Rogers Archaeology Lab

What Everyone Asked Our Curators on #AskACurator Day

By: Meghan Mulkerin, Collections Specialist and Research Scientist Contractor

We participated in #AskACurator Day on Twitter on September 17, 2014. Did you miss the conversation? I created a Storify of each Curator's hour on Twitter, which you can read by clicking on the links at the end of this post. Enjoy! 

    Hey everyone! Thanks for participating with us in Ask A Curator Day on Twitter last week! Over 700 museums all around the world participated; wow! We had a great time answering your questions. All five curators who participated with us @ArchaeologyLab were new to Twitter, and enjoyed seeing how it worked. In order to facilitate the conversation without each one having to become an expert at Twitter, I sat with each curator during their hour and helped them craft their answers down to a "twitter-able" size. At the beginning a few expressed doubt that they would be able to get their answers into the right format, but by the end of the hour all of the curators were growing more confident and enjoying sharing their answers with you!

    It was especially fun for me to have an hour to chat with them in person, even if I was busy transcribing the stories they were telling me! For example, while we were waiting for a question, I asked Sabrina Sholts how she had gotten tapped for such an interesting project as CT scanning a wet-specimen gorilla her first week here! It all happened because she came in during one snowy day when almost no one else was in (she moved here from Sweden and is from Minnesota; DC snow does not scare her!) only to find a fellow Scandinavian, Bruno Frohlich, also in the office. After I had written down her story while she talked, I showed her how we can break up stories like this into separate tweets, and tell a longer story live on Twitter. 

    Later in the afternoon with Dennis Stanford, I was laughing with delight as he detailed the complex partnerships that enabled him to pursue his research goals in an amazing experimental archaeology project. It involved butchering an elephant (Ginsberg died of natural causes at the Boston Zoo, and his body was donated to the Smithsonian) with only bone and stone tools, like our ancestors in the paleolithic would have done, to better understand wear patterns on ancient tools. It read like a joke: so an archaeologist, a NASA engineer, and an FBI ballistics analyst walk into a bar... Seriously amazing.

    From Ives Goddard, I learned about his amazing work on the Meskwaki Dictionary (you can listen to him read a translation of a Meskwaki story here). During Igor Krupnik's hour, we all got to hear about his "wow" moment during fieldwork in the Arctic. Bill Billeck shared some interesting stories about the repatriation process and Sitting Bull. I could go on, but I will let you read for yourself; don't forget to click on the storify links for each Curator's hour below!

    By the end of the day, I was exhausted. I had barely left my desk all day, and my fingers were getting clumsy on the keyboard, but it didn't matter. I had such a great time working to share these amazing people and their stories with you on Twitter. It is one of the reasons that I love working here, we have great people with fascinating passions that they love to share. We hope you enjoyed talking with us. Remember, here at the Smithsonian, every day is Ask a Curator Day. You can follow many of the scientists and departments here at NMNH on Twitter. 

 

Read the Storifys of all the questions our Curators answered! 

Dr. Ives Goddard- Senior Emeritus Linguist

Dr. Sabrina Sholts- Physical Anthropologist

Dr. Igor Krupnik- Arctic Ethnologist 

Dr. Dennis Stanford- Paleo-Indian Archaeologist 

Dr. William Billeck- Anthropologist in NMNH's Repatriation Office

#AskACurator

Hey everyone! We're participating in Ask a Curator Day tomorrow, and I've gathered together five of our anthropolgists who are ready to be questioned! They will each be available for about an hour, see times below. They are each specialists in various areas of Anthropology; we've got all four fields represented, including linguistics, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. We also have anthropologist, Bill Billeck, who will be available to answer questions about museum anthropology and the process of Native North American repatriation. 

To ask a question, tag us "@archaeologylab" and include the hashtag #AskACurator in your question. 

9:30-10:30 am: Ives Goddard - Senior Linguist Emeritus

Ives Goddard is a Linguist, who is a specialist in Algonquian languages. Ives has also worked on endangered languages and language revitalization. He serves as the linguistic editor and technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians. He has researched the origins of now perjorative terms referring to Native Americans, including "red-skin" and "squaw", as well as the types of knowledge lost when a language dies out.

Don't miss his reading of his translation of a Meskwaki story by Alfred Kiyana: "The Married Couple: the Man Whose Wife Was Wooed By a Bear,"

 

10:30-11:30 am: Sabrina Sholts – Curator in Physical Anthropology

Sabrina Sholts is a Curator in the Department of Anthropology at NMNH. She is a physical anthropologist with a special interest in the potential effects of environmental pollutants on skeletal growth, development, and health. She has also worked with Dr. Dennis Stanford (see our 3pm slot below) on the manufacture of Clovis stone points.

Dr. Sholts is our newest Curator in the Department; be sure to ask her about all of the cool things she's done since arriving here (hint: it involves great apes).

 

2:00-3:00 pm: Igor Krupnik - Curator of Arctic Ethnology

Igor Krupnik is a cultural anthropologist and has studied the impacts of climate change, preservation of cultural heritage, and ecological knowledge of Arctic indigenous people, such as in the book “SIKU: Sea Ice Knowledge and Use: Documenting Inuit Knowledge of Sea Ice.” He is interested in bringing socio-cultural and humanities issues, ecological knowledge, and environmental observations of polar indigenous people to the forefront as we discuss climate change.

He has done extensive fieldwork in Alaska, the Bering Sea region, and along the Russian Arctic coast. Dr. Krupnik has published and edited several books and collections, including three volumes on indigenous observations of Arctic environmental change, and served as the lead curator for the Smithsonian exhibit “Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely” (2006).

 

3:00-4:00 pm: Dennis Stanford – Curator of Paleo-Indian Archaeology

Dennis Stanford is an archaeologist and world renowned expert on Paleo-Indian stone tools, especially Clovis and Folsom tools. He is well-known as one of the leading proponents of the Solutrean hypothesis, which suggests that Europeans may have been among the first settlers of North America.

