Rogers Archaeology Lab

Fort Union Redux

Great Plains Travel Series

By J. Daniel Rogers

 

The mosquitoes were glad to see us.

If you remember a few posts back Lotte wrote about her visit to Fort Union, North Dakota during a cold spell in late Winter, 2017. By way of contrast I thought it might be interesting to make a few further comments and share a few images of the visit Garry Rogers and I paid to the fort on June 6, 2018 as part of our travels across the Plains. My summer images of green prairie and leafy trees are a nice contrast to Lotte’s frozen pictures of winter splendor. I haven’t written sooner about this visit because I intended to stop at the fort yet again in the summer of 2019. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it back to Fort Union—my route veered further to the west. I will mention some of the summer 2019 travels in a later post.

Fort Union was not a military fort. It was the headquarters of the Upper Missouri Outfit of the American Fur Company from 1828-1867. Perhaps the most striking thing about the landscape of Fort Union is that it sits on the edge of a low bluff along the meandering lowlands of the Missouri River. During the years the Fort was in use the river channel ran at the foot of the bluff, perhaps only 50 meters from the entrance. Today the channel has drifted several hundred meters south and left a marshland offering a remarkable habitat for wildlife, including swarms of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were glad to see us that day. During my undergraduate years, as part of my minor in zoology, I took a course on the various species of mosquitoes. It did not give me an appreciation for these insects. I have trouble saying anything good about the creatures, except that they are annoyingly resilient and persistent.

With the river to the south, about a mile to the north the rolling uplands take over from the level plain around the fort. It was on this plain that bands of Crow, Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Hidatsa, Lakota, and others came in procession to trade at the fort and to pitch their teepees. Fort employees grazed their horses on this plain and occasionally chased bison. Famous Euro-American visitors at the fort included George Catlin, the painter, who visited in 1832 and went up to the low hills behind the fort to sketch and paint (Catlin 1973). The painter, Karl Bodmer, in the employ of Maximilian, prince of Wied-Neuwied, did the same, including painting several striking portraits of native visitors at the fort. On June 27th, 1833, Prince Maximilian described in his journal the arrival of an Assiniboine contingent of several hundred warriors, women, and children. The warriors sang and fired their guns in the air (Thwaites 1906). When the famous ornithologist, John James Audubon, visited in 1843 he spent several weeks at the fort describing the birds of the region (Harris 1951).

 

George Catlin painted this view of Fort Union and the teepees of the Native visitors in 1832. (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1985.66.388)

 

Karl Bodmer painted this scene of Fort Union in 1833 from a location similar to the one chosen by George Catlin a few years before. Image from WikiArt.org.

 

The comings and goings at Fort Union established it as a hub of commerce on the Plains. Like Bent’s Fort in present-day Colorado it was a place everyone visited. Even with many visitors day-to-day life at the fort must have been very routine, although, there were also momentous days full of danger and tragedy. One of those times was the smallpox epidemic of 1837, which so devastated the native tribes that it forever changed the history of the region. The contagion also impacted the inhabitants of the fort. Although a vaccine was known, none was available and no one present really know how to make it. Charles Larpenteur, leader at the fort, began an ill-fated inoculation program that simply spread the disease faster. The head of the American Fur Company was informed that “at Fort Union all was wretchedness and despair—the Prairies covered with dead bodies, and the whole atmosphere tainted...” (Coues 1898:382).

 

 

Fort Union in Summer, 2018

In calmer and happier times my brother and I visited Fort Union. On the northern Plains the winters are long and the summers are short and glorious. Except perhaps on reenactment days, no modern images can capture the life of the fort. I took a few shots around the fort, as any visitor would do. Some are similar to Lotte’s 2017 images (see the earlier post).

 

The southwest block house at Fort Union and the newly mowed lawn, 2018. Photo by Dan Rogers

 

Closeup of the stonework on the block house, 2018. Photo by Dan Rogers

Inside the fort, 2018. Photo by Dan Rogers

A recreation of the painting by J.B. Moncravi that originally stood above the fort entrance, portraying the ideal of peaceful commerce, 2018. Photo by Dan Rogers

 

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References/Further reading

Barbour, Barton H. 2001. Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Catlin, George. 1973. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians: Written during Eight Years’ Travel (1832-1839) amongst the Wildest Tribes of Indians in North America. Edited by Marjorie Halpin.

