Rogers Archaeology Lab

New Publication on Computational Modeling in Archaeology

Across the social sciences there is an emerging shift towards greater inclusion of computational methods in research. Agent-based modeling is one of the new approaches. In a new publication Wendy Cegielski and Dan Rogers describe how the field of archaeology is rapidly incorporating this new method. Their study, "Rethinking the Role of Agent-Based Modeling in Archaeology" published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology describes the trends in research and the challenges faced when using a complex new methodology. Cegielski and Rogers also use the article as a way to introduce the basic concepts of agent-based modeling, including a glossary of terms.

The link below will take you to a free pdf provided by the publisher:

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Sa2S-JVbYIbs

Broken Pots: More than the Sum of their Parts

By Lotte Govaerts

 

Why is the study of ceramics so prevalent in archaeology?

There are a few reasons: First, clay has always been an abundantly available resource. People all over the world have had easy access to clay throughout history and prehistory. Most human cultures made use of it. They shaped and fired clay to make ceramic vessels of various forms, as well as figurines, architectural elements and other objects (in this post I will only talk about pots, though).  The pervasive use of ceramics is fortunate for archaeologists, because although fired clay is breakable, it’s also very durable. Pottery can last a very, very long time in archaeological contexts. Unlike metal, which corrodes in almost all environments, and unlike organic materials like bone or wood, which rot away more or less rapidly depending on circumstances, fired clay can last almost indefinitely. Pottery isn’t indestructible. Clay fired at relatively low temperatures is somewhat prone to erosion and cracks. Even so, it isn’t uncommon for us to find pieces of pottery (sherds) that are hundreds or thousands of years old, yet look like they broke last month.

Some of the "Middle Missouri" potsherds from archaeological site 39ST56 in South Dakota, which we have been (re-) cataloging recently. Photo by Lotte Govaerts.

 

What can we learn from the pot sherds we find?

Sometimes we find whole pots. This could happen in undisturbed burial contexts, or more exceptionally, if a house or even a whole town was buried quickly, like at Pompeii, which was buried under volcanic ash in AD 79. Far more often, however, what we find are pieces of broken pots. Sometimes all the pieces of a pot are found right where it fell, and we can easily put them back together. Some small pieces are usually lost to the long-term effects of rodent burrows or tree roots, but we can still make a reconstruction that looks almost exactly like the vessel would have looked before it broke. However, it is more common for sherds to get scattered after a vessel breaks. They might get walked on or kicked around. They might get swept up into a trash pit. Some of the larger pieces might be put to use as digging tools, and later discarded elsewhere. Someone interested in reassembling broken pots might find pieces of a single vessel spread out over various contexts. Restoring a pot from scattered sherds can be very satisfying, but it’s obviously not always possible, nor is it always necessary. We can learn a lot about pots from just fragments, too!

A small collection of Aztec and Matlatzinca tripod bowls in storage here at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History' s Department of Anthropology. These bowls were excavated in the late 19th century in Mexico's Toluca Valley.  Photo by Lotte Govaerts.

 

For example, from a single sherd we can make certain observations about things like color, form, and decorations. We also consider the type of clay, firing methods, and type of tempering agent used. Temper is a material added to the clay by the potter to reduce breakage during firing. A wide variety of materials was used for this purpose, like crushed rocks, sand, shell, grass, and even ground up old pots. By measuring the curve of a rim sherd, we can determine the size of a vessel’s opening.  Being familiar with the pottery of a particular time/place/culture can allow an archaeologist to estimate the distribution of vessel forms and ceramics types at a site by just assessing a collection of small sherds.

Dan Rogers teaches Julia and Maddy how to measure a vessel's (approximate) opening diameter using rim sherds, here at the Rogers Archaeology Lab. Photo by Meghan Mulkerin.

 

Careful study of vessel forms and decorations allows archaeologists to construct a “relative chronology” for a certain area and time period. Once we figure out how certain styles of pottery evolved over time in a given area, we can then use sherd styles to date other contexts.

Some attributes of sherds can’t be seen with the naked eye. But we have all kinds of advanced technology to help with that! We can determine the source of the clay via chemical analysis. If paint is used for decoration, that can be similarly analyzed.  We can visualize painted decorations that have faded with time, based on the identification of minute pigment particles left behind on the vessel. Through residue analysis, we can sometimes determine what a vessel once contained. Some people even study the fingerprints left behind on ancient pottery when the pots were made!

Meghan holds up a partially reconstructed vessel from another Middle Missouri site (39ST224) in South Dakota. Photo by Lotte Govaerts.

 

So, what does all this tell us?

Although observations about a ceramic artifact might be interesting on their own, archaeology is not about single objects. Archaeologists always try to learn something about a specific society, or about humankind in general.  We learn by integrating observations about ceramics and other artifacts with each other and with facts we already know. Ceramic artifacts can tell us about technology and how it changed over time, about social organization and issues relating to status or class, about trade networks, about what types of goods were traded, about style and fashion and how they change over time, about how ideas are transferred, about food and drink, and about so many other things!  

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

Resource Guide to River Basin Surveys (RBS) Publications on Historical Archaeology

The following is a resource guide for researchers about the River Basin Surveys. For stories about the River Basin Surveys, please read our other blog posts intended for the general public (see below). For additional resources, please visit our RBS page. 

Archaeologists are in your trash, digging up your stories 

History of Cattle Oiler and the River Basin Surveys

 Objects with Many Voices; People with Two Spirits

What is Historical Archaeology?