He is interested in the origins and development of New World Paleo-Indian cultures in relation to changing climate and ecosystems during the terminal Pleistocene, interdisciplinary Quaternary studies, stone tool technology, and experimental and public archaeology. He has conducted field work in Siberia, China, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains, Plains and Southeastern States; he has also worked in Central and South America as well as Southwestern Europe.

Dennis conducts fieldwork and research on Paleoindian archaeology throughout the Americas with special attention to human-environmental interactions and material culture. He enjoys producing exhibitions and public programs, as well as preparing scholarly and popular publications, and films.

4:00-5:00 pm: William Billeck - Program Manager, Repatriation Office and Case Officer for the Plains

Bill Billeck works for the Repatriation Office at the National Museum of Natural History, which works with Native American communities to repatriate human remains and objects to the tribes. This is a very complicated process that involves deep anthropological and museum collections research, to identify remains, burial goods, and objects of cultural patrimony. You can learn more about what the Repatriation Office does here.

He is interested in the study of the technology, manufacture, variation, and temporal distribution of glass trade beads in North America

Seriously Amazing Women: Dr. Briana Pobiner

This article is part of the Seriously Amazing Women series of interviews with women curators and scientists in the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The interviews were conducted during March 2014 in honor of Women's History Month (#WomensHistoryMonth on Twitter). 

    When you've been around the Natural History Museum any time at all, you realize that most  people have been here for more than 20 years. What can we say; people love it here and stay! We have phenomenally productive staff members who have worked with the Smithsonian for over 40 years, and since scientific knowledge is cumulative and is the work of a lifetime, this is a great thing. Dr. Briana Pobiner is a part of a new generation of anthropologists in the museum. In her eight years at NMNH, she has brought scientifically valuable collections to the museum, continued important research on the evolution of the human diet, been an integral part of the team that put up the Human Origins exhibit, and made an impact in public science education!  

Briana Pobiner eating a termite in the field in South Africa for a video in the Hall of Human Origins. Credit: Chedd-Angier Production Company / Richard Lewis Media Group

    Dr. Pobiner currently is directing a really cool NSF-funded project to provide teachers and students with better materials that use human examples to teach evolution in Advanced Placement high school biology classes; she hopes to expand to general biology since that is the last time many adults will learn about evolution during their formal education! Briana is also the mom of an adorable two-year old, named Toby (Tobias Rex), and I was eager to hear her perspective on this recent life change and how she was balancing family with work-life. Briana and her husband have a lot in common; he is also very involved with biology and teaches human and animal skeletal anatomy, physiology and histology. Little T. Rex is quickly learning that mommy and daddy work with bones, and was very excited about his namesake arriving at the museum on April 15th! 

Briana and Toby visit the T. rex room at the National Museum of Natural History. Image Credit: Kay Behrensmeyer

Briana has not shied away from working in the field underscoring “that life and work intersect at all times in a woman’s career.” Go, Briana! We hope you enjoy this Women’s History Month interview. Please let us know if you have questions or comments for Dr. Pobiner. 

Briana in the field in Kenya. Image Credit: Kris Kovarovic.

Dr. Briana Pobiner: Research Scientist and Museum Educator for the Human Origins Program in the Anthropology Department of the National Museum of Natural History.

Years at the Smithsonian: Eight and a half years. 

Primary Research Focus: Her research centers on the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat-eating), but has included topics as diverse as cannibalism in the Cook Islands and chimpanzee carnivory. She has done fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Indonesia. In addition, she also leads the Human Origins Program’s education and outreach efforts and manages the Human Origins Program's public programs, website content, social media, and exhibition volunteer training.

Videos with Briana Pobiner:

Interview Sections: 

1. Public Education
2. Collections Work, Research and Exhibits at the Natural History Museum
3. Starting a Career in Anthropology and Stories from Fieldwork
4. Being a Woman in Science with a Family
5. Advice for Students
6. Personality Questions
7. What Briana Wants You to Know About Science

Public Education

Meghan Mulkerin (hereafter: M): Hello, I’m here with Dr. Briana Pobiner in the Human Origins Program in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. Hello Briana!

Briana Pobiner (hereafter: P): Hello, Meghan.

M: What is your job title?

P: Right now it’s research scientist and museum educator.

M: What does museum education involve?

Briana teaching the next generation of physical anthropologists! Image Credit: Human Origins Program.

P: In particular, what I do for museum education is everything from running public programs for the Human Origins initiative to maintaining and updating our website, our social media accounts, volunteer training, and larger education efforts. I’m doing a big project with high school teachers right now.

M: That’s really interesting, what kind of project with teachers?

P: So in the project I’m doing with teachers we are using human examples to teach basic evolutionary principles in high school biology classes. And the main hypothesis of the project is that students will be more interested in and therefore potentially better understand evolution, if it relates directly to them.

M: How long have you been doing this kind of work at the Smithsonian?

P: That project is in the second year of a three year project. But I’ve been at the Smithsonian for about eight and a half years.

Collections Work, Research and Exhibits at the Natural History Museum

Briana in the field doing survey work with Curator, Rick Potts. Image Credit: Human Origins Program.

M: What kind of collections work have you been doing lately? You mentioned that you’re also a research scientist.

P: I am and interestingly enough, I have my own collection that I started when I was a graduate student that is now here at the Smithsonian. It has recently been cleaned and is getting organized; I’m actually putting it into storage in the cabinets right outside my office. So it’s taken a little bit of time, but it’s finally now getting properly organized and curated.

M: And what kinds of things does this collection tell you?

P: This collection is made up of modern African animal bones that carnivores have chewed. A lot of my research has to do with the evolution of human diet, especially meat eating. So these bones can tell me the pattern of damage by different kinds of African carnivores. I can look back in the fossil record and I can see if I can find those damage patterns on fossil bones from collections where we also know the early humans were eating animals. To basically [find out] what kinds of carnivores were they competing with.

