S7E3: What’s it like to be an archaeologist?

Daniel Sandweiss’s archaelogy career doesn’t mirror depictions of those in movies like “Indiana Jones,” but for him, it’s been equally as exciting. Over the years, Sandweiss, a University of Maine professor in the Anthropology Department and Climate Change Institute, has uncovered extensive evidence into how ancient civilization dealt with natural disasters, such as climate change, and how they adapted to living in a desert environment next to a rich fishery. His passion, coupled with a commitment to student success, inspired many who took his classes to advance their studies and pursue careers in archaeology.

In this week’s episode of “The Maine Question,” Sandweiss shares his many experiences as an archaeologist, and describes what the field work really entails.

Transcript

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Dr. Daniel Sandweiss:  We never know for sure if we’re right. There are a lot of things that are hard, if not impossible, to get at. What were people thinking? If you have writing it, sometimes, they’ll write down what they were thinking. If you just have objects, even if you have ancient art, which we often do, it’s hard to get at that. You’re making educated guesses.

Ron Lisnet:  That’s Dan Sandweiss, Professor of Anthropology and the 2022 UMaine Distinguished Professor Award winner, talking about the challenge of reconstructing ancient civilizations through archaeological digs, a passion he’s pursued for more than 30 years. I’m Ron Lisnet, and this is “The Maine Question” podcast from the University of Maine.

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Ron:  He’s a gifted researcher, an academic with many accolades and important discoveries to his credit. Despite that reputation, the most animated Dan Sandweiss gets is when he’s talking about digging into the earth, getting his hands dirty, finding a little piece of wood, a fishhook, the shell of a mollusk, a piece of pottery from an ancient civilization that lived 12,000 years ago. That’s when his eyes light up.

He’s an explorer and a bit of a sleuth, trying to understand how humans lived and how they handle the challenges of their time. Climate change, war disease, many of the problems that still plague us today. His work on the El Nino weather phenomenon lead to insights on how these prehistoric communities handled climate disasters.

The bulk of his work has been done on the coast of Peru. Among his many findings, the existence of the oldest fishing community in the Western Hemisphere. Along with his groundbreaking research, Sandweiss is equally psyched about getting young college students excited about the field of anthropology.

Some 500 students this semester get to experience his enthusiasm, and whether they like it or not, the many jokes and puns he sprinkled throughout his lectures in his Anthropology 101 course. Most of us probably have a picture in our heads of what an archaeologist is that likely comes from the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and its sequels.

We talked about the Hollywood image that Harrison Ford portrayed, and about what the world of archaeology is like. It may not be as dramatic as the fictional version but for Sandweiss, it’s equally exciting. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us here. Appreciate it.

Dr. Sandweiss:  It’s my pleasure.

Ron:  Tell us how you got started. What led to your interests? What sparked your interest in anthropology? Were you one of those kids that dug up things in the backyard?

Dr. Sandweiss:  I actually did, although I didn’t know I was interested in archaeology. When I was a kid, we did go to Pompeii and I was fascinated by it. I got into archaeology as a field by taking a Gen Ed course to avoid taking natural science.

I took an archaeology course and it was pretty cool. I took another one, and I was one of about 5 out of 60 kids who wasn’t bored to tears. I was at the edge of my seat and I never looked back.

Ron:  What was it about it? Is it the digging? Is it the discovery? What is it?

Dr. Sandweiss:  It’s learning about things you can’t just go read about and then document it. You figure it out from what’s left behind. It’s the discovery, it’s the new knowledge, it’s the ability to be creative about understanding the past.

Ron:  Let’s maybe define some terms so we know what we’re all talking about. [laughs] I know what we’re talking about. You’re in the anthropology department here at the University of Maine. Anthropology versus archaeology, paleoclimatology, I know is something else you studied. Maybe frame those up for us.

Dr. Sandweiss:  Sure. Anthropology is the study of humans, culturally, socially, archaeologically, biologically. It’s a very comprehensive field. We study human behavior through time and today. Archaeology in this country is very much a part of anthropology. We try to get the same sorts of information, but by using the material records, so things that people left behind.

Most archaeologists do prehistoric archaeology when there is no record, but there are plenty of people who do archaeology of times when there is a historical record. The material remains still tells us things that are not written down. It’s studying human behavior through what gets left behind.

