00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome back to episode one forty seven of a life and ruins podcast we have Mckenna litinsky here and I am just gonna start off by saying that your defense was probably one of the the best I've been to well- organizganed. Well-spoken. Um, well thought out the whole process I was really really impressed and and we had talked before and and kind of chatted about stuff in your research and it was really cool to see it all kind of come together in in this kind of final presentation I'm not usually sometimes. Ah, defenses are bad and and people are it's hard for people who are in grad school to present. Well mine was boring is shit I can tell you that and pretty dry. But I yeah, it was bad. It was not good. 00:47.79 David Howe I was there that was a bad. 00:53.47 archpodnet Um, but it was like ah I felt way more entertained and I really I really truly enjoyed your defense so well done. 01:01.90 McKenna Litynski Thank you that actually means a lot because sometimes from an insider's perspective I don't know how well I'm doing like I'm not gonna lie I practiced against a wall I'm not kidding like at least 50 times so like I practice like every single day for a month 01:14.53 David Howe Wow. 01:20.70 McKenna Litynski Sometimes more than once a day just to make sure I was articulating my sentences correctly I was like not able to look at a script at all like I put a lot of effort into it. But thank you. 01:29.52 archpodnet It showed it showed absolutely. 01:34.63 McKenna Litynski I appreciate it I I overthink a lot So that's probably why. 01:37.47 David Howe And I haven't seen it yet. But I mean I couldn't be there but I'm excited to see it because I've heard from multiple people that you knocked it out of the park. So good. Good job and yes some defenses no offense to the people that were there in my tenure just sometimes you're like. 01:47.37 McKenna Litynski Thank you. 01:56.62 David Howe That wasn't good but they passed what. 01:57.59 archpodnet Yeah I mean I mean not everyone is like a super good public speaker and I don't think that's fully taught at least fleshed out in grad school I mean you should be presenting a lot and doing it but it doesn't mean. 02:01.84 David Howe Ah presenter. Yeah. 02:08.97 David Howe That is something yeah for the audience listening that doesn't that hasn't gone to school either wants to go to school writing obviously is the main thing you need to be good at that's why they make you take an English's classes as pre comps. In college because you got to write but also every class where you have a term paper you usually have to defend it and in grad school for sure you have to be able to talk in front of people and I took a public speaking class in my undergrad which really helped because I was pretty nervous before that and I get mean I guess it worked out well for me. But. 02:31.16 McKenna Litynski Are a. 02:42.27 David Howe In Grad school. You get that constant practice with every turnpaper turnpaper and you have your peers that you go to every class with so it's a comfortable group that you get pretty much comfortable talking in front of which I think is another benefit of a cohort. Um. 02:55.42 archpodnet Yeah, and you get lots of at least our stuff was a lot of discussion based so you're pretty much presenting your side of the case every time you're in class and making arguments and stuff like that. So it really forces you to be articulate or articulated as a. 03:04.71 David Howe Um, yeah. 03:13.59 archpodnet Sebastian said right. 03:15.16 McKenna Litynski If yeah yeah I feel like um, wyoming does a really good job of like preparing you for the defense like Todd was basically telling me that they wouldn't put a student in the position of defending their thesis if they wouldn't they if they weren't ready right. 03:15.33 David Howe Articulated. 03:32.60 David Howe Um, yeah. 03:32.78 McKenna Litynski So and I feel like there's a lot of nice steps towards the defense so like at the end of your first year you have the 4 field presentation where you have to like propose a master's thesis topic kind of defend that and then obviously there's. 03:33.36 archpodnet Um. 03:47.40 McKenna Litynski Prospectus I really enjoyed the prospectus defense that was really fun and I think that prepared me the most for my defense was just because like I proposed my thesis I proposed my methods and everything and then it was an hour long brainstorming session with my three committee members and it was intimidating but walking out of it I was like I had so much fun. It was great. 04:11.43 David Howe Ah, to reiterate for the audience this What she's talking about is a woman I mean I mean you can explain it like what's a perspective presentation. It's like it's private right. 04:22.75 McKenna Litynski Yeah, it's private. It's just with your 3 committee members associated with your thesis. Um, essentially you go in you describe some background research what you propose to research for your thesis your timeline What your methods are. Um, just the steps you're going to take to make sure you can complete your thesis basically and then afterwards they ask you questions or your committee member Committee members. Ask you questions and then they kind of feed off of that and it's I. Describe it as intimidating because you're sitting in a room with 3 people that already have the doctor degrees and they're clearly smarter than you and they're brainstorming themselves and it's like oh my gosh like this is crazy. 