Bayesian Statistics and Radiocarbon Dating Discussion
00:32:26
Speaker
So having precise chronologies is critical to understanding the archaeological record, understanding human behavior. And what else is critical is wrapping up this segment
00:32:39
Speaker
And so we will be back with segment three of a life ruins podcast here with Dr. Eric Robinson. 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 arc pod net dot com slash shop for a link. That's arc pod net dot com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:33:06
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 23. We have Dr. Eric Robinson hanging out with us, chatting. You talked about, in general, transitioning from British archaeology or being across the pond to American archaeology. We're interested in how that difference manifests itself in terms of the fieldwork.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah. Um, so the field works really, really different. That is the, is the first, uh, the first answer. So I started doing field work in Belgium in 2006, um, is basically universities run, um, CRM work there. And they were doing a series of, um, extensions to the Antwerp Harbor. So we're talking, you know,
00:34:02
Speaker
20 meter by 50 meter block excavations and so really really large excavations with really large sort of palimpsest problems
00:34:15
Speaker
Basically, these are deflated sites on late Pleistocene sand dune systems. You have Mesolithic sites that have maybe 2,000, 3,000 years worth of occupation. You can tell from relationships between the diagnostic artifacts immediately. They shouldn't be at the same level together, but they are.
00:34:42
Speaker
you know, it was really different. And then, you know, you go to, I was fortunate enough to be a tourist with friends that were excavating at Stonehenge. That is a landscape that, you know, is really, really shallow. I mean, you're down, you know, a few centimeters, a few tens of centimeters and you're at the chalk that you're sitting on. And the chalk is what people would excavate into to create the large hinge monuments in that landscape.
00:35:12
Speaker
And so, you know, caffeinomically, uh, you know, in terms of sedimentation processes, all of that stuff's very, very different to Western North American fieldwork, where, you know, the first site I was on when I came to Wyoming was Alm Shelter. That's just this beautiful,
00:35:34
Speaker
stratified rock shelter that has 13,000 years of, well, 12,000, give or take thousand years of occupation, you know, um, like a layer cake. And I mean, you never get something like that in, in, in the areas of Europe that I've worked in before. So. Wait, wait, wait, on rock shelter was the first place you dug in the United States.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Yeah, for sure. Eric's first quad takes on like a whole nother level of meaning outside of just the sarcasm. Yeah, the first US quad for sure.
00:36:09
Speaker
So yeah, you didn't do a field school here in Kansas? No, I did survey work on historic cemeteries. So because I all my work in in undergrad, I mean, I did I had such a full load and I was doing summer classes at like Berkeley and I did some classes in Reno one year and
00:36:30
Speaker
So, no, I never did a field school. That's my biggest regret, actually, is the people that I could have learned from at the University of Kansas in the field. I mean, there's some amazing field archaeologists in North America that are there that I just didn't, I never had the opportunity to learn from. So, yeah. What cheat code did you enter to skip a field school, skip a master's, and go into a PhD program where you didn't have to take any extra classes?
00:37:05
Speaker
I mean, there's probably a cheat code involved. I mean, I would just say, you know, I don't know if you can.
00:37:15
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know. I can I can write okay, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, you know, it's it's a it's a weird story, you know, and then I'm in Europe and I'm I'm doing all kinds of archival work and going to all these collections and doing all this recording and working across two different languages. I mean, fortunately, everyone speaks English. But, you know, the literature that I was reading and
00:37:45
Speaker
all of that. I mean, it's just been a crazy, crazy diverse experience that I think a cheat code is a good way to
00:37:54
Speaker
It's probably a good way to describe it. So I'm very lucky and very fortunate. Absolutely. And you've also got to like run a couple of research projects in the state. There is one in the red desert of Wyoming where it was like an experimental archaeology study of like caloric return rates based on the seasonality of biscuit root growing. Any great nuggets of information from that experience?
00:38:19
Speaker
Well, yeah, we, we got some really cool results from that. I mean, that that project was kind of carried on from work that we saw this like,
00:38:28
Speaker
interesting growth of populations in the middle hole scene in Wyoming. And we saw the, you know, pit house villages forming in the middle hole scene in Wyoming. And for the longest time, people had seen all these ground stone collections. And we know that ground stone increased during the middle hole scene. And people always just assumed that, you know, people were using these ground stone tools to process seeds, for instance.
00:38:54
Speaker
Well, seeds have really, really low caloric return, and why weren't they potentially processing geophytes? And so the funding that I got on that project was for us to go out into the field and collect modern geophyte assemblages that can be used as a reference collection to then use to assess groundstone collections and try to obtain starch granule data
00:39:23
Speaker
off of archaeological collections of ground stone to try to understand whether or not these ground stone materials were being used for actually geophyte processing.
00:39:34
Speaker
What kind of geophytes? So geophytes are kind of larger producing in general. I mean, could you explain what geophytes are? Yeah, underground storage organs. So basically all the storage is below ground. So roots, think of tubers and roots. And so what you had is that specifically the species was Simonacteris bulbosis.