In the Kitchen with…Middle Missouri Indians

Sherds and Spreadsheets

 Introducing the Arikara and Mandan Ceramic Type Collection

By: Lotte Govaerts

Results from excavations conducted during the RBS were published by various mechanisms that changed over time. The first RBS archaeology reports were published in the Bureau of American Ethnology’s Bulletin in a series called “River Basin Surveys Papers”.  Bulletin number 176 (containing River Basin Surveys Papers 15 through 20) was devoted entirely to historic sites (Roberts 1960).  Paper number 15 is an overview of historic site archaeology in the Upper Missouri Basin (Mattes 1960), while paper 16 discusses the historical archaeology of the Fort Randall Reservoir. This last paper includes information about Fort Randall (39GR15), Whetstone Indian Agency and Army Post (39GR4), Lower Brule Indian Agency (39LM54), Fort Lower Brule (39LM53), Fort Lookout Military and Trading Post (39LM57)[there is some debate on whether 39LM57 actually is Fort Lookout, a topic I will discuss in a future blog post], Fort Hale (39LM52), and a single paragraph on the crew’s  search for the elusive Fort Recovery (Mills 1960). Papers 17 through 20 each deal with a single site: 39LM57, which Miller (1960) identified as Fort Lookout II, Fort Pierre II (39ST217) (Smith 1960a), Fort Stevenson (32ML1) (Smith 1960b), and Kipp’s Post (32MN1) (Woolworth and Wood 1960).

Locations of Historic Sites in Big Bend Reservoir - South Dakota. Source: Mattes, Merrill J., 1962. Historic Aspects of the Big Bend Reservoir Area. South Dakota Historical Collections and Report, Vol. 31, p. 243-286. 

Some years later, additional work from the RBS was published in a separate series entitled “Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys Publications in Salvage Archaeology”. Volume 9 (Smith 1968) in that series was devoted to the historic sites in the Big Bend Reservoir area (see map pictured above). This volume describes the work at Fort George (39ST202),  Red Cloud Agency III (39LM247), a site called “Medicine Creek” (32ML241) which investigators had believed might be Fort Bouis until they excavated and found it was not; and site 39HU301, which they had erroneously believed to be a fur trade establishment known as Loisel’s Post.

In addition to work published in those two series, some of the investigating archaeologists published articles about their research in scholarly journals. G. Hubert Smith (1954a) published preliminary results from his work at Like-A-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold (the two incarnations of the fort – Fort Berthold I and II – were  adjacent to the village and all three share site number 32ML2) in an article in Plains Anthropologist. Carlyle Smith (1955) later published an article in that same journal about Firearms and related artifacts from the same site. Similarly, preliminary results from work at Fort Stevenson (39ML1) were published by G. Hubert Smith in North Dakota History (1954b). Carlyle Smith (1954) published an article on the cartridges and bullets from 39ML1 in Plains Anthropologist.

The delay between the completion of field work and the publication of results – a period during which artifacts are processed and research is conducted – varies in duration, depending on the size of the project, and the researchers’ other engagements. Considering the scope of the RBS, it isn’t surprising that not all excavations carried out by RBS crews had been reported on in one of the RBS publication series when the RBS transferred to the NPS in 1969. Some of the historic sites excavated during the RBS remained largely or even wholly unpublished.  With the exception of the publication of work done at 39ST217/Fort Pierre II (detailed above), the historic sites of the Oahe Reservoir were discussed only in a 1963 pamphlet about the history and archaeology of the region, which includes a brief chapter on historic sites (Caldwell and Smith 1963).  The whole pamphlet can be read online.

However, after the transfer to the NPS, RBS archaeologists continued publishing their earlier work via other mechanisms. Smith (1972) followed up his Plains Anthropologist article about 32ML2 (Like-A-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold) with a single volume published via the National Park Service.  His work at Fort Manuel in the Oahe Reservoir was published posthumously in South Dakota Archaeology (Smith and Ludwickson 1981).

Some of the sites investigated or briefly visited by River Basin Surveys crews were not inundated by reservoir waters, and were later revisited and reported on by other archaeologists. These later publications fall outside the scope of this dedicated bibliography as they are not River Basin Survey publications. They will be included in the bibliographies of specific sites, as I discuss them in future blog posts.

If I missed a relevant publication in this list, please let me know!

 

References Cited

Caldwell, Warren W. and G. Hubert Smith 1963. Oahe Reservoir: Archeology, Geology, History. Omaha, Corps of Engineers.

Mattes, Merrill J. 1960. Historic Sites Archeology on the Upper Missouri, River Basin Surveys Papers, No. 15, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, United States Printing Office, Washington D.C.

Mills John E. 1960. Historic Sites Archeology in the Fort Randall Reservoir, South Dakota, River Basin Survey Papers, No. 16, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, United States Printing Office, Washington D.C.

Miller, Carl F. 1960. The Excavation and Investigation of Fort Lookout Trading Post II (Site 39LM57) in the Fort Randall Reservoir, South Dakota,  River Basin Surveys Papers, No. 17, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, United States Printing Office, Washington D.C.

Roberts, Frank H. H. Jr. (ed.) 1960. River Basin Surveys Papers, numbers 15-20, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, United States Printing Office, Washington D.C.

Smith Carlyle S. 1954. Cartridges and Bullets from Fort Stevenson, North Dakota, Plains Anthropologist 1, 25-29.

