00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome to episode one zero nine of a life ruins podcast weinvestige the careers of those living life and ruins I'm your host Carlton Gover David will not be joining us today and Connor will make it for the second and third segments. But for this week's episode. We are joined by Dr Anna Goldfield from the apn's flagship show the dirt podcast Anna thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you doing this evening. 00:21.83 Anna I'm doing very well and fearing feeling very flattered that you called the dirt the Apn's flagship show. Um gosh yeah no I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. 01:02.46 archpodnet Absolutely I mean at all of our monthly meetings for the apn and we go through monthly episode downloads. It's always the dirt in the if not tens of thousands then bruins is down there with like five thousand a month so it's always. Dirt is what we aspire to be one day if we ever get our act together. We're hoping to get to your guys' level of listenership and also your guys' content is just phenomenal. What you guys are able to cover. 01:21.77 Anna I It adds. 01:33.53 Anna Yeah I mean thank you, thank you so much. Um, it is really fun to get to talk about something new every week or at least as close to every week as we can manage with our with our dayops. 02:23.16 archpodnet Absolutely So we really wanted to get you and we will have amron later on just really kind of have our listeners get to know you guys which you guys both propelled into anthropology and what led to the dirt. So I mean just kind of. 02:10.87 Anna Is it. 02:58.94 archpodnet Kicking us off. You know what first got you interested in anthropology to begin with. 02:43.57 Anna I think I mean I think it was history first that I really got interested in I've always been really into the past and really curious about how people lived and and how it was different from how I lived and how the world was different and. How technologies were different the the stuff like the actual physical stuff. The development of technologies and the creation of art and the actual physical remnants of the past have always really interested me but I didn't really realize that for a long time. Um, as a kid I was super into the middle ages. Um, really I still am I'm still into you know castles and swords and sort of the the very sort of pop cultureified middle ages. Um I even and I've said this on the dirt. And I will continue to say it because I deserve to be roasted for this but I had a medieval castle-themed Batt mitzvah and ah in in context and in retrospect the medieval period for jews was a rough time in Europe. Um. And so the irony is not lost on me but when I went to undergrad I started as a classics major I really really loved the Greek and latin classes that I was fortunate enough to take in high school and um I went to brynmar college which is a small liberal arts. Women's college just outside of Philadelphia and I started in the classics program and I was like I'm gonna do latin and Greek and learn about the ancient world and then about a semester and a half in I realized that while the languages were really interesting. What I was. Really really captivated by was the lives of people and so I and this was also ah because I had also taken an archeology class I took sort of intro to archeology one ah 1 or 100 whenever it was and I realized like oh. Okay, the languages interested me because it was kind of ah a lens into the lives and I didn't have access to it as a high school student I didn't have access to archaeology or anthropology classes I was doing greek and latin but not learning the wider context of the ancient world. In which those languages were spoken and so that sort of propelled me into archeology and and I've really spent my career as an archaeologist for a really long time. Not knowing what I was doing and sort of blundering into the right place by accident and so. 08:03.97 Anna When I finished my undergraduate degree. Um, it's a degree in classical and near Eastern Archeology which essentially for me was an art history degree because I didn't take the opportunity to do fieldwork at that time I went to and studied abroad but that didn't include. Fieldwork and really no aspect of sort of the practical parts of archaeology were ever dealt with I didn't really learn how excavations work I Never I didn't learn what a total station was I didn't know how to some extent I learned how artifacts are. Studied and catalogued and illustrated and that was a big part of um, my interest was illustrating artifacts which is something that I still do and but I really don't think I got an archeology education until graduate school. Um, and so for. Grad school I went to Boston University um, because I applied to 3 programs and that's the one that I got into and sort of simplified things for me and again I went into it. Yeah at Bramar College yeah. 10:37.82 archpodnet So but before we get into that where did you where'd you end up going to undergrad because you didn't cover it so you started off okay gotcha. 10:35.13 Anna Yeah, that's the the small women's college outside Philly yeah, and so um, after undergrad I mean I took 2 years off after undergrad to sort of experience living in the real world and have a real job hated that and so I went back to school. 10:59.38 archpodnet Right. 11:27.60 archpodnet What did you end up doing. 