Briana looks for damage patterns on animal bones in the field. Image Credit: Kris Kovarovic.

M: Oh very interesting! So have you heard anything about Raymond Dart and all of that during your education? Was that part of your development as an Anthropologist?

P: Yeah, certainly! I think the beginning of the Osteodontokeratic culture, or the bone-tooth-horn culture, which Raymond Dart came up with, [was] the idea [that] our earliest ancestors were sort of these blood-thirsty early humans that were wielding all these tools to kill animals.

Example of a 1.5 million year old fossil bone from Kenya with stone tool cut marks. Image Credit: Briana Pobiner. 

And interestingly a lot of the broken animal bone fossils that were found in those earliest excavations in South Africa in the 1920’s and 30’s, we’re now realizing were probably just carnivore chewed assemblages.

An example of a carnivore-chewed assemblage. These bones are the remains of a Thomson's gazelle eaten by a lion in Kenya. Image Credit: Briana Pobiner.

M: So it wasn’t actually humans doing anything at all to each other, for instance like Dart hypothesized [about cannibalism].

P: Exactly, that’s right.

M: What do you consider to be the biggest accomplishments of your career so far here?

P: I would say the biggest accomplishment would be [that] I worked on the team that developed the Hall of Human Origins, which opened in 2010. That will probably be one of my biggest career accomplishments throughout my whole career. It was an amazing exciting, crazy, intense process, and it was… it was wonderful.

Hall of Human Origins under construction during installation of specimens. Image Credit: Chip Clark/National Museum of Natural History

M: And that’s a permanent exhibit?

P: It’s a permanent exhibit; the most recent permanent exhibit to open here at the Natural History Museum. It opened in 2010, and we have a commitment for the exhibit to remain open for 25 years.

M: Oh wow. And what’s your favorite part of that exhibit?

Briana's favorite part: the skull wall in the Hall of Human Origins at NMNH. Image Credit: Chip Clark/National Museum of Natural History

P: Oh, that’s a good question. Probably the display of 76 exact replicas of early human fossils, that we call our skull wall. It’s this amazing array of evidence. My second favorite thing would have to be right across from it, is actually a real Neanderthal skeleton. To be actually able to exhibit real fossils, I think is really exciting.

M: That is really exciting! What was the most challenging part about putting that exhibit together?

The skull wall waits for the specimens to be installed. Image Credit: Chip Clark/National Museum of Natural History

P: The most challenging part was that in order actually get all of the objects for the exhibit—most of them are replicas—it involved reaching out to colleagues across the world, in order to find the particular person or the institution who does the casting; creating Memorandums of Understanding across museums. The hardest part was just really to get all the objects, because we’re trying to display as much as we can of the entirety of human evolution. So it’s not just the research that we do, but it’s really about the world’s wealth of evidence on human evolution.

Starting a Career in Anthropology and Stories from Fieldwork

M: How did your career here get started; how did you get this job? Tell us about what you started doing when you first got here.

Briana in the field with a Smithsonian research vehicle. Image Credit: Human Origins Program

P: Sure, it’s a great story. I got this job based on an encounter with my current boss, Rick Potts, at a photocopy shop in Nairobi, in Kenya. So we knew each other for a while and the long story short is he was looking for somebody with a particular set of skills, to do various things including work on this exhibition and I had that skill set. So it was being in the right place at the right time, in essence, with the right tools, under my belt; but I started here as a pre-doctoral fellow and then a post-doctoral fellow. I was finishing my dissertation, but I really came to help work on this exhibition. I had no training in exhibitions beforehand; no background in museum studies, so it was kind of trial by fire, but I spent about three and a half years doing that, and after that I transitioned into my current job where I am doing a mix of continuing to do my scientific research but really taking on a lot of these education and outreach responsibilities.

M: Have you had a lot of interaction with the larger Smithsonian collections? You said you made your own collection but have you found anything really interesting in our existing collections?

P: I haven’t had as much of a chance to do that, but some collections that I’ve worked with are actually in the Paleobiology Department, some of Dr. Kay Behrensmeyer’s collections, who’s a curator in Paleobiology. She has done some similar studies of carnivore chewed bones, but also bones that have been weathered on the surface, and thinking about different process that happen to bones as they become fossils.

M: That’s really interesting. How do bones become fossils?

P: If you want to become a fossil, the first thing you should probably do is get buried. So burials are really a key part of becoming a fossil, because essentially bones that are sitting out on the surface will eventually disintegrate from wind and water and all kinds of different erosional processes. But eventually, the minerals in bone get replaced by the minerals in the soil. Fossils are basically rocks, and so it is the process of bone turning into stone.

M: You said you’ve been to Nairobi. Do you have any interesting stories from the field that you’d like to share?

Briana meets a rhinoceros in the field. Image Credit: Felix Patton.

P: Wow, so, one of my scariest encounters in the field—I’ve had a couple of encounters where I have been inside a four wheel drive vehicle that I had a lot for my research over there—so, I’ve been in several situations where I’ve been in a national park doing research and had close encounters with elephants. Twice I had a vehicle stall—two different vehicles—where there were elephants all around, and elephants were fighting. And I have a great respect for and terror of elephants; they are amazingly huge and amazingly quiet. But a lot of the work I did for my dissertation, beside the excavation part, and recovering fossils and studying them, was being able to follow carnivores around and pick up animals that they had killed after they were done eating them. So I sort of felt like I was on Animal Planet all the time following lions around. It was really fun!

Briana being brave with an elephant in Thailand. Image Credit: Linda Pobiner.

M: And that seems really unusual for an anthropologist to be so involved with biology and the natural world, but it tells you a lot of about human cultures!

P: Exactly, and I think that the interactions between humans and wildlife—those questions kind of span a lot of different disciplines. In essence I’m just looking at that in pre-history.

M: Where did you go to school to study all of this?