Ron:  Present company excepted, of course, probably the most famous archaeologist is Indiana Jones. I noticed you don’t have the hat but maybe you do when you’re in the field. How close is the real thing to what we see in Hollywood? Do they get anything right?

Dr. Sandweiss:  The only thing they get right is that archaeologists tend to be excited about what they’re doing. The rest of it is pretty much a primer how not to do archaeology. I teach a course here called Hollywood Archaeology, in which we look at movies like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Tomb Raider,” and a number of others.

We assess how bad they are ethically from the perspective of the ethics of archaeological practice, which the Society for American Archaeology has come up with. We have these essays, Society for American Archaeology Principles. They study that and then they see the movies and they have to assess them using those principles.

Ron:  The people that take artifacts, I can’t remember what the term is for those.

Dr. Sandweiss:  Looters.

Ron:  Looters, yeah. That is what you see on film a lot.

Dr. Sandweiss:  Yes, and that’s wrong.

Ron:  Absolutely.

Dr. Sandweiss:  The information about the past isn’t only in the objects. In fact, it’s not mainly in the objects. It’s in the relationship of the objects with everything else, in what we call context. If you don’t recover the context and record it, by digging you destroy it completely. If you haven’t got a good record, it’s gone and all that information is lost.

That’s why looting is bad. Even if the objects end up in a museum, they don’t mean that much because they’re devoid of that context. If you excavate them and record everything carefully, then you can actually learn something about people in the past.

Ron:  You teach at all levels of higher education from the intro course to the PhD level. Talk about the Intro to Anthropology course. How do you get students excited about this subject about what you care so much?

Dr. Sandweiss:  I think what gets them excited when they do is that I’m clearly excited about it. I think archaeology is cool. I enjoy doing it. I enjoy making discoveries. I try to show that in the class. At least the students who liked the class say that they picked that up. I try to use a sense of humor. I make a lot of bad jokes.

Again, some of them seem to appreciate it. The other ones, they don’t say anything. I have over 500 students now in that class, and so some people are into…I’ve picked up majors from that class because they pick up the bug of being excited about understanding the past from what’s left behind.

Ron:  If you get eye rolls to your jokes, you know you’ve succeeded, right?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Absolutely. Moans and groans.

Ron:  That’s what you want. Can you talk about your research efforts big picture? What is the key foundational question you are going after in your research?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Over my career, I’ve had two main questions. One, the one I started with is, how do people use resources from the ocean and how has that affected cultural development over time?

The other is, what can we learn about past climates from archaeology? You asked about paleoclimatology. That’s the study of climate in the past. It’s critically important to understanding climate into the future.

If we don’t know how climate behave before, we don’t have any way to test the models. If you know how it behaved before, you can run your model against past conditions and see if you come up with what we know actually happened.

Of course, climate affects people. It does today, it did in the past, so I want to understand past climate in order to understand the influence it had on people.

Ron:  Through times of your research, any findings, conclusions, discoveries that rise to the top of your list?

Dr. Sandweiss:  There are a couple. One is finding that the El Nino phenomenon actually changed in the past. That’s something sort of happened by accident. I was doing research in Peru at the very beginning, when I was in between undergrad and graduate, I was there for a year, and I got hooked up with these archaeologists, professional archaeologists who worked there.

I took them to see some of the things that I found that were anomalous, these mollusks that were not in the right place. They shouldn’t have lived there. They should have been living 400 kilometers to the north.

We started talking about what that meant and realized that the conditions under which those had to live in this place where we found them were such that El Nino could not have been functioning the way it does today.

That was exciting and led to a lot of the work I’ve done on the past of El Nino but it was one of the first studies to show that this phenomenon hasn’t just been there for all time in the same way. That it is changed. It’s been frequently there, infrequently there, not there at all.

This has happened including over the time people have lived on the coast of Peru where El Nino is a critical element in affecting people’s lives but it also has effects throughout the Pacific basin.

Even here. We actually benefit. During El Nino events, we have warmer winters and the Caribbean has fewer hurricanes. Some people benefit from it, most people do not. It’s pretty much a disaster where I work.

Ron:  Let’s make sure because El Nino, La Nina, I think a lot of people get confused. What exactly is the El Nino phenomenon?