Coues, Elliott, ed. 1898. Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri - The Personal Narrative of Charles Larpenteur 1833 - 1872. New York: Francis P. Harper.

Harris, Edward. 1951. Up the Missouri with Audubon: The Journal of Edward Harris. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.

Thompson, Erwin N. 2003. Fort Union Trading Post: Fur Trade Empire on the Upper Missouri. Williston, N.D.: Fort Union Association.

Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1906. “Travels in the Interior of North America by Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied.” In Early Western Travels, 1748-1846. Vol. 22–24. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark.

 

 

 

The Great Plains

(Part of a continuing series of travel commentaries)

By J. Daniel Rogers

 

The Great Plains brings all landscapes down to their essence—earth and sky. No hills, no trees. It is not boring, or blank or incomplete, the prairie is the foundation, the prototype. For me, it is the place to start.

The essence of the Plains. Photo by Dan Rogers.

 

 

All simple and true things are oversimplifications. The Great Plains is not only flat land and ever-changing sky. There are rivers--sometimes very large rivers--and hills and valleys. Stands of trees and forest follow along the river and stream courses. The land is never really flat and sometimes mountains crop up (the Black Hills) while bare mesas define some regions. Today, wherever it is feasible agriculture defines the landscape of the Plains. In some areas new oilfields have popped up.

To the east grasslands give way to ever thicker forest. The Rocky Mountains rise up at the western edge of the plains. The landscape transition to the mountains is something of a shock. Almost no foothills, prairie becomes mountain with little warning. On a recent trip to the Great Plains I marveled at the first sight of the mountains. My traveling partner, Garry Rogers, a landscape ecologist specializing in arid lands, said, “look at the snow!” I couldn’t believe it. “Snow?” As we drove west across the sweltering plains on June 6 I just didn’t think it could be snow. Viewed from 50 miles away, I thought it must be haze or fog on the mountains. Garry was right and I was wrong, it was snow and lots of it. I have lived on the Southern Plains and traversed the Northern Plains, I have hiked prairies and mountains around the world, but mountains still surprise me.

A couple hundred years ago Lewis and Clark led their expedition up the Missouri River. On May 26, 1805 they saw the mountains for the first time. This is what Lewis wrote:

 

In the after part of the day I also walked out and ascended the river hills which I found sufficiently fortiegueing. on arriving to the summit one of the highest points in the neighbourhood I thought myself well repaid for any labour; as from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time these points of the Rocky Mountains were covered with snow and the sun shone on it in such manner as to give me the most plain and satisfactory view. while I viewed these mountains I felt a secret plaesure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri; but when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I felt in the 1st moments in which I gazed on them; but as I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to believe differently. [Moulton 1983, Volume 4]

 

 A first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains. Photo by Dan Rogers.

 

I suspect that Lewis knew at that moment the dream of a water route to the Pacific was not even a remote possibility.  He must have known it before then.  He and Jefferson were aware of the Rocky Mountains and that the expedition would need to travel from the Missouri River across the mountains and to the Columbia River.  After all, how can you travel up a river and expect it to connect to an ocean (the Pacific)?  Rivers begin in a series of smaller and smaller streams, or sometimes emerge from a lake.  Perhaps there will be a westward flowing river system nearby, but access would certainly require portages and the eventual construction of a canal.  Two hundred years later it is easy to wonder what President Jefferson, Captain Lewis, and many others were thinking.

Of course, the contrast of prairie and mountain was nothing new to the Native tribes of the region.  The Blackfeet, the Assiniboine, the Crow, the Sioux, and others and many generations of their ancestors often traveled from grassland to forest, from plains to mountains.  And, indeed Native guides led the Lewis and Clark expedition from the Missouri River drainage to the Columbia River drainage and eventually to the Pacific.  The first view of the mountains that shocked Lewis was routine to others, including even a few European trappers who had traveled up the Missouri over the previous 30 years.  I have only twice seen that view, traveling from the east to the west.