05:08.36 David Howe Um, yeah. 05:11.32 David Howe Yeah, um I remember mine too because it was like a small room with Dr Kelly Drerville and this guy named Dr Walrath who fell asleep during mine. Um, and I was like so I think Todd and Bob are both like kind of. Talking louder and louder to to get him to wake up because he the other thing too. You have to have an outside committee member that shows that you can collaborate with people outside of your your discipline and like I found an engineer who like clearly had no interest in archeology and he was just like. There to look at my math which Todd could easily do himself anyway and he was just kind of like it was like 8 in the morning. He's just not no I didn't blame him but um, yeah, it it. It did afterwards though, the brain session and he brought in some good points about like physics and like the parameters of the experiment and things like that. So um, yeah, it is beneficial to do that. Um, and yeah I don't think we've talked about that in detail here before. 06:09.73 archpodnet Yeah I think I blacked out mine I don't remember it but I remember that's just grad school in general. Um, so onto your actual defense and and your research So could you explain like um, the. 06:12.56 David Howe All right. 06:26.85 archpodnet I think you had 3 or 4 broad topics that you were focusing on as part of your masters thesis which is first of all impressive because I had two so there's that. But yeah, if you don't want explaining that. 06:41.69 McKenna Litynski Yeah, definitely? Um, so my master's thesis focuses on analyzing the microphone fauna remains from the laprole mammoth site which is a mammoth killin campsite located in Commerce County Wyoming dates to around twelve thousand Nine hundred years ago contains a diverse assemblage of artifacts including Lithic Technologies Ochre charcoal bone needle fragments of bone bead and the remains of large and small vertebrate animals so to back up a little bit. What really took off. Um, where kickstarted my thesis was this big debate in Clovis Archaeology known as the generalist versus specialist debate and that's kind of focused on the extent to which paleoindigenous peoples preferentially targeted large animals on the landscape or whether both small and large animals were pursued upon encounter. Tos ensure Hunter Gatherer survival so there's lots of different articles on taking different sides of the debate. So that's kind of where my first question comes in is I'm trying to test whether or not these small animals that exist at Laprelle are naturally associated if they're just. Natural occurrences or intrusions on the landscape or if people thirteen thousand years ago were cooking and consuming these microphonea to aid in their caloric needs. Their subsistence purposes. So that's kind of question one to supplement. 08:13.60 McKenna Litynski Question one I pursued a proteomics based method known as zoeology by mass spectrometry or zooms. Essentially what that entails is ah using peptide mass fingerprinting to differentiate between animal taxa. So you extract collagen from bone you run it through chemical processes. One of those chemicals is actually an enzyme known as trypsin. So it chops up the collagen protein chain into smaller bits called peptides it chops them at. Very specific amino acids called Arganine and Lycine. So it just standardizes those lengths so a bit more and then you run it through a very specific mass spectrometer. Um, it's called a maly toff. That's the acronym I won't go into the long name unless you want me to um. But essentially it results in a series of peaks on a screen and by comparing the positions of those peaks on the x-axs which represent the masses of those different peptides you can compare an unknown archaeological spectrum to a known animal spectrum. Um I think right now we have. 60 animals in our library but at the time we had of at the time of my thesis we had 54 um and we can ah make at least family level taxonomic identifications. Sometimes we could make genus and species level identifications. 09:43.62 McKenna Litynski From bones that otherwise we didn't know what the heck they were because the bone fragments were so small so that's the second variable and then the last variable was a different question and that asked what the environment was like back then. During site occupation around thirteen thousand years ago and how that kind of plays into which vertebrate animals were available on the landscape if these people were pursuing the animals for subsistence purposes. Um. So those are kind of the 3 variables that I looked at from my thesis. 10:22.93 David Howe Um, I'm going to ask 2 questions I guess rhetorically just to I mean I think I know the answers to them. But just the audience gets a feel. Um, so after filming you do the zooms like process and stuff my. In my head my analysis of it was essentially you break down this bone dust liquefy it put it the new a computer and that liqueified bone looks a little more like this dear liquid bone than it does the chicken one and like therefore like is that right? like it's. You're reducing the bone down and say comparing it to living samples. Yeah. 10:58.43 McKenna Litynski Yeah, that's essentially it So you're specifically looking at the collagen associated with that bone. So you're not looking at the mineral component at all just the collagen structure. And yeah, you're able to through this liquid sample that you bald on. 11:08.10 David Howe A. 11:17.32 McKenna Litynski Spot onto this small deep plate and then the series of Peaks on the screen which kind of looked like a barcode I like to call it a barcode for species identification. Um, you can essentially say okay this barcode looks more like the steer or this pocket Gopher or this squirrel. 11:22.32 David Howe Right. 11:37.90 McKenna Litynski And therefore you can come up with likelihoods of it being a particular species. 