Smith, Carlyle S. 1955.  An Analysis of the Firearms and Related Specimens from Like-A-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold I, Plains Anthropologist, No. 4:3-12.

Smith G. Hubert 1954a. Archaeological Work at 32ML2 (Like-A-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold), Garrison Reservoir Area, North Dakota 1950-1954. Plains Anthropologist No. 2, 27-32. 1954

Smith, Hubert G. 1954b. Excavations at Fort Stevenson, 1951, North Dakota History vol. 21, no. 3, 127-135.

Smith G. Hubert 1960a. Fort Pierre II (39ST217), a Historic Trading Post in the Oahe Dam Area, South Dakota, River Basin Surveys Papers No. 18, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176.

Smith G. Hubert 1960b Archeological Investigations at the Site of Fort Stevenson (32ML1), Garrison Reservoir, North Dakota, River Basin Survey Papers, No. 19, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, 1960.   

Smith G. Hubert 1968. Big Bend Historic Sites, Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys Publications in Salvage Archaeology No. 9, Lincoln Nebraska.

Smith G. Hubert 1972. Like-a-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold, Garrison Reservoir, North Dakota. National Park Service Anthropological Papers No. 2.

Smith G. Hubert and Jon Ludwickson 1981. Fort Manuel: The Archeology of an Upper Missouri Trading Post of 1812-1813. South Dakota Archaeological Society, Special Publication No. 7. University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD.

Woolworth Alan R. and W. Raymond Wood 1960, The Archaeology of a Small Trading Post (Kipp's Post, 31MN1) in the Garrison Reservoir, North Dakota. River Basin Survey Papers, No. 20, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, 1960.

 

 

How the River Basin Surveys Shaped Historical Archaeology

This is the second installment in a series of posts about my research involving historic artifacts from the River Basin Surveys (RBS) curated by the National Museum of Natural History. In my first post, I reviewed historical archaeology in general. In this post I will discuss historical archaeology in the context of the RBS. My discussion focuses on the Upper Missouri River basin in North and South Dakota, where most of the archaeology of the RBS took place. Please see the blog's RBS resource page for other posts on the history of the River Basin Surveys and research done in the collections. Click here for an overview of RBS publications on historical archaeology.

By: Lotte Govaerts, Pre-doctoral Researcher and Volunteer with Meghan Mulkerin, Collections Specialist and Research Scientist Contractor. 

    When you think about the archaeology of Native North America, I bet you don't think about archaeologists finding glass bottles, fine china, gunflints and forks! And yet there they are. Many of the sites we catalog out at the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center have both prehistoric and contact-era layers, which we call a multi-component site. So not only do we learn about traditional Middle Missouri Native lifestyles, we also gain insight into the contact period, when Native Americans were dealing regularly with Europeans and trading goods across the cultures. The RBS collections are really an amazing resource for archaeologists, and the depth and breadth of these collections is unparalled. So how did we end up with all of these items? It's a pretty amazing story. Let's go back to the 1940's to see how economic forces shaped the drive to salvage these prehistoric and historic-era Native North American sites, and in so doing, shaped the way archaeology developed as as profession to this day! 

Figure 1. Some of the 19th century artifacts collected by RBS crews and stored at the NMNH's Museum Support Center. A: Part of a drawer with artifacts from Fort George (39ST202): Mended and unmended stoneware and some glass beads. B: “Dr. Hoofland’s German Bitters” patent medicine bottle from site 39HU301. C: Various glass beads from Fort Berthold II (32ML2), sorted by size and color. D: Three-tined forks from Fort Berthold II (32ML2). Image Credit: Lotte Govaerts.

    The River Basin Surveys (RBS) were part of a large-scale program of archaeological investigations that took place in the United States after the flood control act of 1944. The Act implemented numerous projects for flood control, irrigation, hydroelectric power, and navigation improvements in river basins across the country.  Because these projects would destroy many archaeological (and paleontological) sites, there was concern among archaeologists (and paleontologists). As a result, several institutions and organizations banded together to salvage as much as they could. And thus, the Inter-Agency Salvage Project (IASP) came into being—a collaboration between the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, and various State and local universities, historical societies, and museums (Jennings 1985, Lehmer 1971, Snyder et al 2000, Thiessen 1999, Thiessen and Roberts 2009, Wedel 1967).

The Smithsonian Institution created the River Basin Surveys unit as part of its Bureau of American Ethnology, and under that banner conducted archaeological research as part of the IASP. The IASP was the largest and most long-lasting salvage program ever implemented in the United States. The Smithsonian’s RBS operated from 1946 to 1969 in various areas across the country, but mainly in the Upper Missouri River Basin. In this area, the “Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program” called for construction of the Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavin’s Point dams (Figure 2). This construction would create large reservoirs, inundating significant parts of the river valley.

Figure 2. Reservoirs on the Upper Missouri (The Fort Peck dam in Montana is part of the Missouri River Main Stem System, but predates the Pick Sloan Plan). Image source: “Builders and Fighters: U.S. Army Engineers in World War II”, sec. IV (18 December 1992), p. 233. Publication #EP 870-1-42.