P: My undergrad degree is from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. I created an independent major there; it was mostly Anthropology focused but it was called Evolutionary Studies because I wanted to bring in geology and biology and evolutionary psychology; that was wonderful. And my Master’s and PhD are from Rutgers University, in New Jersey.

M: What first got you interested in Anthropology in general?

P: I didn’t know what Anthropology was when I got to college, but my Dean who was advising me at that point, had taught Anthropology at Bryn Mawr, and as I was rounding out my schedule my Freshman year, my first semester, she said, “Why don’t you take Anthropology for your fourth class?” And I said, “I don’t know what Anthropology is.” Then I had a fabulous professor and just got hooked.

M: Very cool! You don’t hear that often, you know it’s sort of like, “I was five years old and always wanted to be an archaeologist.” But it’s really great that you were able to encounter that in college and then go so far with it.

P: Yeah, it was a big shift. I really thought I wanted to major in English or comparative literature and do creative writing. I just saw the creativity in science, which I thought was really exciting.

M: Have you heard anything—being so involved with teachers—about the impetus to go into STEAM instead of STEM, incorporating art into science, technology, engineering and mathematics?

P: I have, and I think a lot about [what is behind that drive towards] the art/science intersection is [that] people are really interested in using both sides of the brain; both ways of thinking about the world, and in helping people learn.

Being a Woman in Science with a Family

M: Regarding our theme of Women’s History Month; how has it been for women in your field? You’re one of our younger people here; have you experienced any difficulties as a woman in science?

Briana in the spotlight in South Africa filming a video for the Hall of Human Origins. Image Credit: Chedd-Angier Production Company / Richard Lewis Media Group. 

P: You know, it’s very interesting. I feel like I have not in a lot of ways, but I also remember having a conversation with a senior male colleague in my profession. As I was talking about my career path and things I was interested in, he was saying, “Well, you know, I assume at some point you’re going to want to run your own excavations and have a big field site,” and I said, “Well I’m not actually sure about that, I have some ideas about experimental archaeology, and doing a couple other things,” and I think there is this concept that succeeding in this field is basically running a long-term field site, which can be a really difficult thing to do if you are a woman with a family, and so that in a theoretical sense, is a boundary that I’ve encountered.

M: Very interesting.

P: I don’t know about a boundary, but it’s an issue that I’ve encountered.

M: There has been a lot of news lately about personal or family life and career goals for women. How have you been able to balance family and career?

Briana and her husband, Peter with newborn Toby. Image Credit: Howard Pobiner.

P: Every day I balance it differently; and I’m lucky in the sense that—I have a two-year-old—and since I’ve had my son, I have scaled back my fieldwork for sure. I use to be in the field every summer for about 3 months. A lot of my projects were naturally ending right before I had him, so it’s actually part of my career trajectory that I’m thinking about smaller projects or some more museum-based projects. I still have a long-term field project that I’m running, so I think having—if you are a parent—having a partner that understands what it is to be a woman in academia, a woman in science [is important]. My husband, right now is mostly home taking care of our son, which allows me amazing flexibility in my day-to-day life, but also in going to the field for a couple of weeks. And I’ve actually looked to a lot of my female mentors in my field, to find out how they’ve done it. People are, I’ve found, amazingly open to giving me advice about that, which has been wonderful.

M: Who are some of those mentors and role models that you have?

P: One of them is Dr. Kay Behrensmeyer (Kay was selected as one of 50 most important women scientists by Discover Magazine in 2002), a curator here, who has really been a role model for me for a long time. She does a lot of her own kind of field work, runs field projects, and is involved with other people’s field projects. Another is the person who was my external committee member for my PhD, Margaret Lewis. She has kids and has a husband in academia and so talking about what it’s like to have a two-partner academic family… those have been two of my main mentors, as well as Dr. Alison Brooks, who’s at GW (The George Washington University), where I have an affiliation. She’s also in a dual academic marriage and she’s done a lot of field work... so just learning that that can be done has been really helpful for me.

M: Did people treat you any differently in the field when you were expecting your son? Was it difficult? 

P: They mostly thought I was completely insane. Actually the game reserve staff forbid me from going into the deep bush where the elephant and buffalo (both quite dangerous) tend to hang out, saying I might not be able to run fast enough if we got charged. I thought that was reasonable, and although it changed our research plans I figured not putting two lives at risk – mine and future Toby’s – was worth it. I felt pretty good physically, it was during my second trimester, but sleeping on a crappy mattress was not fun! And I’m telling you, bending over to tie my boots and put on the gaitors was the toughest part of the day.

Dr. Pobiner in the field in Kenya. Image Credit: Nick Walton.

Advice for Students

M: Do you have any advice for young people, especially young women and girls who want to go into your field?

Dr. Pobiner teaching young women about skull morphology of early humans, in this case, Paranthropus boisei. Image Credit: Human Origins Program.

P: Um, wow, follow your heart! Really just figuring out what your passion is—and it never occurs to me to take no for an answer—so to not feel intimidated by talking to people whose articles you’ve read and whose names are big in your field, and especially finding one or more female mentors, I think is a really important thing to do. I’m actually involved in a new group at GW, in the Anthropology graduate program—a Women in Science Club. We get together with young faculty members and graduate students to talk about issues facing women in science. And I think just hearing stories and getting support from other women is really crucial.

M: Thanks for that perspective.

Personality Questions

M: Now we have a couple silly questions so people can get at your personality.

P: Okay, oh boy.

M: Nothing too difficult. Favorite book, favorite movie?

P: Oh wow, okay, my favorite movie is The Usual Suspects and I think the amazing twist at the end that I did not see [coming]; every time I watch the movie I enjoy it. What’s my favorite book? I don’t, I don’t even know. I think that’d be a really hard one to answer.

Briana running the Army Ten Miler in DC. Image Credit: Peter Nassar.

M: Favorite genre?