On June 1st Garry and I met in St. Louis and began our drive along the Missouri River towards those mountains.  Everywhere we went we were reminded of the Lewis and Clark expedition, such as the L & C Ford/Lincoln dealership in Yankton, South Dakota or the L & C Cafe in Washburn, North Dakota, plus lots of monuments and points of interest.  In Nebraska City, Nebraska we stopped at the Lewis and Clark Visitor Center, a fine museum and activity center dedicated to the Corps of Discovery.  An exhibit about the flora and fauna along the river was especially interesting.  We both enjoyed the replica of the Lewis and Clark keel boat in front of the visitor’s center.  The original was designed by President Jefferson and Captain Lewis.  Presidents these days don’t set down and help design expedition equipment.  Mr. Jefferson was a scholar and intensely interested in the history, geology, flora, and fauna of unknown regions—not to mention making the U.S. a global power.  He did a lot more for the expedition than design equipment, he also intensely instructed Lewis on making scientific field observations.

Garry Rogers and the keel boat. This replica of the Lewis and Clark keel boat was made for an early 2000s documentary. The original has not survived. The expedition keel boat has its own commemorative history, having been featured on the US nickel during the early 2000s. Photo by Dan Rogers.

 

At the Lewis and Clark Visitor Center I picked out a couple postcards in the gift shop to send home.  I asked about stamps at the counter.  The staff person said, “Oh, I’m going by the post office later.  I’ll get stamps for you and mail the cards.  No charge.”  Welcome to the Great Plains!  Everywhere we went we met helpful and kind people curious about why we were visiting their town.

Paying attention to the Lewis and Clark expedition is a good way to reflect on what has changed and what has remained the same over the last 200 years.  For me the point of the trip was to visit some key places on the Great Plains and develop a sense of place.  Mountains are interesting, but prairie comes first for me.  After driving for a couple weeks about all I learned for sure is that I must come back.

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[A few months ago Lotte Govaerts wrote in this column about her travels in North Dakota to Fort Union and other important places.   In subsequent posts I will follow-up with my perspective on some of the same places.]

 

References/Further reading

Lewis and Clark Visitor Center

Gary E. Moulton, ed. 1983.  The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition., Volume 1, Atlas, and Volume 4, April 8 - July 27, 1805.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Christian, Shirley.  2009.   Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Ronda, James P.  1984.  Lewis and Clark Among the Indians.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Travels in North Dakota, Part V: Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site

By Lotte Govaerts

 

This is the fifth and last post about my recent trip to North Dakota. Previous posts in this series are here, here, here, and here. In this post, I describe our last stop in North Dakota: Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site (NPS). The park is located ca. 25 miles southwest of Williston, ND, near the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, on the North Dakota/Montana state line.

 

History of the fort:

Fort Union was the longest-lived of the Upper Missouri trade posts. Established in 1828 by the American Fur Company’s new “Upper Missouri Outfit” (UMO), it operated continuously through 1867. As we’ve discussed in previous blog posts, John Jacob Astor sold the American Fur Company in 1834. The UMO was purchased by Pratte, Chouteau, and Company (later Pierre Chouteau Jr. and Company). Fort Union was built mainly for trade with the Assinboine, but many other Northern Plains tribes (Blackfeet, Chippewa, Cree, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) were also frequent trading partners at Fort Union over the years. The bison robe trade waned in the 1860s, and the company’s business turned mostly to hauling freight on their steamships and distributing annuities to the tribes. Military troops were stationed at the fort in its last few years. In 1865 the Chouteau company sold to the Northwest Fur Company, who in turn sold to the military in 1867. The military then dismantled the fort and used its materials at nearby Fort Buford.

Karl Bodmer: Fort Union on the Missouri. Aquatint from the book "Maximilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, during the years 1832–1834" by Prince Maximilian of Wied (Publisher: Ackermann & Co., 1839). This image shows Fort Union during its earlier years. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons.