    As a survey project of this never-before-seen magnitude, the RBS laid the basis for many of the current practices in salvage archaeology. The survey crews made efforts to standardize their field methods and modes of documentation across the project. One example of this standardization is the development of the so-called “trinomial system” for assigning a unique site number to each archaeological site in the country.  This system is still used across the United States, although some states have made minor modifications. For the first number in each site identifier, each of the 48 states then in the Union was assigned a numeric code (1 for Alabama, through 48 for Wyoming. When Alaska and Hawaii became states, they were assigned the numbers 49 and 50). Each site number further consists of a two-letter county code, and finally a unique site number within that county. For example, Fort Pierre II (a site I will discuss in more detail in a future blog post) was assigned the unique number 39ST217. The number 39 is the code for South Dakota, “ST” stands for Stanley County, and 217 means that this site was the 217^th site to be recorded in Stanley County, SD. When I talk about specific sites in future posts, I will use their unique site number as well as the site’s common name, to avoid confusion. Using site numbers is important as different sites in the Great Plains sometimes share common names (For example, “Fort Union” was used more than once to name a fur trade establishment or military post in the 19^th century).

    The Smithsonian turned the River Basin Surveys unit over to the National Park Service in 1969. The operation was then renamed the “Midwest Archeological Center” (MWAC), and it continued the salvage mission along the Missouri Basin. However, as the dams and reservoirs on the Upper Missouri were completed at this time, this salvage work was of a much smaller scale. The MWAC mostly focused on shoreline sites that were being threatened by wave action and erosion. The organization of archaeological responsibilities across the US changed again after the Historic Preservation Act of 1974, and in 1975 the MWAC changed its focus to National Park archaeology only.

    During the salvage efforts, RBS archaeologists mostly investigated prehistoric sites, but they did not ignore historic sites.  The RBS ushered in a transitional period for historical archaeology in the Great Plains. It was during the RBS that archaeologists first investigated non-Native sites in this area. (Lees 2001, Scott 1998).

    The historical archaeology of the Great Plains prior to the RBS used the so-called “direct historic approach” to study Native American sites. This approach works backwards from documented periods (historic Native American sites) to find out things about the proto- or prehistoric Native American sites. This method was employed in order to answer specific questions, and this type of archaeology was decidedly anthropological in nature. The historical archaeology of the RBS, on the other hand, was based on history rather than anthropology.

    With the pressure of time and budget concerns, RBS archaeologists had to prioritize their efforts.  They could not excavate every site in the construction area. Even before budgets were allocated for the excavation of historical sites, historians conducted detailed document searches, and made lists of “historic places” within the reservoir areas behind each dam that was planned along the Upper Missouri (Figure 3, Mattes 1947, 1949; Mattison 1954, 1955, 1962).  

  Figure 3. Locations of Historic Sites in Big Bend Reservoir - South Dakota. Source: Mattes, Merrill J., 1962. Historic Aspects of the Big Bend Reservoir Area. South Dakota Historical Collections and Report, Vol. 31, p. 243-286. 

    Historic sites from the list were prioritized for excavation, based on three criteria: The degree of historical significance, the extent of available documentation, and whether or not the documented site could be located in the field. These decisions were made approximately half a century ago, at a time when historical archaeology was still developing as a field, and when some of the sites under investigation had been abandoned for less time than has passed since then (meaning that some of the artifacts in the collection have been in storage longer than they ever were in the ground!). It is to be expected that the RBS staff made different decisions than a historical archaeologist in the 21^st century would make. The result of this prioritization was that almost all historic sites investigated during the RBS fall into three categories: Fur trade posts, military forts, and Indian Agencies. I will talk more about all three types of sites in future blog posts.

Figure 4. Photo taken during RBS excavations at Fort Stevenson (32ML1) - Excavated area of the hospital’s east wing. Image source: Smith 1960 Pl. 36

    In studying the RBS artifact collection, I use various historical sources. Some of the most useful documents are those produced by the RBS staff.  RBS archaeologists published their work in a number of places. For the researcher, I created an overview of RBS publications that focus on historical archaeology here, which will be updated over time.  In addition to published works, I also attempt to review primary materials produced by the RBS. Because of the large scale of the project and the eventual transfer to the NPS, records and artifact collections have become somewhat dispersed across and within agencies (see Thiessen and Roberts 2009). As a result, the full cohort of RBS materials related to a given site is not always available in the NMNH collections.

The end of the RBS came at a time when historical archaeology was establishing itself as an independent discipline with its own theoretical framework. The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) was formed in the late 1960s. In some of their early publications (available online) members discuss the nature of the discipline, its theory, and the direction they felt the organization should take. While the framework of Historical Archaeology in the United States evolved predominantly around the archaeology of early Euro-American sites on the east coast, certainly the historical archaeology of the River Basin Surveys had its own influence. Several of the RBS’ researchers were among the founding members of the Society for Historical Archaeology: Merrill J. Mattes, Carlyle S. Smith, G. Hubert Smith, and Alan R. Woolworth (Scott 1998, p. 484). This early and evolving framework of historical archaeology is reflected in the nature and design of the RBS and the resulting collections. 

Figure 5. Photo taken during RBS excavations at Fort Stevenson (32ML1) - Remnants of the porch attached to Commanding Officer's Quarters - Image source: Smith 1960 Pl. 47

    The NMNH’s collection of RBS artifacts from historic sites is a unique and invaluable resource created from salvage archaeology efforts decades ago. The sites are now long gone; I can’t go back and excavate more in order to answer questions of interest to a 21^st historical archaeologist.  What I can do is re-examine the documentation produced by the archaeologists who did the work all those years ago, and analyze the collected artifacts. How can artifacts collected by researchers of a different era answer questions I have today? Stay tuned as I explore this subject in future postings on this blog.