 P: My favorite thing that I’m reading right now... one is I’m actually really enjoying sort of pop psychology books and understanding how our brains work and how our personalities develop. I like to read popular anthropology books. I’m reading Catching Fire right now, by Richard Wrangham, which is about the idea that cooking made us human, and it was instrumental in human evolution. And of course I’m reading parenting books now, so those are the three different types of books I’m reading at the moment.

M: How about your favorite color?

P: Purple.

M: Oh, mine too.

P: I don’t, know I love purple, sometimes it’s red, but it’s mostly purple.

M: It’s in the same family. Are you artistic at all? Do you have any kind of hobbies?

P: I cannot draw to save my life, but I’m musical so I sing, I play drums, and I played piano for ages and ages so I would say that’s the artistic side of me. I also like to run. 

M: How many countries have you been to off the top of your head? Or just a few favorites?

P: Wow, probably a dozen. For my research I’m mostly in Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa; been to Uganda [for more of a] vacation, and Indonesia. I’ve not worked much in Asia, but my time in Indonesia was pretty amazing. I did a lot of traveling when I was in college. I studied abroad at the University College London, which was wonderful because probably still now as a student, you can do a lot of cheap traveling in Europe, so I got to really travel a lot in Europe. Now for the first time, thanks to a conference in the fall, I will be going to Argentina. I haven’t been to South America before; I’m really excited about that.

Briana visits the equator! Image Credit: Kris Kovarovic.

M: That is exciting. Do you speak any other languages?

P: I speak really bad Swahili. I actually took French and Italian in high school. I thought I potentially wanted to be a comparative literature major until I realized that I was very good at memorizing and kind of regurgitating, but not good at actually becoming fluent in a language. So I know enough Swahili to kind of get by when I’m in Kenya. That’s about it.

M: If you had to pick a time period other than your own to live in, what would it be?

P: I would pick a time deep in human pre-history and I think I would probably pick–probably because I study the origin of meat eating—I would pick the beginning of the time when people were first figuring out that big animals were food. And just [find out] what was the mind-set and how did that become… I mean our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, they don’t eat dead animals, but it looks like early humans were doing a lot of scavenging, so how did that work? Off the top of my head that’s what I would pick.

M: Do you have any pets at home?

P: Not anymore. I had a cat in fact that I brought home from Kenya when I was doing my PhD research. She unfortunately passed away about a year ago. But at some point we would like to get a cat and probably a dog. I grew up with a dog, so I’m a huge dog and cat fan.

M: So obviously Argentina sounds like the next place you want to travel. Any other ones that are high on your list?

P: I have always wanted to travel to South Asia. I’ve been on vacation in Thailand but I haven’t really been to other places in Asia; that’s a whole part of the world that I probably won’t get to with my research. I would love to go to India; I would love to go to China; I would love to go to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. You know I would take out a map of the world and throw a dart; I think that would be really fun. And Australia, again, I probably will never get to Australia with my actual research so that’d be pretty amazing.

What Briana Wants You to Know About Science:

M: And to close, if you had one thing that you’d like to get out to the public to let people know about, what would it be?

"Science is fun and cool!" Even when you have to enter your data. Image Credit: Human Origins Program.

P: That science is fun and cool, and I’ve become a real big advocate for public engagement with science and public understanding of science. When I was taught science in high school it was rote and boring and I wasn’t interested in it. And there was nothing left to learn, and then all of a sudden when I got to college, I had these great professors who explained, there are all these research questions and here’s the kind of things that you could study, and there’s so much out there left to discover! And it’s really fun! That’s what I would say.

We're out to discover! If you ever dug holes for fun as a kid, you never know, anthropology might be for you (and that's not all we do)! Let us know if you have any questions about a career in science. Briana digs with her team in Indonesia. Image Credit: Craig Feibel.

By: Meghan Mulkerin, Collections Specialist and Research Contractor, and Dr. Briana Pobiner, Research Scientist and Museum Educator for the Human Origins Program

For more Seriously Amazing Women, read about Forensic Anthropologist, Kari Bruwelheide's life and career.  

Seriously Amazing Women: Kari Bruwelheide

This article is part of the Seriously Amazing Women series of interviews with women curators and scientists in the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The interviews were conducted during March 2014 in honor of Women's History Month (#WomensHistoryMonth on Twitter). 

Talking with Kari Bruwelheide about her work in honor of Women's History Month was a great experience. Most of us living here in America were immigrants at one time or another. My own family tree has both recent immigrants and ones who came to America much earlier, in the 1600’s. As any genealogist knows, the further back in time you go, often the harder it is to find good records about people’s lives. Kari explained the ways she and Doug Owsley go about telling the stories of people who never made it into the record books, or had very little written about them, through the examination of their physical remains. She also made the point that her work with historical remains supports her work with modern forensic cases, and vice versa, with the Smithsonian skeletal collections being a huge resource for her and her colleagues to use as reference cases. Kari, like Mindy Zeder has found a lot of fascinating things within the collections of the Smithsonian. Both emphasized that many times collections end up getting re-used after the original studies are done and new discoveries are made, with Kari saying:

And that’s not an exception, that something that happens all the time with our objects here at the museum… that’s the cool thing about working with our collections here… you never run out of things to discover.

For Women’s History Month, Kari also speaks to her experiences as a woman scientist, and how she has balanced her two children and family life with her career. She also gives good advice to young aspiring physical anthropologists! Please read on, and let us know if you have questions or comments for Kari Bruwelheide! 

Kari examines a skull at the Harleigh Knoll site in the Chesapeake.  Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

 Kari Bruwelheide: Physical Anthropologist and Museum Specialist.

Years at the Smithsonian: Since 1992, ca. 22 years. 

Primary Research Focus: Forensic anthropology involving human skeletal remains in both historical and forensic cases.

Videos with Kari Bruwelheide: Kari recently starred in a webcast with Q?rius, our new education center, to teach students about forensic anthropology; the webcast is archived and has a lot of resources for teachers. Kari and her work are also featured in several videos on SmithsonianScience.org. See the video, "Power of the Bones" below, and find more videos about her work here.