 

Because of its size, long life, and importance as UMO flagship post, Fort Union is the best documented of the Upper Missouri fur trade posts. Many records survive alongside writings and depictions by fort employees and famous visitors.

 

Painting of Fort Union by J.B. Moncravie [also spelled “Moncrevie” and “Moncrévier”]. J.B. Moncravie was an employee of the UMO who also had some artistic talent (see Hanson 1972 for more detail on what is known about J.B. Moncravie). He painted a treaty scene over one of the gates to the fort in the 1840s.That painting can be seen (with some effort) in the center of this image. Image Source: Original from the IX De Smetiana Collection, Midwest Jesuit Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. Reproduced here as a photo of the cover of Barbour 2001.

"Fort Union & distribution of Goods to the Assiniboins" watercolor with graphite underdrawing by John Mix Stanley, 1854. 

 

Historic Site Designation and Fort Reconstruction:

After the military dismantled the fort, the site lay abandoned for quite some time. Local interest in the history of the fort, however, led to its recognition as a landmark and the eventual reconstruction of the replica post. In 1961, Fort Union became North Dakota’s first National Historical Landmark. Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site was created in 1966. Archaeological field work took place at the site in 1968, 1969, 1970, and 1972. In 1985 a bill was passed in Congress funding a reconstruction of Fort Union. Prior to construction, more archaeological excavations took place, led by William Hunt between 1986 and 1988. Results of these excavations were used in the planning of the reconstruction. In the various 19^th century depictions of Fort Union included on this page, it can be clearly seen that many changes were made to the fort during its several decades of existence. As you can see in my photos below, the reconstructed Fort Union was built to look like the original fort did in its later years. Much more detail on the efforts preceding the establishment of Fort Union National Historic Site and the fort’s reconstruction can be found on the NPS’ page “Fort Union at Fifty, 1966-2016: An Online Exhibit.”

 

An 1865 drawing of Fort Union by Benjamin Franklin Griffin, a soldier stationed at Fort Union. Image Source: National Park Service, FOUS 568.

 

Our visit to the site:

Mat and I visited Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site after the blizzard we’d been traveling through had finally ended, though some fresh snow had fallen overnight which was still being cleared as we arrived. We visited the exhibit in the visitor center (located inside the Bourgeois House), and toured the grounds. We also chatted with the ranger on duty, Loren Yellow Bird. He provided us with much information about the site and the area. Below are some photos from our visit.

 

One of the bastions at reconstructed Fort Union. Note the bison weathervane. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

The front entrance to the reconstructed Fort Union. Above the gate is a painting that can be seen in some depictions of the original Fort Union. The original was by J.B. Moncravie, who also did one of the paintings included above. On the right side of the photo is a wooden fur press. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

Mat takes pictures of the reconstructed Bourgeois House, which houses the visitor center. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

One of the exhibit cases inside the visitor center at Fort Union. Many of these cases include artifacts recovered during the archaeological excavations at the site, alongside snippets of text from journals of employees and visitors to the fort. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

Mat was thrilled to find this hands-on part of the exhibit, including examples of different furs/hides that were traded at Fort Union. Photo: Lotte Govaerts

One of several sample bead sheets included in the exhibit inside Fort Union's visitor center (non-archaeological). These were distributed to traders by bead manufacturers. Many such beads were recovered during excavations at Fort Union. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

 

We hope you enjoyed traveling through North Dakota with us! Stay tuned for new posts on different topics, or check out our blog index to see all our older posts.

 

 

References/Further reading:

Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site

Midwest Archaeological Center Featured Projects: Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site

Barbour, Barton H. 2001. Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Hanson, Charles E. Jr. 1972. “J.B. Moncravie.” In Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen, 73–82. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Kurz, Rudolf Friedrich, and J. N. B Hewitt. 2005. On the Upper Missouri the Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, 1851-1852. Edited by Carla Kelly. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Larpenteur, Charles. 1933. Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri: The Personal Narrative of Charles Larpenteur, 1833-1872. Chicago: Lakeside Press.

Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1906. “Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834 by Alexander Philip Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied.” In Early Western Travels, 1748-1846. Vol. 22, 23, 24. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark.

 

Travels in North Dakota, Part IV: Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site

By Lotte Govaerts

 

This post is part of a series on a recent trip to North Dakota. You can find previous installments here, here, and here.

 

Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site includes 1758 acres of National Park, just north of Stanton, North Dakota. Inside the park boundaries are over 50 archaeological sites, estimated to span a period of about 8000 years. The main points of interest are the remains of the large villages that gave the park its name.

 

A Map of Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. Source: National Park Service.

 

Here is a Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site introductory video by the National Park Service:

 

Awatixa X’ie or “Lower Hidatsa” village was established by the Awatixa Hidatsa subgroup around 1525 , and was occupied until 1780-85. The village covered 10 acres and there were at least 50 earth lodges. Approximately 500 to 600 people lived here until the village was abandoned after the smallpox epidemic that struck the area in the early 1780s. The survivors temporarily moved away before returning to the area to establish Awatixa Village, which was occupied ca. 1790-1834. This village included approximately 60 lodges, though the population fluctuated over time. It was burned in a raid in 1834. Awatixa Village is also sometimes referred to as Sakakawea Village, because this is the village where Sakakawea lived before she joined the Lewis and Clark expedition. The site has partly eroded into the river. Hidatsa Village, or Big Hidatsa was founded by the Hidatsa-proper Hidatsa subgroup around 1600. This village covered approximately 15.5 acres, and included some 100 earth lodges. Population estimates for this village range between 830 and 1200. It was abandoned in 1845.

 

The entrance to the visitor center at Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, in summertime. Mat and I were far too cold to take a picture of the exterior of the building when we visited during a blizzard. Photo: National Park Service.

 

When Mat and I visited Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, it was still extremely cold and windy, so we did not walk any of the trails or see any of the village sites. Fortunately, there is a lot to see indoors at the visitor center, as well. The exhibits inside include artifacts recovered from the village sites, alongside decorative arts made by Northern Plains Indians and replicas of tools and other objects. Below are just a few examples.

 

 

An exhibit case showing tools made out of animal bone. Our archaeological collections here at NMNH include many of these bones without the wooden handles, as you may have seen in previous blog posts. Photo: Lotte Govaerts

 

An exhibit case showing some local artifacts, including Knife River flint, glass beads, and metal tinklers. Photo: Lotte Govaerts

An exhibit case showing porcupine quill decorations alongside glass bead decorations. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

Another exhibit case showing quill- and bead work. Photo: Lotte Govaerts

A "bull boat" replica. These were made out of willow frames, covered with bison skin. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

 

The ranger on duty also took us inside the earth lodge replica just outside the visitor center. The earth lodge is furnished, though wintertime displays are a bit more sparse than those you can see there during summer.

 

 

A photo of the outside of the earth lodge at Knife River Indian Villages, during nicer weather. Photo: National Park Service.

 

Inside the earth lodge. Mat listens to the ranger telling us many things about the park, the region, and their history. As you can see, there was no fire going, but we were sheltered from the wind inside, so we were able to stay out there for quite a while without freezing. Photo: Lotte Govaerts.

 

A diagram of the inside of an earthlodge. Source: National Park Service.

 

 

That concludes this post about our visit to Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site. Stay tuned for the next (and last) installment in this series, in which I will discuss my visit to Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site.

 

Further Reading:

Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site

Ahler, Stanley A., and Marvin Kay, eds. 2007. Plains Village Archaeology: Bison-Hunting Farmers in the Central and Northern Plains. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Ahler, Stanley A., Thomas D Thiessen, and Michael K Trimble. 1991. People of the Willows: The Prehistory and Early History of the Hidatsa Indians. Grand Forks, North Dakota: University of North Dakota Press.

 

 

 

Travels in North Dakota, Part II: Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center and Fort Mandan

By Lotte Govaerts

This is the second post in a blog series on my recent trip to North Dakota. Check my previous post for photos from Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. The second stop my friend Mat and I made on this trip was at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, North Dakota. It was snowing when we arrived there and the wind had picked up more, but the museum was open and we even got to tour the reconstructed Fort Mandan in the snow. Both are run by the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation.