00:40:03
Speaker
that we were interested in. It has really, really high caloric return rates that we were looking for. We knew that they were on the surface around where this archaeological site that was excavated in the early 2000s was. It's actually spring onion or spring parsley is the sort of informal term of this specific species. So biscuit root, spring parsley, things like that.
00:40:32
Speaker
And, you know, when we did that, I decided to kind of throw the people into a collecting exercise as well, where we went out and tried to dig, see how quickly we could and how many of these
00:40:50
Speaker
these spring parsley plants we could obtain in a limited amount of time, which led to a fateful adventure for Carlton. But we got some good data out of it, so thank you, Carlton. Is this the extreme sunburn situation that Carlton went through? Yeah, I think Carlton
00:41:12
Speaker
He didn't do his research on the Red Desert. I don't know. And so we go out there and he's wearing a tank top. And I'm like, Carlton, you should not be wearing that tank top here. We're pretty high elevation and we're pretty, we're a lot closer to the sun. And it was a really nice day. And I remember Carlton told me, he's like, what part, what was the, what's a very,
00:41:42
Speaker
frat-tastic term you used. I was like, I'm on summer vacation, bro. I had my tank top on and my six inch in seam shorts. Like I was wearing short shorts. And you said, actually you said that you were working on your base layer. That's actually, that's it. I was working on my base layer. And I'm like, I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm so happy. This is like an informal project and you volunteered, you know, and all of this stuff. And so, so we like,
00:42:11
Speaker
We like did this and you know within like two hours Like I'm touching you and you know your shoulder and like, you know it's super white when it comes off and you're already super burned and then it would the funny maybe the funniest thing was actually like you're not only got that bad summer, but we went back to camp and
00:42:32
Speaker
And you didn't like bring a jacket. You didn't have like, I have a photograph of you with a blanket draped around you. And you're like, well, we're in the desert. I thought we were going to the desert. And I'm like, well, it gets really cold in the desert at night, man. Like, it's really cold here. So you had to just be in this massive pain and the
00:42:50
Speaker
And then the second day, we had to go to a site east of where we were the first day. So it's south of Wamsutter and sprawling metropolis of Wamsutter. And I remember we were meeting a BLM person at the loves. And I kind of said, how are you doing today? And like slapped you on the back and you just like winced really hard.
00:43:19
Speaker
And I could tell it was not, you were, you were keeping it to yourself, right? You were, you're being really tough about it. I mean, props to you for that. Um, but then you texted me like after we finished the work and a couple of days later you texted me and it's not a very good result, was it?
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah, I remember like at the end of that first day, we were like checking something out. And I was like, I remember every time my skin was in sunlight, it hurt. And I was like, oh, that's odd. And then went to bed uncomfortably because I also forgot a pillow. Like I was not prepared to camp at all. Gosh, man. And I was like, my shoulders really hurt. And then the next day I looked down and there was like my shoulders recovered in these huge blisters. And I was like, oh, fuck.
00:44:03
Speaker
And I was like, kept it to myself. And then we stopped at that gas station. Wham said, I was like, all I needed some aloe vera, bro. So I bought myself some aloe vera and went behind the truck to put on my shoulders. And the second it touched my shoulders, I started like crying how bad it hurt. Oh, no, like this is bad. And just kept it to myself. And I remember when I was putting on my backpack as we met the BLM agent, I just heard this like,
00:44:28
Speaker
squishing sound of my shoulders popping and just searing pain and like trying not to cry and almost biting through my tongue. And now I wear sunscreen. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I guess when you grow up, you know, as pasty as I am, you always have to be prepared, you know, in that way. And I, we know folks that don't wear sunscreen, um, you know, the field. And so, uh,
00:44:55
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you were one of the unlucky ones that day. And that story has resurfaced itself as part of, you wrote recommendation letters for me. And I remember, and you didn't tell me this, but I was at field work with who's my advisor now.
00:45:13
Speaker
She was giving the sunscreen lecture. He told you that's amazing. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe he told you. And he's like, yeah, you should wear sunscreen no matter how cold it is. Right, Carlton? I was like, yeah, of course. I had no idea what he was talking about. And after later, I was like, why did you call me out on the sunscreen? He was like, oh, your friend Eric Robinson mentioned you had a bad sunscreen incident when you were working with him. I was like, that son of a bitch.
00:45:39
Speaker
That's amazing. Yeah. So I actually, I was thinking about sending you the reference, but then, you know, you usually don't do that. So I didn't, I didn't send you the reference. And I kind of, I quibbled back and forth about it with my wife actually. And at first she was like, that was not smart, Eric. What are you doing? And I'm like, no, you have to speak to the character of the individual as well. Right. And I think it was a show of character. Like you didn't, you were in massive
Advice for Archaeology Students
00:46:03
Speaker
pain, you know, you, you made a fatal flaw, but you kept on working, man. And you worked hard. And so
00:46:09
Speaker
You know, I appreciated that and I think that if, you know, as you guys know, grad school is not easy and you can't have someone whinging about. So that's a good trait to articulate to the people getting to accept you, you know, or going to accept you.