Interview with Kari Bruwelheide

Since the interview covers a wide range of topics, feel free to read from the beginning or skip around! The interview is split into the following sections:

1. Kari's Research at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
2. Role Models in Physical Anthropology and Advice for Students
3. Being a Woman in Science and Balancing a Family
4. How research evolves over the course of a Smithsonian scientist's career
5. Personality Questions!

Research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History:

What kinds of research or collections work have you been doing lately?

Kari Bruwelheide (hereafter, K):  We’re analyzing the skeletal remains of early colonists from the Chesapeake; that’s the focus of our research within the past decade or two decades actually. It began when I first started working here, but that’s continued to be a large part of our research. We also do contemporary forensic case work about part of the time, and then another area of research that we’ve been concentrating on are Paleo-American skeletal remains. So remains [of people] that date around 9000 years old that are found here in the Americas. 

Meghan Mulkerin (hereafter, M): Have you been working on Kennewick man?

K: We did; that’s an ongoing project for more than a decade now, that skeleton is curated at the Burke Museum out in Washington so, the research entailed traveling out there doing the documentation and then bringing back the information and data and writing it up.

Kari Bruwelheide and Doug Owsley examine Kennewick man. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

M: Very Cool. What about the early colonists interest you?

K: Well these are the people who arrived in the early 1600’s to the Chesapeake area. Little was written during the first 100 years of European settlement. The skeletons allow us to fill in the gaps that exist for that first century of settlement. People are surprised that there are very few records but the only real records are people’s property accounts—their wills—and those are only for the very wealthy. Most people did not have one thing written about them or related to them in their lifetime. So, these remains really allow us to look at things that no other piece of information can provide. You know, things like personal identity, what life was like, what activities these people participated in, how did they physically adapt to a new environment? How did their diet change, how did their health change, or was it the same as in Europe when they came over? So there are lots of different things we’re looking at as we collect the data.

M: Do you notice that the health gets better or worse compared to the European populations?

K:  It depends on what aspect of health you’re looking at. We were surprised that it was not that improved. England during the time period that these colonists came was a very—for many of them—was a very Urban environment; life was very hard, which is why many of them came to the Americas to settle. But here, things that we did not expect to occur were occurring, things like improper nutrition. They weren’t getting the foods, the nutrients that they needed. The labor was very intense. It was very physical, very physically demanding to settle in a new place. Most people who came here died within the first year or two, so there’s a very high mortality rate, which is why during that first 100 years of settlement the population was sustained only through new immigration.

Kari working at the Harleigh Knoll site in the Chesapeake. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

M: Oh wow.

K: The people who came… they couldn’t reproduce in high enough numbers to actually sustain the population. So without that constant influx of new people, the settlements would not have survived. So there’s a lot that we’re learning about the high price that these people paid in coming over here. 

M: That’s amazing. You always hear about how hard it is to build a log cabin and all that; do you see stress factors on the skeletons?

K: Yes, very intense amounts of physical labor appear on the skeletons of these very young people, we’re talking about even teenagers who have multiple herniated disks, a lot of muscle pulls and tears. Sometimes you can even be more specific. There’s one skeleton from St. Mary’s city who was a young man in his twenties, who had large bony spurs, we call them enthesophytes. They’re on areas of the bone where muscles and ligaments attach. If the muscles are stressed they ossify at these locations. He has large areas of enthesophyte formation. And then he has—what eventually killed him—multiple unhealed fractures on his long bones. And we think he must have fallen from a barn or building, a structure… the number of bones that are broken and the way they’re broke look like he sustained a fall. In that case we’re even more specific about activities. He probably was building and had that occupation during his life.

Kari Bruwelheide, Doug Owsley, and team work on another skeleton that was buried in a brick chapel in St. Mary's City. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

M: Would the women be doing the hard work of building? I remember in the "Written In Bone" exhibit you could see women were holding pins in their teeth.

K: Well women also participated in a lot of heavy physical labor, and you have to remember too, unlike Europe where people had a lot of animals doing work alongside them, many people who came and settled did not have that luxury of having oxen or cows when they first arrived. So everything they did they did on their own bodies, their own backs. So even women were carrying very hard, or very heavy bundles, they were tilling the fields, plowing. They show a lot of heavy physical labor and then, yes, you’re talking about seamstress; tailors notches in the teeth. A lot of specific activities that we do can appear on our bones and our teeth, such as the marks from holding pins in the mouth. So sometimes you’re able to get specific occupations. 

Example of tooth-wear patterns found in early Maryland colonists. This early 17th century colonist has a pipe wear facet, from regularly holding a pipe between his teeth. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution.  

M: That’s really fascinating. Do you have any personal connection to that time period? Did you have ancestors here at that time?

K: No, I’m a latecomer.

M:  You’re a latecomer?

K: Yeah, my ancestors didn’t come until the early 1800’s, at the earliest. So I claim no ancestry to the first colonists who came over, but you feel a personal connection with the remains anyways, just by virtue of their humanness.

M: Getting to know what they were?

K: Yeah, you know, you really feel like you get to know them, as individuals when you collect the data.

M: And how does that change for, or rather get more so, for forensic cases?

K: Well the forensic casework we find interesting because yes, it’s satisfying in the fact that you can actually solve the case and bring closure to a family who might be missing a loved one. But we do forensic case work because that informs us on these older remains as well. Forensic cases we get feedback on, or eventually, hopefully we will know, that this is a white male, aged 25 years, he died of a gunshot wound. And knowing that and confirming what we’ve seen on the bones we can then apply that knowledge to skeletons of any age. It really makes us better forensic anthropologists, physical anthropologists. Forensic case work isn’t for everybody, because it does get very personal. You do learn about these individuals, and in a way you have to shut that part of your emotions off. But like I said, it’s extremely satisfying when you can solve a case. Even just identifying someone brings some satisfaction.