“A map of Lewis and Clark's track, across the western portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean: by order of the executive of the United States in 1804, 5 & 6.” (Image Source: Library of Congress G4126.S12 1814 .L4.)

 

Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center

After the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory in 1803, the government immediately set out to establish a presence in the area, explore, map, and attempt to find a river route to the Pacific. President Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition into the new territory. He and William Clark, along with their “Corps of Discovery” traveled from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean (at the mouth of the Columbia River) and back again, between May 14, 1804 and September 23, 1806.

The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center has exhibits illustrating different aspects of the Lewis and Clark expedition, as well as ones that illustrate local Native American and fur trade history. These exhibits include many archaeological artifacts, very similar to ones you may have seen in our various posts about our collections work.

Below are a few examples of exhibit cases at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center:

Display of bone and ceramic artifacts at Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

 

"Trade objects" display at Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

A bison scapula hoe with wooden handle attached, sitting among other replica tools used for educational purposes. If you've been reading our River Basin Surveys collections posts, you might know that in archaeological contexts, we don't normally find those with the wooden handles still attached, so our photos look a bit different. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

A reconstruction of what a trade room would have looked like, showing many of the items that were traded on the Upper Missouri in the 19th century. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

Fort Mandan Reconstruction

Fort Mandan is the name of the fort Lewis and Clark (and the Corps of Discovery) constructed near the Mandan villages, where they stayed the winter of 1804-1805. The replica Fort Mandan (originally constructed by the McLean County Historical Society) is not in the exact location of the original Fort Mandan. That is because the site of the original Fort Mandan was never found. It is likely in/under the Missouri River now, as the river frequently shifted channels, and does not flow in the same place now as it did when the Corps of Discovery passed through.

Because of the uncharacteristically warm temperatures the area had seen in the days just before our arrival, ice and snow had melted inside the fort and then re-frozen. This made it impossible for the ranger who gave us the tour to open some of the doors and show us all the different rooms/exhibits, but we still got to see most of the fort. The blizzardy conditions seemed kind of appropriate for a winter fort visit.

Approaching the reconstructed Fort Mandan in the snow. The weather gave us some appreciation of what life must have been like at Fort Mandan, though it wasn't nearly as cold as the average temperature experienced during the winter of 1804-05! (see Burnette 2002 and Preston 2004 for information on weather conditions during the Lewis and Clark expedition)

 

Looking into the interior of Fort Mandan. The odd patterns in the soil are frozen footprints. It had been unseasonably warm for a few days, and melting snow and ice had made the fort interior very muddy. By the time we visited, all the mud had frozen again, leaving these patterns, and leaving some of the doors in the fort frozen shut.

 

 

"A reconstruction of Lewis and Clark's room at Fort Mandan.” Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Inside the translator/fur trapper room. It was nicer than the enlisted men’s rooms, but not quite as nice as Lewis and Clark’s.

 

Stay tuned for the third part of this blog series, in which I describe a visit to Fort Clark Historic Site.

 

 

Bibliography & Further Reading:

Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center/Fort Mandan

Lewis and Clark Journals online at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln

Burnette, Dorian J. “Meteorological Reconstruction of the Lewis and Clark Expedition” Emporia State University, 2002.

Jackson, Donald. Thomas Jefferson & the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

Preston, Vernon. “The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 1803-1806: Weather, Water & Climate” Weather Forecast Office, Pocatello: NOAA National Weather Service, 2004.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Travels in North Dakota, Part I: Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park

By Lotte Govaerts

I have been working with collections from the Upper Missouri basin in North and South Dakota for about four years now, here at the National Museum of Natural History, but I had never actually visited the area until this past spring (late winter, really). My good friend and frequent travel companion Mat and I had the opportunity to take a short road trip across the area in early March of this year. Unfortunately, we arrived in North Dakota at the very end of an uncharacteristically warm period, which was followed by a blizzard. Our travel was impeded somewhat by these blizzard conditions which persisted throughout our visit.