11:13.25 Anna I worked at the front desk of a dorm at Drexel University which is in Philly so I lived in I lived in West Philly and I was I was the person who like swiped entrance cards at the security desk in front of the dorm. But I also I wasn't security I was like the kind of liaison between. Facilities and like student resources and um, security. So I it was not intellectually challenging at all. It wasn't a great fit for me. It was a job and you know I it paid the rent. It. Ah. Allowed me to do fun things on the weekends but I was not happy as so I really wanted to go back to school and I really wanted to pursue archeology and so um I went to Boston University intending to kind of get into and because I had experience in sort of the classical near Eastern World um I wanted to kind of continue that but specifically look at I think at the time it was sort of the development of technologies and specifically like how different different technologies working with different materials. Spread to different places. Um and somewhere along the way I realized again that that wasn't that wasn't the thing. Um and I found my way to zooaraeology. So I really found my way to to zoorhark the the analysis of of funnel remains from archeological sites. In the field. So in my first year of graduate school I met Dr Paul Goldberg who um, he's ah he's a professor. He's currently I think he's now a professor emeritus at Boston University but he basically invented. Micromorphology which is like the the study of site formation processes on a very very small scale the scale of um really the scale of sort of grains of sand um to look at sort of so micromorphology. The. Essentially how you study that is that you take sections from from a site you encase them in plaster you remove them so you got a chunk of the the profile of a site you embed that with you impregnated it with resin. And then you can cut it up and take thin sections of it which you can then look at under a microscope and you can get a very very very fine resolution view of all the layers of sediment much more than you can just see with the naked eye. You can see whether whether there's layers of Ash and whether there is whether silt has. 16:36.21 Anna Blown in or whether Clay has washed in due to water movement. So it's a really incredible way of getting at things that have happened at the site over Millennia um, and he was working at the site of la ferace in France which is it's in the southwest dordon region of France and he said. Why don't you come along for the summer do some field work. You need the experience and I had taken high school french that was my only other non-english language so that seemed like a reasonable idea and it also wasn't I have very um, very protective parents. And it wasn't a part of the world that would make them excessively nervous. So so France seemed like a way to go. Um, and so I ended up participating in field seasons at La Pharisee for the next six years and I got the chance to work with Dr Harold Dibble who's um, he bested away a few years ago but he was a phenomenal sort of force in the study of Lithic technology and and the paleolithic in Europe um, so I worked on his team for for several years and over the course of that realized that I was really really interested in how ancient people. 8 like supported themselves how they subsisted um and I should mention la ferace is a neanderthal site it's a really well known well-established neanderthal site that was first excavated in the 20 s and then the world wars got in the way and then it was excavated again in the. 19:29.90 archpodnet Right? right. 19:42.73 Anna Want to say sixty s and seventy s and then again in the two thousand s and so I was a part of those last excavations and the intent of those excavations was to sort of sort out the stratigraphy the the context of the previous excavations because they were disconnected and the site reports kind of didn't match up. So they were trying to sort of contextualize everything and and figure out what the whole story of la feracy was so there were um, no longer any neanderthals there. No no remains there at least that we found but there had been and several skeletons found during the first excavations. So at la feracy. Um I met Dr Teresa Steele who was the zooareologist on site and she started I I expressed interest in learning zoo archeology because I realized that that was the simplest way for me to get at patterns of of behavior related to food because. Those are the things if you're talking about a site that's you know, sixty Thousand or more years old animal bones are the things that preserve best out of all the possible sort of food materials. There are other things that preserve it's just that was the thing I could see and touch and and learn directly about and so that was. What I got really really interested in and so I started thinking about zooareology and decided to do my dissertation on neanderthal subsistence as it related to both the use of fire for cooking and the um. Extinction of neanderthals once homo sapiens moved into western europe so that's I mean that's really and and indeed I did that is what I did my dissertation on and yeah, that's that's me that's my whole trajectory. 23:41.90 archpodnet Um, that's a lot like for those micro sections of site strata like how many like if like a regular like let's say like a. 23:30.41 Anna Um, yeah, yeah. 24:07.68 archpodnet Twenty Centimeter deep like just something like super shallow like how many thin sections are we talked about with just something like that. 23:46.15 Anna Sure it really depends on how many so so what happens first is that the the team sort of looks at it and tries to determine how many layers overall they think are present. And then often the thin sections will be taken based on specific areas that they want to look into so especially the margins between layers and they want to make sure that in fact, there is a change in the sediment or there's not just like a tiny layer of something else hiding that the naked eye can't see. Um, but yeah, it can be dozens. It can be I'm sure that some sites have hundreds I