M: Yeah that’s huge. We have a lot of older skeletal bone collections in the museum like the Terry collection, have you done any work with those?

K: Yes, we use the Terry collection quite a bit, because that’s a collection of known individuals. We know their age, their sex, their life histories, sometimes cause of death, and that allows us to use that knowledge to compare to forensic cases. If we have a particularly difficult forensic case we might look at Terry bones as references for that case. There are other collections, here in the museum we do that [with]; we use that same technique. One I’m thinking of is the infant and children skeletal collection. Having the bones of infants and children is extremely rare, but the museum has this collection. It was compiled in the early 20th century and recently it helped us resolve a forensic case dealing with childhood neglect and abuse. We were able to refer to these infant bones as comparison models and draw some very interesting conclusions in regards to the forensic work. So these collections are vitally important to interpreting not just the historic remains but also the modern forensic casework.

Kari Bruwelheide examines the skeleton of a 5- to 6-month-old infant buried in a small lead coffin ca. 1683, Brick Chapel, St. Mary’s City, Maryland. Historic St. Mary’s City. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

M: And that would be something I don’t think most people would know about or think about that; they’re keeping all these bones, but what for? Well, it actually helps with modern day problems.

K: Right, a lot of people can’t understand why we would have skeletal collections. What they don’t realize is that a lot of the knowledge that we have today was built from those collections and that they are still being used. Not just for training the next generation, which is really important—having students come and look at the bones for themselves—but we constantly refer to those collections when we need to ask questions. So they’re really important.

Role Models in Physical Anthropology and Advice for Students:

M: Do you have any role models of physical anthropologists, either men or women, in the past that you looked to when you were starting this career?

Kari and her mentor, Doug Owsley, examine a cast iron coffin in August 2005. Image Credit: Ken Rahaim, Smithsonian Institution. 

K: Well you know, when I was starting, I kind of came to forensic anthropology, physical anthropology in a roundabout way. My focus was on applied anthropology, which is working with living people. But I just happened to volunteer to work on a skeletal collection in graduate school and that led me down a totally different path. I guess at that point it was my volunteer advisor who was a physical anthropologist [that was influential]. He became my graduate advisor. But he was the person who was handling the volunteer project and he totally influenced me by including me in his research.  I found this is a very critical aspect of influencing students to change their career paths. And then, of course when I was in school I met Doug [Owsley], my supervisor here. He’s the one who brought me here, so I am eternally grateful to him. And you know, I really have grown up here and he’s been an extremely good mentor because he, more than anyone else I know, is totally focused on his job. I mean he goes to the Nth degree to solve a question. So he’s taught me a lot. And then there are a various number of other people along the way who have kind of mentored me in my career. So, I think it’s really important to have those kinds of people in your life.

M: And for young people, young women just starting out in their career paths, maybe this direction, do you have any kind of advice for them on what to study?

Kari mentoring the next generation potential physical anthropologists! Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

K: Yeah, people always ask that and I could give the obvious answers of studying biology and chemistry and things of that sort. The less obvious ones are learning how to write well, because writing reports is a huge part of this job and communicating—taking the time to take your English classes and writing classes. However, English writing and scientific writing are two different things; you have to be versed in both. And I also encourage students [that] you can go into any good undergraduate school and get a degree. It’s really in graduate school that you’re going to have to focus on whatever field you want to get into. And as you do that, volunteer to do different types of projects, even if they aren’t internships, like with me. It can be a huge game changer in terms of what you want to do after you graduate. So volunteer for as many things as you can and meet people, and get experience, because it’s all of the networking that is going to influence your career choice, but it’s also just knowing what’s out there. When I was starting graduate school I had no idea about forensic anthropology. That wasn’t even on my radar.

M: You were going to be an applied anthropologist.

K: Yes. So just take the time to volunteer for lots of different things, even if they are not specific to what you think you want to do.

Being a Woman in Science and Balancing a Family:

M: Since its women’s history month, have you faced any challenges as a woman scientist?

K: Well my biggest challenge is raising a family while you’re doing work, because you know, as a woman, you feel a huge obligation to your kids and to being home with them. The really wonderful thing about working here at the Smithsonian is I’ve been able to fit my family life into my work life. And so, I think that’s the biggest challenge for any woman going into any career; balancing that work-family issue. Even though I have a wonderful husband, who is willing to help out, it’s just not the same thing—and of course we’re the ones who actually have the kids and that puts a strain on your work life as well. But having that environment where you can do both is very nice and probably pretty rare, but the Smithsonian is one place that you can do that in.

Kari and husband, Kurt, with their children Beret and Calvin. Image Credit: Kari Bruwelheide.

M: And did you take breaks when you had your kids, we talked about kind of restructuring your work around that a bit?

K: Yes, I was able to take three months off, which isn’t, in retrospect, that many. And then of course the Smithsonian has childcare here, so, we were able to take advantage of that for both kids as well. So that was really nice. Because daycare, preschool, that’s a huge hurdle to get over as a parent when you’re working full time.

M: Well and one of the things Mindy Zeder said to me was that women’s career arcs are often different than men’s and maybe your production increases even more later in life once you’re done.

K: Yes. It’s something that I think women will never totally get over... how they balance family and work issues, but yes, now that my kids are older, it’s not as difficult as it was when they were younger. But, I still feel a strong obligation to be at home. Maybe when they go off to college I won’t [feel that way]. It’ll be a different story. I know Mindy’s daughter is grown and has her own kids. But yeah, that’s probably the hardest thing. I never really faced a lot [of sexism]. The fact that I was a female in graduate school and looking for a job I don’t think hurt me in any way. In fact, I think a lot of times it’s an advantage, at least when I was younger. There weren’t as many women in science, so people were eager to bring women in. Nowadays it’s much more competitive as it is a woman-dominated field. It’s becoming that way anyways.

How Research Evolves Over the Course of a Smithsonian Scientist’s Career:

Kari photographs site features at Harleigh Knoll. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution. 