Because of the time of year and the weather, many parks and other attractions were closed or inaccessible when we passed through the area. Despite this, we were still able to see a lot of the sights, and had a great trip. In this blog series, I want to share some pictures from that trip, as well as some historic photos and other related images.

Three earth lodges at On-A-Slant Village, in Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

One of the first places Mat and I visited in North Dakota was Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, located about seven miles south of Mandan.  The park does not close entirely for winter, but during the off-season, there are no interpretive services, no employees on site, and no exhibits, tours, or other activities. The visitor center is also closed.

 

On-A-Slant Village

One of the historic sites contained within Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park is On-A-Slant Village. On-A-Slant was a Mandan village occupied for approximately 200 years between the late 16^th and 18^th centuries. It was abandoned shortly after many of the village’s inhabitants were killed during the smallpox epidemic of 1781. The survivors moved north to the Knife River region. In the 1930s, five earth lodges were reconstructed on the site by Civilian Conservation Corps crews.

Tracks in the snow lead to the entrance of an earth lodge at On-A-Slant Village. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

It was extremely cold when we visited, with an icy wind blowing. With no fire going, it wasn’t particularly warm inside these earth lodges, but we could appreciate how well-insulated they were, as the wind could not penetrate the walls at all.

Selfie inside an earth lodge at On-A-Slant Village. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

 

Close-up of interior of roof of an earth lodge at On-A-Slant Village. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

Interior of larger, ceremonial lodge at On-A-Slant Village. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

Interior of the larger, ceremonial earth lodge at On-A-Slant Village. Human (me) for scale. (Photo Mathew Patterson)

 

 

Outside of an earth lodge at On-A-Slant Village. The Missouri river can just be seen on the right. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

1930s photo of Civilian Conservation Corps crew working on the construction of an earth lodge at On-a-Slant Village. (Image source: North Dakota Parks and Recreation, 50^th Anniversary Photo Album)

 

 

Fort Abraham Lincoln

Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park of course also includes the site of the fort it was named for.

Almost a century after the Mandan left the area, in June 1872, an infantry post named Fort McKeen was established in this location. It was soon renamed Fort Abraham Lincoln. A cavalry post was added the next year. Fort Abraham Lincoln housed three companies of the 6th and 17th Infantries and six companies of the 7th Cavalry, making it one of the largest military forts in the Northern Plains. It is perhaps most famous for being the home base from which the 7^th Cavalry under Custer started out on the expedition that ended in their defeat at the Greasy Grass or Little Bighorn.

The house where George and Elizabeth Custer lived has been restored, along with the commissary storehouse, enlisted men's barracks, a granary, and a stable. Visitors can take tours, but not during the winter season when we visited.

Wide view of some of the reconstructed buildings at Fort Abraham Lincoln. (Photo Lotte Govaerts)

 

A close-up of the reconstructed Custer house, taken on a nicer day. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Quite a few historical drawings and photographs exist of Fort Abraham Lincoln and the Custer house in particular.

 

View of Fort Abraham Lincoln, 1887. (Image Source: North Dakota State University Libraries, Institute for Regional Studies, Dakota Lithographs and Engravings Collection, Folio 102)

 

Officers and their wives at Fort Abraham Lincoln, 1876 or slightly earlier. (Image Source: State Historical Society of North Dakota 0022-H-0034. Via ND Studies)

 

Several people on the porch and steps of the Custer house, sometime between 1873 and 1876. (Image Source: State Historical Society of North Dakota 00260-03)

 

In the next post I will share photos from my visit to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center and the reconstructed Fort Mandan. Stay tuned!

Further reading:

Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park website

MHA Nation history pages

Chambers, Lee. Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Pub., 2008.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. Macmillan, 2014.

Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890. Rev. ed. Histories of the American Frontier Series. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

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. 

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. 