Dr. Sandweiss:  The El Nino phenomenon, what we think of as El Nino is this classic first thing that was identified. This involves warming in the center of the Pacific, and then that warm water sloshing over to the east side of the Pacific to the coast of Peru and Ecuador all the way up to the coast of California.

That warm water changes where you get rainfall, you get it. Where it’s normally desert, it starts having torrential rain, which erodes a lot of things. It’s very bad for that environment. You get a change in the animals that live there. Usually, this warmer water has fewer nutrients so a lot of the fish go to other places.

The mollusks die, the seabirds, the sea lions die, so it affects the resource base pretty significantly. You’ve got disaster on the land from the floods in Peru, or in Baja California, or even in Southern California. At the same time, you’ve got a lot less food coming out of the ocean. It’s pretty bad.

Ron:  It happens on a regular cycle? How often does it happen?

Dr. Sandweiss:  It happens at different strengths. There are really mild events and it goes all the way up to really disastrous ones. Any kind of event occurs about every two to seven years, but it’s not a regular interval. The really big ones happen less frequently.

In my lifetime, the big events were in 1982, ’83, ’97, ’98. For the coast of Peru, 2017, although the one that affected the whole Pacific was 2015, ’16. That’s El NiÒo, then La NiÒa is the reverse where the water gets cooler instead of warmer.

That’s a little bit harmful for people’s respiratory health, but it’s not nearly as destructive as El NiÒo. Then there are a couple of other varieties people have found, but those are the two really big ones that affect people I work with.

Ron:  Obviously, those native tribes that you that you look at, they had to deal with a changing climate as we do today. Any parallels that can be drawn between how they handled it and how we’re doing today?

Dr. Sandweiss:  I think we have some good lessons to learn from things that they did, particularly when they became agricultural‑based with big irrigation systems, which is the basis of people living on the coast of Peru today, which is my research area.

A recent study actually discovered that there was an area where people built fields, that would only work when you had that flood water from El NiÒo, when the rest of the irrigation system was destroyed. Those could be redone. They’re not doing that today. It doesn’t replace everything that’s lost, but it mitigates in some way.

We’ve also found dams at the base of gullies that normally have big, what we call debris flows. A lot of rock and mud slosh down, it’s very destructive. Ancient people put dams in front of those, and they’ve held back 3,000 years of El NiÒo flooding or more, and nobody is doing that today either.

There are some things we can learn from what people who lived there for millennia figured out to do about these events.

Ron:  Let’s talk about a dig when you start a dig or a project. How do you analyze or use those items you find to reconstruct history of those people? You talked about it, it’s the relationship of one thing to another and where they are. What kind of items and what special alignment are you looking at?

Dr. Sandweiss:  It really depends on what kind of site you’re digging and what questions you’re asking. Early sites that I dig were looking particularly to see how they made a living, how they got food. We look a lot at the kinds of animal bones and if there are any plant remains, the kind of plant remains that we find.

We look for them in association with tools like fish hooks or pieces of nets, to figure out how they acquired those things. We look to see if they had structures and what kind of structures and how many people might have lived in them, and what the nature of the structure suggests about the organization of the society.

When you get to sites with very large constructions, big pyramidal mounds, large centers, large workshops, mainly people fed by irrigation, agriculture so they had lots and lots of food, although seafood on the coast remained important where I work throughout time.

Then we would look at other things. What sort of art is on the walls, what objects are found in different rooms and what were those rooms used for? How were the sites organized? How were activities divided among different parts of the site, and what were the statuses of people who lived in different parts of the site, who had more power, who had less?

We can get that from looking at what we find, the context we find, the architectural context, the artifacts that we find there, what’s close to each other. We can also get some of that from burials and what’s buried with people. Because in the past many people were buried with things that related to what they did in life and to their status in life.

There are a lot of ways that we can get at different questions, it really depends on the site and the questions we’re asking.

Ron:  Any favorite objects or finds that come to mind?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Yeah, I can think of two really favorite ones. One was finding these mollusks I mentioned that we’re not where they live today. I had been studying mollusks in Peru early in my career, and I was sent to look at some things called beach ridges. Another archaeologist said, “Well, you’re interested early sites. Back behind those beach ridges, there are some sites.”