References cited:

Ferguson, Leland (ed), 1977. Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things. Society for Historical Archaeology Special Publications Series No. 2. (put the link here)

Jennings, Jesse D. 1985. River Basin Surveys: Origins, Operations, and Results, 1945-1969. American Antiquity 50(2): 281-296.

Lees, William B., The Impact of the River Basins Surveys Program in Historical Archaeology. Paper presented at the 66th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology New Orleans, Louisiana, April 18-22, 2001 [retrieved from link].

Lehmer, Donald J. 1971. Introduction to Middle Missouri Archeology. Anthropological Papers I. National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, Washington.

Mattes, Merrill J. 1947. Historic Sites in Missouri Valley Reservoir Areas. Nebraska History, vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 1-5.

Mattes, Merrill J. 1949. Historic Sites in the Fort Randall Reservoir Area. South Dakota History Collections, vol. 24

Mattison, Ray H. 1954. Report on Historical Aspects of the Oahe Reservoir Area, Missouri River, South and North Dakota. South Dakota History Collections, vol. 27. Pierre

Mattison, Ray H. 1955. Report on Historic Sites in the Garrison Reservoir Area, Missouri River [North Dakota]. North Dakota History, vol. 22, nos. 1-2, pp 5-73. Bismarck.

Mattison, Ray H. 1962. Historic Aspects of the Big Bend Reservoir Area. South Dakota History Collections vol. 31, pp. 243-286, Pierre.

Roberts, Frank H. H. Jr. (ed.) 1960. River Basin Surveys Papers, numbers 15-20. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 176, United States Printing Office, Washington D.C..

Scott, Douglas D. 1998. Euro-American Archaeology. In W. Raymond Wood (ed) Archaeology on the Great Plains (481-519), University Press of Kansas.

Smith, G. Hubert 1968. Big Bend Historic Sites. Smithsonian Institution River Basin Surveys Publications in Salvage Archaeology No. 9, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Smith, G. Hubert 1972. Like-A-Fishhook Village and Fort Berthold, Garrison Reservoir, North Dakota. National Park Service, Anthropological Papers 2, Washington D.C.

Snyder, Lynn M., Deborah Hull-Walski, Thomas D. Thiessen, and Myra J. Giesen 2000. Postwar Partners in Archeology: The Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service, and the River Basin Surveys in the Missouri River Basin (1945-1969). CRM 23(l):17-20.

Thiessen, Thomas D. 1999. Emergency Archeology in the Missouri River Basin: The Role of the Missouri Basin Project and the Midwest Archeological Center in the Interagency Archeological Salvage Program, 1946 – 1975, Midwest Archeological Center Special Report No. 2.

Thiessen, Thomas D. and Karin M. Roberts 2009. The River Basin Survey Collections: A Legacy for American Archeology. Plains Anthropologist Vol. 54, No. 210: 121-136.

Wedel, Waldo R. 1967. Salvage Archaeology in the Missouri River Basin. Science 156(3775): 589–597.

Herding Simulated Sheep

By: Hollis Miller, NHRE Intern, with Meghan Mulkerin, Collections Specialist and Research Scientist Contractor.  

   When I was accepted to the Smithsonian’s Natural History Research Experience (NHRE) Internship, I was so excited. I had always loved the Smithsonian and now I was getting the chance to work there! I first heard about the program through Liz Cottrell, co-director of NHRE, who gave a lecture at my school the year before. Along with my acceptance letter came a short description of the research project that I would be working on, entitled “Computational Modeling of Climate Change and Human Adaptation.” It sounded cool, especially since I am very interested in climate change, but I was a little worried because I knew nothing about computer models. 

Dr. Rogers points out some of the interesting trends that came out of my research with the computer model. Image Credit: NHB2014-01191.

Thankfully, upon my arrival in the office of Dr. Rogers, I learned that I simply had to learn how to use and apply the models – no computer programming necessary on my part. Even so, it still took me several weeks of reading, playing with the computer model and instruction from Dr. Rogers, before I was ready to officially design and execute my research project. 

The Mongolian landscape that HouseholdsWorld models, complete with herd animals. Photo Credit: Dr. J. Daniel Rogers. 

   The computer model I am using is called HouseholdsWorld (designed and tested under NSF grant BCS-0527471), which simulates a nomadic herding society in Mongolia. It is an agent-based model, which is a complex type of computer simulation that allows individual people or households (i.e. the agents) to make their own decisions each day. If you have ever played the Sims, you know that each Sim has its own personality and operates independently, although its decisions can be influenced by other people and social norms. This is basically the same concept as in agent-based modeling, albeit HouseholdsWorld has far less exciting graphics.

The HouseholdsWorld graphical user interface (GUI--pronounced "gooey". Now you speak computer!) showing households and clans moving on the landscape. 

Each agent in HouseholdsWorld has its own kinship network and its own life history of birth, marriage, childrearing, herding animals, and death. But even death is not the end to the agent’s participation in the model, because the agent’s living relatives will continue to remember them for several generations, much like you recall who your grandparents or great-grandparents are. This complexity is necessary because it reflects how societies in the real world operate, thus making the model more useful and applicable.

Here's another picture of the goats and sheep, which are typical of the kinds of animals a simulated household in our computer model would own. Who needs a graphical user interface anyway? Dr. Rogers has tons of these pictures from his travels in Mongolia. Photo Credit: Dr. J. Daniel Rogers.