NorthLands in a Changing World

Before stepping out the front door of the Museum on a recent evening, I pull on my serious down parka and snap the fur-trimmed hood snug under my chin. Bill Fitzhugh, Director of the Arctic Studies Center, looks at me like I’m from another planet and says, “15 degrees isn’t that cold! If you were in Ulaan Baator now you wouldn’t be able to breathe.” Not being able to breathe is an exaggeration, but I got the point, thinking, “That is exactly why I am not in Ulaan Baator in February.”

I say, “Give me a hot desert any day.”

I will take my chances with sunburn and dehydration in the Gobi over frostbite in the Arctic Circle. Sure, I know 15° F isn’t very cold. In Washington we do get temperatures like this from time-to-time, although probably less so in the future.  

I’m also sure that Bill Fitzhugh is better adapted to the cold than I am. In his research, he camps with the reindeer herders in Russia and Mongolia, excavates European contact sites in Frobisher Bay north of Hudson Strait, and dives in Hare Harbor on Quebec’s North Shore. Bill specializes in the study of cold places, Vikings, Inuit, and the Mongol Empire.

Bill measures a whale limb bone, during an underwater excavation in Hare Harbor, Quebec. Image Credit: Bill Fitzhugh.

We have been colleagues for decades and have traveled in Mongolia, attended some of the same conferences, and sat at the same tables in countless meetings here at the Museum. The irony of my aversion to extreme cold is that the northern ice is melting and the Arctic is becoming warmer more quickly than other parts of the globe. And as part of a 4-year NSF grant, I am a member of a research team that is developing computer simulations of the ways social and climate systems interact. Last year the project received supplemental funding to include the Arctic.  Bill’s experience and that of the other members of the Arctic Studies Center, especially Laura Fleming, Igor Krupnik, and Stephen Loring have become critical links for this research project. Our current efforts are focused on both the Boreal and Arctic regions through a simulation called NorthLands.   

For me the experiences of 15° F in Washington, indigenous ways of life in the Arctic, and the travels of European explorers are directly connected and now linked even further through a modern high-tech way of building simulated worlds to find connections and their implications. The current evidence for climate change motivates us to seek better and more realistic ways of coping. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released a report focused on the state of knowledge about managing risks and adapting to climate change. One of the case studies was drawn from the Canadian far north. We need to know how the risks will affect the lives of people who call those regions home, not to mention the fact that what happens in the Arctic has implications for us all.

The NorthLands view, looking down on the North Pole. This is the NorthLands model's graphical user interface (or GUI- pronounced "Gooey." This amuses us.). Photo Credit: Mason Smithsonian Joint Project on Climate and Societal Modeling.

The NorthLands model has 4 major components: climate, biogeography, social systems (including government), and infrastructure (roads, buildings, airports, etc.).  The model is currently under construction at George Mason University’s Center for Social Complexity, using the MASON simulation toolkit.  We think we can make a unique contribution by developing a simulation that replicates the dynamics of very complex socionatural interactions, on a very large scale.  Once NorthLands is fully functional, we can adjust different components and study the effects to analyze alternative scenarios.  We then compare the results against what we know about the real world.  Does NorthLands give us new insights?  Here are some of the questions we hope the NorthLands model will help us get closer to answering:

• What are the principal criteria for successful adaptation? What resources will be required?
• What kinds of collective action will be needed for successful adaptation?  How important are governmental policies?
• Is our adaptive capacity sufficient for the given challenges? Will we need new technologies?
• Are extreme weather and abrupt changes likely to exceed our capacity to adapt in some regions?

The experience of climate change isn’t just gradual rising temperatures. It is not as if every day is just slightly warmer; the change isn’t linear. There is an upward trend, but jagged ups and downs is probably a better way to describe the process as we experience it through increased variation in weather.  Climate change is sometimes about more extreme and unusual weather, and even abrupt changes.  Climate is complicated and even chaotic, but that doesn’t mean we cannot interpret the trends and sort out the implications for the ways we live on this planet.

You can read more about the project and the people working on the project on our website and the George Mason NSF-CDI Wiki.

In a future blog I will take a closer look at the word “adaptation” and the many ways it is used to describe the potentials of our future. 

 By: Dr. J. Daniel Rogers