guess it really just depends on the the depth of the section. But um, yeah, Paul Goldberg's pretty incredible. He's he's done because he essentially like invented this. So discipline. Um, his name is just on every kind of seminal paper for every major site. Um, so it was it was great to get the chance to to work with him and the man makes a mean Apple cobbler. Yeah, he's just he's a great guy. Yeah. 26:25.18 archpodnet I All right? That's a fun fact I'll take that I'm always amazed by Geo Archeologists like truly what they're able to do with dirt is like I think it's witchcraft like I don't I don't get it. But it's just so cool for them to. 26:22.15 Anna Same. 27:00.94 archpodnet Be able to look at Strata and sediments and soils the way they do and like Reconstruct a site's history and and taking that to like the like microscopic level the the Width within sections is like a whole different level. Yeah that unch. 26:46.10 Anna Yeah. It really? um, brings tons of depth. Yeah yeah, um, if you want to talk to ah a micro stratographic guy on your show I I have a friend and colleague who is who does that. So yeah yeah I can um. 27:43.24 archpodnet Oh absolutely, that'd be fascinating. Yeah absolutely and then um, man it's always been a dream of mine to be able to work on a neanderthal site like going to Europe to work on something like that. So um, when you were. 27:32.65 Anna Remind me and I will give you his contact info. 27:44.29 Anna Um, I totally looked out. Yeah I I do realize how what an absolute privilege that was. 28:21.46 archpodnet Ah, right? Um, when you're getting your district like your doctorate because you're not you know, very old I think we're around the same age like that the I yeah see like not at all were those ideas of neanderthals. Um, so being like. 28:12.77 Anna Um, thank you? Yes I have 36 29:01.36 archpodnet Brutish and like quote unquote primitive still pervasive by the time you're writing your disc. Yeah. 28:43.71 Anna Oh yeah, yeah because I would I would you know mention to my parents something that I was working on and my dad would crack a joke about you know a neanderthal being a dumb dumb and I would get and you know probably unreasonably mad but I was like come on I don't. Go to your job and make fun of what you do, but um, yeah, no I do think and I think it's still um, it's It's definitely changing. But I think it is taking a lot of time to sort of for the you know, understandably. 29:43.26 archpodnet Sir. Yes. 29:48.83 Anna Relatively obscure world of research into neanderthals to sort of filter through to everyone but I do think that that Neanderthal Renaissance is picking up Speed. It seems to be It seems that I see more and more news stories and more and more um, just sort of. Features about like neanderthals were much more complex than originally than we ever thought it's like well okay, but but I'm you know obviously the media tends to sensationalize things. Ah for to some extent I'm not mad about that but a lot of times that it causes people to take. Research out of context and so that is sort of where the other part of my career comes in. 31:33.16 archpodnet Absolutely now are you in the camp that neanderthals are like ah like Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis or like firmly like homo neanderthal lenses. 31:28.97 Anna I think that that's kind of I think it's for me personally, it's an issue of sort of biological semantics like if it's really important to someone to distinguish that neanderthals and homo sapiens were. Different in some and if they want to make that taxonomic distinction. That's fine. That's great if they want to connect neanderthals to homo sapiens by saying homo sapiens neanderthalinsis that's also fine because clearly um, it's it's murky. It's very wobbly because. We know that neanderthals and homo sapiens interbred because modern humans living today. Some portions of the population still have some neanderthal Dna a very small percentage but it's in there which means that you know sex had to happen. That's the only way Dna gets in there and. 33:28.38 archpodnet Move. 33:15.33 Anna So we know that they were at least biologically compatible enough to to do that. Which means that by the biological or sort of the broadest biological definition of species neanderthals and humans were closely related enough to be kind of if not the same species then. Maybe like a subspe I don't know it gets. It gets really dicey there but I just tend to call them both different flavors of human um because I like to think of them like when you say human it implies a lot of things. The word human is a very loaded word. It comes with connotations. Of intelligence with sophistication in terms of like technology and culture with sort of innovation but also with humanity right? giving someone the quality the aspect of humanity. Um and seeing a kinship between. 2 people or 2 you know, 2 2 species and so to call neanderthals human I think gives them that humanity that that we're seeing more and more that they had you know from evidence in the archaeological record. So that's when i. When I get asked that question I tend to get very flustered because of like I don't know because do you want me to be a biologist or but about it or do you want me to be like an anthropologist about it and um so I I try to answer both at the same time and end up just sort of getting myself into ah a funk. But um, yeah. That's that's my answer is that they are both humans. 36:45.44 archpodnet Fair enough. That's a great answer I like that answer a lot awesome. Well on that note I can imagine well on that note, we're going to go ahead and wrap up the first segment of episode one zero nine we'll be right back with Dr Anna Goldfield 36:30.63 Anna Thank you I've had to answer it a lot.