    In HouseholdsWorld, the agents are households that move across a 10,000 km² landscape consisting of dense forests, open grasslands and rivers. Each household is a member of a camp, which is a small living group that generally contains 1 to 4 households, and is also a member of a clan, which is basically an extended lineage of families. The main goal of each household is to find the most abundant grass in order to support its herd of animals. In turn, this supports the household as well, because wealth is measured by the number of animals a household or clan owns. They also use the animals as a source of meat, milk and hides.

Households move in the model according to five social rules:

1) relying on the memory of the camp to return to locations that had good grass in previous years

2) searching for nearby abundant grass

3) staying close to other camp members

4) staying close to other clan members

5) avoiding members of foreign clans

How strictly the households follow these rules can be changed by the researcher.

    Bad weather is the main source of trouble for the households. There are two types of bad weather in the model, droughts and zuds, which are severe winter storms. When weather events occur in HouseholdsWorld, they decrease the amount of food available for the animals to eat, which causes both the animal and human populations to suffer. Generally, the weather events are based on historical climatological data from Mongolia, but the model can be programmed to increase the number of weather events, which could be used to approximate modern climate change.

Zuds are very dangerous for herd animals and the people who rely on them. Millions of animals can die from prolonged zuds. Image Credit: FAO: Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, Chapter II - Cold, semi-arid Asia. 

    This summer I explored how the social connections people make with one another affect the ability of the society to bounce back after severe weather events. That ability is called resilience. Resilience is similar to flexibility. For example, think about a rubber band. You can stretch a rubber band and when you release the pressure, it returns to its original shape, however, if the rubber band is stretched too far, it will break. Similarly, the more times you stretch a rubber band, the less well it rebounds back to its original shape. Societies can act in similar ways, such as how the Roman Empire expanded throughout many centuries, but eventually reached a point of collapse because the government could no longer control unrest in the far-reaching corners of the empire. Equally so, a society that finds its adaptive capacity stretched too frequently, or several times in quick succession—such as back to back snowstorms—might be less able to cope with the events.

    Bringing this idea back to HouseholdsWorld, I wanted to know what happened to the society when I weakened the connections that people have with each other, so I set up three experiments:

1) No Bailout – in this experiment I weakened the economic connectivity that people had with one another by turning off the bailout function in the model. The bailout function is when households give some of their animals to other family members in times of need. However, in this experiment I turned off that feature, so households did not share animals with one another.

2) Alien Distance – in this second experiment I weakened the strength of kinship ties by lessening the number of people that each household recognized as family.

3) Social Rules – in the final experiment I changed the order of importance of the social rules. If you look back to the list of five social rules above, you will see that the first two involve finding the best grass, either by remembering where good grass was in previous years or simply by going to the best grass that is nearby. I switched these two rules in this experiment so that households are more likely to settle for nearby grass than seek out better grass that may be further away. In terms of connections between people, this experiment represents decreased communication among camp members.

    In order to have a control group to compare the experiment results to, I also did a baseline run of the model, using real historical and ethnographic data for how nomadic herding societies in Mongolia operate. After comparing each of my experiments to the baseline, I came up with some interesting results that suggest that the type connections people make with one another matters in terms of the population and function of the society.

If you would like to read more about my experiment, you can download my final poster presentation here: Download Miller_NHRE2014 (smaller) 

 1) No Bailout

a. Population decreased because poorer households could not survive

b. Society lost the social safety net when households no longer shared animals with one another

2) Alien Distance

a. Population increased

b. Fewer family members meant that each household had fewer people to worry about and potentially take care of, so they were able to act more independently – like a modern urban setting where people may be more concerned about their immediate family than their extended family

c. This would also mean that there were many more available marriage partners, making it easier for the society to reproduce

d. Families were on average less wealthy than in either the baseline or the No Bailout experiment

3) Social Rules

a. Population dropped significantly over the generations as birth rates decreased

b. This is probably due to a reduced number of marriage partners because in a smaller group, people are more likely to be related to one another and therefore not allowed to marry based on the customs

c. Households are much wealthier and there is a middle class larger than in any of the other experiments because of less competition for grass

This graph shows the total population for each of the experiments plotted throughout the 330 year time frame. Blue represents the Alien Distance experiment, red is the baseline run, green is the No Bailout experiment, and purple is the Social Rules experiment. The first 250 years of the run are an initialization phase when no extreme weather events occur, hence the fairly stable population during that period. The later section with high variability in the population is the phase when extreme weather events are introduced. These data suggest that connectivity is important to demographic success, as evidenced by the sometimes extreme deviance from the baseline run, especially in the Social Rules experiment.     

    The data revealed that lessened social connectivity does affect demographic success (i.e. population) and thus resiliency, but the direction of that effect depends on the type of connectivity in question. Humans make choices based on observations, inherited knowledge and the input of other humans. In short, they make the system more complicated and more difficult to predict as even subtle changes can have massive cascading effects. Understanding the dynamics of how societies and their natural environments interact with one another is especially important now, because the Earth system is currently being tested by humans through environmental degradation and climate change. Agent-based models, such as HouseholdsWorld, could be instrumental in learning how best to proceed regarding climate change and how our connections with one another around the globe are going to help and/or hurt us and the societies we have built.