11:40.69 David Howe Okay, yeah, and um I guess for people listening to like the you can with a bison Mandible You can pick up a bi amandible if it's intact and you can compare it to a wolf Mandible and say like okay this is clearly a bison. We know what this is but for the tiny stuff. It's really hard and this hard science stuff is like a really cool way to go about it. Um, and it's something I never knew of until you explained it to me. 12:06.10 archpodnet Yeah, especially because it's like that's what's preserved on a lot of sites is small little fragments. So potentially this research allows us to identify these small fragments and really get a better picture of what people are eating in the past or. 12:24.54 David Howe Yeah. 12:24.73 archpodnet Destroying killing whatever. 12:25.99 McKenna Litynski Yeah, it's very useful for fragmentary assemblages I know my microphone assemblage only had complete mullars in 15 cases. But the the rest of. 12:37.46 archpodnet Oh shit. 12:39.98 David Howe Ouch. 12:41.93 McKenna Litynski The bones I analyzed 4796 little fragments and all of them were just that fragments. 12:45.66 archpodnet Oh oh, there's care. 12:51.89 David Howe Yeah, um, and and speaking of those fragments ah something I wanted to ask you to I guess to elaborate on is like the the reason you're doing that obviously is because like. 13:05.90 David Howe I Mean again this for the audience listening. Basically what I'm saying is for dumb me trying to like put this simply people think Clovis hunted a lot of megafauna because that's really all that preserves like there's big mammoths and bison hanging out there but there's still all that little bone on the fire and stuff that people are looking At. That's just still there at sites and what your thesis is is looking at that tiny amount like those small things and seeing what they were eating right? is that what a good way to put it. 13:33.75 McKenna Litynski Yeah, because like you mentioned there's a lot of articles out there one of which was written by ah Dr Todderrel and Nicole Wagspe is that you pronounce her name. Yeah Nicole wagspe and essentially they argued that. 13:43.76 archpodnet Okay. 13:50.94 McKenna Litynski Even though Probosidians like mastodon and mammoth are very rare on the Pleocene landscape. They're the most abundant tax. Ah in the archaeological record and because of that it suggests a high degree of specialization but then we have other papers like buyers in ugin. 14:05.48 David Howe Um. 14:08.73 McKenna Litynski And they argue that even though Megafauna should have been the preferred food source on the landscape these clovis peoples in the past should have been pursuing a wide variety of taxa including including rodents and lagomorphs to ensure their caloric and nutritional Needs. So That's essentially ah the framework that I'm going off of and I'm looking at the microphoneuna in a couple different ways to answer the question of whether or not they are natural or Cultural. So I'm looking at densities of Microfana and court according to their association with herth features. 14:31.56 David Howe Ah, her. 14:47.24 McKenna Litynski Um, with the expectation of if they are showing this cultural pattern. They'll be very dense in these hearths and then slowly become less and less dense as you move away from the hearth I'm also looking at burning distributions on horizontal and vertical axes. Um. 14:56.18 David Howe No. 15:05.66 McKenna Litynski Through a burning scale. So 0 represents not burned at all 3 represents fully carbonized meaning very black in color and 6 being ah fully cowsigned meaning it's white in coloration. So that's the second variable that I'm looking at. In terms of question one and then the third is taxonomic distributions where I'm expecting a significant difference in taxa represented at the occupation service compared with the non-cultural elevations if people were targeting specific taxa. For caloric needs. Um, kind of backtracking to expectations for burning um serga et all and cerrevel 2020 to argued that in terms of invisible hearth features. You should expect to see highly dense. And clustering of calcine bone and so I was expecting to see that pattern in microuna just very dense clustering of calcine microphonea in association with the hearths if these people were cooking and consuming them. 16:19.12 archpodnet And that's the theory. The theory there is that people are sitting next to fire eating discarding and that that those remains stay close to this central feature. 16:30.70 McKenna Litynski Yeah, and it's actually based on a previous paper by Ken and Meltzer because they argued that there are several sites with strong evidence quote unquote for microfauna subsistence use in North America associated with collobuscys. Um I think there are seven seven different sites that they proposed and I would argue for various reasons that the Aubrey site in the near the Trinity River in Texas is one of the strongest arguments for possible subsistence use. But. Even so they only used a single variable to justify this kind of idea of Microphonea possibly being consumed by people in the past and that one variable was burning. So they essentially looked at the microphonefauna assemblage they said hey some of these bones are charred black others are calcineed white and based on that alone, we're kind of brushing our hands and saying people were eating these. 17:36.40 David Howe Some big brain stuff. Um. 17:37.23 archpodnet Yeah I think on that note, maybe we'll have her summarize the the the findings the beginning of the next segment. 17:47.19 David Howe Yep, that's my next question I guess so yeah, it's next duck 7 17:48.47 McKenna Litynski Sounds great. 17:48.55 archpodnet Obey.