M: Was there anything you’ve ever found in the Smithsonian collections that surprised you or was especially interesting, as you’ve been working here over the years?

K: There are so many things that are interesting… and there are so many incredible stories behind objects. It would take a long time to go into them. I just showed a group today a particular skull that we had, or at least Doug had documented in the 1980’s. And then we revisited, reanalyzed that skull in the 1990’s because somebody had brought us research regarding this particular individual who was killed at the Battle of Little Big Horn. We took out this skull, reexamined it with the knowledge we had in the 90’s and it totally reinterpreted that specimen and that story. It just shows that you change over time as a scientist. You learn so many new things even in the course of ten years—and that particular skull eventually got matched with a name of an individual. It’s just bringing that information together, the different pieces, they can all come together and fit perfectly, and you get a much richer story. And that’s not an exception, that something that happens all the time with our objects here at the museum. People think that you’ve collected all the information you can on something, but in ten years that story will be so much richer because we have new techniques that we acquire. Our eyes get better from learning as we go on. And you know that’s the cool thing about working with our collections here… you never run out of things to discover.

M: That sense of being able to knit things up and solve the puzzle must be really satisfying as part of the job.

Forensic Anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide measuring a cranium, Cadiz, Spain. Image Credit: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution.

K: Yeah and I think that’s true with any field here in the museum, it’s all about answering questions. It’s all about whatever mystery you might have. I’m just partial to human skeletons because I love that human story that goes behind it, but people who study marine mammals probably feel the same way.

M: People like different things.

K: Yeah.

Personality Questions:

 M: Do you have a favorite movie?

K: … Uh, wow. Do I have a favorite movie??…

M: Or a favorite book, if that’s more your speed.

K: Well… I was an English major in college so I have lots of favorite books. And just like I said, you look at a specimen and ten years later you look at it again and have a different interpretation...it is the same with rereading books. My kids are reading some of the “classic books” that I read in school. …It’s hard to name a book but I just re-read Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe because my son is reading that for class, and I don’t know, I love that book. I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but I love to read.

Movies—I know this sounds hokey—but The Lord of the Rings trilogy, they are my favorites. Just for a great adventure movie with wonderful tidbits of… life philosophy. So I love that trilogy. That has to be my favorite for pure enjoyment.

M: I can definitely relate to you on that one, and the re-reading, I always re-read books, like things I read in high school. I hated Jane Austen in high school, ‘This is stupid’ and then I re-read it when I was older and I was like ‘This is so insightful and hilarious’ it’s just funny.

K: And as I tell my kids it’s all because your perspective has changed. You’re at a different place than you were ten years ago. And so the way you interpret things is going to be so different from when you were a teenager.

M: Definitely.

K: And so, that’s why it’s hard to have a favorite book of all time because you might have favorites that relate to different parts of your life.

M: And favorite color?

K: Favorite color… is probably green, just because I like nature.

M: And how many countries have you been to as part of the Smithsonian?

K: Well most of our travel is done nationally in the U.S. because our research is focused on North America, but we have gone overseas. Probably the most exotic place is Croatia. And we went there, not long after their civil war, so it was kind of unusual for me to go there and have to have an escort, an armed escort. Getting out into the countryside away from the city was real unusual. So we do travel on occasion to various places like that.

M: Any places you want to go for fun at some point?

K: Yes, I want to go to Italy and Greece; they’re my two biggies. My daughter loves Greek mythology and all of that so eventually we’ll take a trip there together, and I would also like to go to Antarctica.

M: Oh!

K: Just to go to an extreme place, once in my lifetime.

M: That would be great. Do you speak any other languages?

K: No, although I did almost became a French minor in college. But all of that has escaped me now so I speak teeny amounts of French and I also took a semester of Spanish in graduate school so I could understand people when I went to Peru, because I went to Peru to do some research.

M: Well this might be an interesting question for you, knowing what you know about how people lived so intimately in the past. If you had to pick a time period to live in other than your own, would you pick any of them?

K: I would pick, probably—because I always was fascinated with [the] history of the Wild West—I would probably pick the 1800’s just to experience it… the 1860’s 1870’s era. Plus, we have done research on this particular curator here at the Smithsonian, actually he wasn’t a curator, he was a naturalist called Robert Kennicott, and if I could go back in time and meet someone I would probably pick him. He lived in the 1860’s.  I just love that period in history, the pioneer movement out west. I know it’s romanticized in my mind, but there was so much going on here in this country at the time and I would just like to, to know what it was like.

M: Do you have any pets at home?

K: I have two cats and a dog.

M: What are their names?

K: The dog is Toby and the cats are Sebastian and Boo.

M: I suppose I should also ask your children’s names [laughs].

K: Yes, they are important too, my son is Calvin, he’s 12, almost 13, and my daughter is Beret and she is 15, almost 16.

M: Do you have any hobbies?

K: Well I was just telling Katie [co-worker] that I have the gardening bug. I like to garden and work outside, and we also, as a family, like to go camping and we have a canoe that we like to take out. Um, and what else? I knit a little bit; like to read.

M: I knit too! Do you have anyone you especially admire, in the world? Alive or dead?

K:  Oh, I admire a lot of people. Hmm. Yeah, it would be hard to… [pick]. I guess like many people, I admire historic figures… with the death of Nelson Mandela, just learning about, just like these skeletons tell us, [the] individual stories, inspires me. I’m always amazed at how one person can make such a significant contribution. So anybody that can rise up and have the courage to make such a statement in their life I think I have admiration for. So somebody like him, or Martin Luther King, or… gosh, there are so many figures who have done that.

M: I think I’m out of questions, anything you’d like to add?

K: No I think you covered it all.

M: Well, thanks very much for talking with me.

K: You’re welcome. 

By: Meghan Mulkerin, Collections Specialist Contractor and Kari Bruwelheide, Forensic Anthropologist.