Suggested Readings 

Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio, J. Daniel Rogers, and Maciek Latek. 2010. The MASON HouseholdsWorld Model of Pastoral Nomad Societies. In Simulating Interacting Agents and Social Phenomena: The Second World Congress on Social Simulation. Keiki Takadama, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, and Guillaume Deffaunt, eds. Pp. 193–204. Agent-Based Social Systems. Tokyo: Springer.

Rogers, J. Daniel, Teresa Nichols, Theresa Emmerich, Maciej Latek, and Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. 2012. Modeling Scale and Variability in Human-Environmental Interactions in Inner Asia. Ecological Modelling 241: 5–14.

Walker, B. H, and David Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking : Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Acknowledgements

This blog post was made possible by support from the National Science Foundation. HouseholdsWorld was created under NSF Grant: BCS-0527471. Hollis Miller's internship through the Natural History Research Experience program was supported by NSF's REU Site, EAR-1062692. 

What is Historical Archaeology?

By: Lotte Govaerts, Pre-doctoral Researcher and Volunteer.  

In the mid-20^th century a massive effort was made to survey and excavate low-lying areas of multiple river valleys in advance of flooding due to dam construction.  These River Basin Surveys encompassed parts of the Missouri River and other waterways in the United States. Here in the Rogers Archaeology Lab, I am studying some of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)’s collections associated with historic sites excavated during the River Basin Surveys. I will be reporting on my research in a series of posts on this blog. I will start with an introduction to historical archaeology, as the field might not be familiar to everyone.  So, what exactly IS historical archaeology?

Figure 1: Some of the historic artifacts collected during the River Basin Surveys, curated by NMNH. This drawer contains several late 19th century whole glass bottles, tin cans, and utensils from the site of Red Cloud Agency III (39LM247), an Indian Agency and community of Oglala Lakota Sioux, named after their leader, Red Cloud. Photo Credit: Lotte Govaerts of NMNH Collections.

Historical archaeology is a subdiscipline of archaeology. Its exact definition has been the topic of some debate as the field has grown over the past several decades (see, for example, this series of articles from the early days of the Society for Historical Archaeology).  In the strictest sense, historical archaeology is the archaeology of societies that left behind historical records. These records are generally written materials, but oral histories can also be used. The historic period begins at very different times in different parts of the world. To make things more complicated, between “prehistory” and “history” there is a grey area, usually referred to as “protohistory”. So, this strict definition is even more complicated than it might seem at first glance. 

In practice, the above definition of historical archaeology is seldom used. Historical archaeologists certainly make use of written records, but not all research that involves written records is classified as “historical archaeology”. For example, the writings of Meso-American cultures are studied by archaeologists, but their work is not generally considered to be “historical archaeology”.  The same is true for fields such as Egyptology and Classical (Greek and Roman) Archaeology.  

Figure 2: Historical archaeology in the field - excavation of a test unit at a 19th century house site. A: Site prior to excavation with cleared surface and one 160 cm (5'3") tall human (me) for scale. B: Excavation of a test unit centered on chimney base. C: Plan view drawing of test unit after excavation. Photo Credit: Lotte Govaerts/BRAC. 

The term “historical archaeology” most commonly refers to a narrower aspect of archaeology, namely the archaeology of the modern period with a focus on colonial and post-colonial contexts influenced by European Imperialism. I have heard some people define it as the archaeology of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism. The Society for Historical Archaeology defines historical archaeology on its webpage as the archaeology of “the emergence, transformation, and nature of the Modern World.”  However, the terminology is used mostly for sites outside of Europe.  In Europe, researchers prefer to use “post-medieval archaeology”.

In North America, historical archaeology generally means the study of “post-contact” sites, that is to say, sites that postdate the arrival of Europeans. This includes anything from approximately 1500 through the twentieth century (Archaeological methods can be used on subjects from the very recent past, including the 21^st century, but this isn’t common). The starting point for the historic period in the Americas is slightly fuzzy, as European contact did not take place for all native peoples at the same time. Moreover, European trade goods (and infectious diseases!) preceded actual Europeans into the inland. We often refer to these trade goods as “historic artifacts” (as opposed to prehistoric artifacts).  However, native sites containing a few European trade artifacts but where the inhabitants haven’t “made contact” with Europeans, are usually called “protohistoric”. “Historic” is typically only used for sites that have contemporary written sources associated with them. Therefore context and subject matter are more important than dates when defining the boundaries of historical archaeology in North America.

Figure 3: Documenting aspects of historical archaeology - Rural settlements of the 19th century US had multiple sawmills and grist mills. On the left is a cropped detail of a plan view map of one such saw/grist mill as it looked one century after its abandonment. The picture on the right shows the excavation of a brick flue associated with a different late 19th century mill in the same settlement in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Photo Credit: Lotte Govaerts/BRAC. 

Historical archaeologists studying the period of European arrivals investigate topics such as early culture contact and the ways colonists formed settlements and adapted to new environments. In the study of later periods, topics of interest include how the struggle for independence manifests itself in the material culture, the lives of enslaved or newly free people, urbanization, industrialization, the archaeology of institutions such as prisons and asylums, conflict and warfare, farmsteads, factories and labor, capitalism, mass production, transportation systems, trade networks, infrastructure, and the intersection of any of those with class, race, and gender.

Some people might question the use of archaeology to study cultures or time periods for which we have ample historic records available. While such records certainly are of great importance to historians and historical archaeologists, they can’t tell us everything we wish to know about the past. For example, historical records often lack details about people’s daily lives – details that are reflected in the material culture studied by historical archaeologist. Even more importantly, most societies or groups that left behind written records also included large cohorts of people who did not write, or who were not written about.