00:46:27
Speaker
I was more worried about not giving you the immediate gratification of saying, I told you so, to putting on sunscreen more than was anything about suffering it out. I didn't want to see that smirk on your face like, well, Carlton, this is why you wear sunscreen.
00:46:42
Speaker
I love, I love it that you guys are, you know, you know, we all have those fatal flaws. Like you were mentioning that Carlton just, he just went with it, man, you know, and that's, that's a testament to his personality in general, you know, like he, he deals with shit, you know, so respect to Carlton. Exactly.
00:47:03
Speaker
If I wanted, if I wanted a, if I was to pick a grad student that I would try to recruit in, I would want someone that if they had something bad to them, happen to them, first they would make some smart ass joke about it. And second, they would, you know, they would grit their teeth and get on with it. You know, that's, that's, that's respect worthy there. So, so I'm, I'm happy you didn't, that you got in and everything is good.
00:47:31
Speaker
It would have been a different story if you wouldn't have, I guess, so. Yeah, man. I mean, thank you so much, Eric. And as we're closing, you know, the final couple minutes of this interview, you know, we're in a.
00:47:43
Speaker
A really bad economy right now, as we all know, who's in the academic world, grants are being postponed and the job market shrinking. And I mean, what advice can you give grad students and undergrads for kind of the coming decades? I mean, you've been around the block a while. Like if you were to give one golden nugget of advice, what would that be?
00:48:03
Speaker
Leverage the inherent flexibility of the skills you've been taught. You are not restricted to a one-track career track. What we learn in archaeology, and particularly with modern graduate programs, right, where you're going to learn, you're going to learn R, you're going to learn really good statistical analysis techniques. You're going to learn how to write really well, right? Your critical thinking skills are good.
00:48:34
Speaker
This time, more than anything, shows that the structures on which our social, you know, socio-economy of this country and the world actually are developed are overly rigid, are not adaptable.
00:48:48
Speaker
And the people that can flexibly leverage the skill sets that they have are the ones that are going to come out on top. So to all of the undergraduates and graduates in archaeology, your skill set is much wider than you think it is. You can go and you can be a really good writer.
00:49:14
Speaker
business leaders today are saying that some of the most important skill sets that you need to have are critical thinking skills, the ability to write clearly, the ability to isolate a problem, and then know how to attack that problem. So, you know, I think
00:49:35
Speaker
I think that archaeology teaches a lot wider skill set than we get credit for and I think that students need to feel confident that they can kind of move outside of the profession and they can be successful.
00:49:51
Speaker
Well, on that note, thank you for that beautiful note to all our undergraduates and graduates who are out there. Dr. Robinson, you know, kind of reflecting back on your career, would you choose this career from here on out? We always ask this question, like, would you choose to live your life in ruins?
00:50:11
Speaker
Absolutely.
Career Reflections in Archaeology
00:50:13
Speaker
The guy who, if you've seen the HBO series True Detective, the guy who wrote that was once asked, I think it's, I've said this before to people, this guy was once asked, like, what would your advice be to young writers? And he said, only do this if it's the only thing you can see yourself doing, because it's going to be really hard. And you're going to need to be able to get through the hard times. And
00:50:38
Speaker
I'm sitting here right now, I can't reinvent a trajectory for myself. I would be doing the exact same thing if I had to do it all over again. One thing I'm so fortunate for and so grateful for is the diversity of experiences that I've had in this field. Getting to work in Europe, the people that I've worked with, the people that I've been exposed to, the students I've been exposed to,
00:51:07
Speaker
The diversity of that has enriched me a thousand fold and I thank you guys for my interactions with you. I think everyone out there because I wouldn't be who I am without you guys and without everyone I've encountered in this great field. So, you know, got to take things one step at a time. You got to focus on the present moment and enjoy it.
00:51:32
Speaker
And yeah, gotta know that if you had to do it over again, you'd do the same thing. And I absolutely would. My first days in Sheffield, I was questioning what my choice was, but I met my wife on the first day that I was there. And it's the kind of situation where it's like, well, you gotta stick in with this, right? And make the best of it and make the most of it.
00:51:58
Speaker
I'm very, very thankful and grateful that I did. So. Well, awesome. Do you hear to hear folks? That made no fucking sense. You heard it here, folks. You know, today we just interviewed Dr. Eric Robinson, postdoc here at Utah State University and mentor to many of us here at the Life Ruins podcast. And with that, we are out.
00:52:29
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So what is the most common explanation, you know, for Stonehead in general?
00:52:52
Speaker
Did the aliens built it? They rolled it in on logs. That's accurate, but they chalk it up to ceremony. Yeah, that's that's I mean, that's a screamer right there.
00:53:17
Speaker
See you guys next week. Thanks guys.
00:53:36
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:53:56
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.