The interest in using historical archaeology to study poorly documented members of societies is a somewhat recent trend. In previous generations the field of archaeology focused largely on sites that were of historical importance, that is to say, those associated with famous people, events, or locations. This is true for historical archaeology as well.  Some of the more well-known historical sites where archaeologists have been working for decades are those associated with early presidents’ homes, (Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon, for example), and early colonial towns like the site of the English settlement at Jamestown.

However, for several decades now, historical archaeologists have increasingly focused on people who are far less visible in the historical record. For example, written records about slavery are generally from the point of view of those who did the buying and selling of human beings, in the form of record keeping, or possibly discussions on the morality of slavery.  Written sources from the point of view of the enslaved are more rare. Archaeology can help shed light on those lives and the lives of other groups of people (the urban poor, tenant farmers, women working in brothels, Native American kids at boarding schools, etc.) who have traditionally been underrepresented in historical records, and who have been underrepresented as subjects of study as well. 

Figure 4: How historical archaeology sites might look prior to study - In an area that has been National Forest for approximately a century, the remnants of a 19th or early 20th century house site might look something like this overgrown pile of rocks, or like the much less noticeable pile in the picture in Figure 2. Photo Credit: Lotte Govaerts/BRAC. 

The well-known historic sites have had researchers working on them for decades.  These well-funded programs often engage in a high level of public outreach, complete with informative websites (See for example Monticello Archaeology, Mount Vernon Archaeology, Jamestown Rediscovery, Colonial Williamsburg Archaeology, and perhaps less famous on a national level, but still considered historically important for the history of the western expansion of the US, the site of Fort Union at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers). On these websites, researchers publish articles discussing their latest findings, and often have their artifact collections available for viewing.  In visiting these websites, it is apparent that the contributing archaeologists have been devoting ample attention to the not-so famous people of the historic sites, and their day-to-day activities.

There are other historical archaeology projects focused solely on “obscure” sites (in the sense that they are not associated with any particularly famous people or events) that also do great outreach including extensive websites, for example “New Philadelphia” in Illinois and the African Burial Ground in New York. 

Figure 5: As un-glamorous as historical archaeology gets: a turn of the 20th century kitchen trash dump site (actually excavation of latrines is perhaps less glamorous, but it often leads to interesting discoveries). Photo Credit: Lotte Govaerts/BRAC. 

Not all historical archaeology work gets reported on fancy websites or in academic publications. All around the country, a great deal of less publicized work is conducted in the context of Cultural Resources Management (CRM).  In these studies, archaeologists discover and/or examine sites during legally required archaeological surveys or mitigation projects (related to new construction or repairs after natural disasters). These types of projects produce results that often only appear in technical reports filed with the State Archaeology offices. I am certainly not alone in dreaming of a day when all the information from such reports will be easily accessible as reference material.

    My dissertation research and the work I’m doing here at the Rogers Archaeology lab studies mostly sites ranging from the late 18^th to early 20^th century (hence the use of 19^th century examples in most of my figures). There is an abundance of historic documents available from this time period. Local courthouses have documents such as birth, death, and marriage records, wills, property deeds, and probate inventories. Many of those document collections date back all the way to the founding of the county, although courthouses full of paper have been known to burn down, especially those in areas where Civil War fighting took place. Stores and manufacturers sometimes have store records, trade catalogs, and advertising archives. Local and national libraries 

Figure 6: Documents used in historical archaeology. Detail from a copy of a 1793 property deed. The legibility of handwritten records varies greatly between documents. There is usually some variability within a single document as well. The top of the page tends to be easier to read than the bottom, where it would have been harder for the clerk to write legibly. Photo Credit:  Deed of sale from William Davidson and Daniel Smith to Joseph Randolph, July 17, 1793, Buncombe County, North Carolina, Deed Book 1, page 129 (Buncombe County Register of Deeds, Asheville, North Carolina).

have items like personal communication collections full of letters, postcards, and personal journals. There are also vast collections of historic photographs, newspapers, and maps in repositories around the country. Other records like patent claims and census data are available as well. The list is nearly endless. As I report on my research in future blog posts, I will detail the specific historic sources I used, and what I used to find them.

    As you can see, the definition of historical archaeology can be broad (any study of societies that have writing) or narrow (modern colonial and post-colonial societies outside of Europe). In my research, I will be using documentary as well as archaeological sources to study sites in the Upper Missouri River basin. One challenge of this work is that the sites under investigation have long been submerged or destroyed. The archaeological surveys and excavations were done by other people, long before I was even born. Therefore my work addresses the historical archaeology of the sites solely through the collected data and artifacts from the River Basin Surveys and any associated historical documents I can identify. I look forward to sharing my ongoing research on this blog. In my next blog post, I will discuss how historical archaeology fits into the River Basin Surveys.

 

 Further reading:

Deetz, James 1977/1996 In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York.

Ferguson, Leland 1992 Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800. Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution Press.

Hall M. and S. Silliman (eds.) 2006 Historical Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hicks, Dan and Mary C. Beaudry (eds.) 2006 The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Orser, Charles E. 2004 Historical Archaeology, New Jersey

South, Stanley 1977. Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology. New York.

Scott, Elizabeth M. (ed.) 1994 Those of Little Note: Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Spector, Janet D. 1993 What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.

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.