I went and looked at them, and it had all these mollusks that I didn’t recognize. I thought I knew all the ones that showed up in archaeological sites in Peru by then. I collected some and I took them back to the shell specialist at Peru’s Institute of the Sea.

She said, “Come back in two weeks, I’ll tell you what they are.” I came back and she said, “What were you doing in Ecuador?” I said, “I wasn’t in Ecuador. I was 500 kilometers to the south in this valley.” She said, “That’s impossible. These don’t live on the coast of Peru, they live in Ecuador where the water is warmer on an average annual basis.”

That’s what led to what I said before about beginning to see changes in climate and the El Nino system over time on the coast of Peru. Then one of the other ones, we were digging a really early fishing site, for a while the earliest fishing site known or found in the new world. It was 12 to 13 years old at the earliest part of it.

We found a lot of holes that we thought might be from post holes, and if they were from the post from a house, then they would tell us the shape of the house, the size of the house, how many people might live there.

You find a hole filled with debris, you don’t know if it’s a post hole or not. Then we found a post that was actually still, the base of it embedded in one of these holes straight up. We knew that we had discovered for sure that this was actually part of an ancient house from 12,000 plus years old. That was just a little piece of wood, but boy, was that exciting.

Ron:  I bet. Take us inside a dig. How do you actually plan and conduct it and what’s the process? I imagine, you use everything from a toothbrush to a backhoe, or a shovel, anyway, right?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Again, it depends on the nature of the site and what you want to do. The first thing is to identify the problem that you want to solve. Because excavation destroys context, destroys the archeological record.

We only dig where we have a specific question we think we can answer by digging that place. We try to do as little as possible to leave more for the future when there are better techniques to recover information from the past.

We identify the problem, we figure out where we have to go to solve that problem, how much we have to dig. It also depends, of course, on how much money we have, because it costs money to be in the field and to do these things.

We try to balance all that out. Usually, we use a lot of trowels, mortar pointing trowels and all. Four, five‑inch. There’s a particular brand that all archaeologists, who can use, it’s called Marshalltown, they’re made in Iowa. They’re the best because they don’t break.

We very carefully scrape with that, we use brushes. Sometimes we use dental tools if things are embedded and very delicate. We try to take everything out very carefully. Everything we removed from the site, we put in buckets and then we pass through screen, so we capture everything.

It’s not just what you see as you’re digging and then you put that aside. We systematically capture everything that’s archeological that got there from human activity. We also look at the sediments that the objects are embedded in.

Then when we finish this excavation, recording everything by drawing, by taking pictures, sometimes we do videos. We record it every way we can, we have note books, take a lot of notes. When all of that is done, then we send things to various specialists to analyze them to figure out what it is we actually found.

Then from that, we build up the story of the site and the answer to if we can, to the question that we were asking.

Ron:  That’s the fun part?

Dr. Sandweiss:  That’s the fun part. That’s when things really start to come together. Although, even the digging, it’s very tedious. You have to pay very careful attention. You have to go slowly. You can’t just chunk in a shovel and start digging until you find some cool thing.

We do routinely identify something that we want to find that would be really exciting. We almost always find at least some, and so there are, in the field, moments of great excitement. Like when we found that little piece of a post, just very exciting.

Ron:  Talk about the anthropology department here at the University of Maine. What are its strengths? What’s the focus?

Dr. Sandweiss:  The focus is on humans and the environment. The archeologists do that. The social‑cultural anthropologists do that. We have a fairly new doctoral program in anthropology and environmental policy. That’s not an archeology program. That’s for people who are going to work in policy with living people today.

We’ve had five people graduate with PhDs so far. Every one of them has gotten a job at most within six months of graduating. Most of them have gotten it before they got their degree, months before. That’s an unheard of record for any university in terms of the success of getting our degree recipients employed.

It’s a very strong department. Everybody is active. They all do interesting work. We all have our particular perspective on what we study, but we have this overlap of interest in climate and environment.

Ron:  Unlike a historian, the people that you study existed before there was any sort of, what you might think of as, a recorded history. You’ve talked about putting that puzzle together. How much harder is it to put together their story based on what you find?

Dr. Sandweiss:  In many ways, it’s much harder. We never know for sure if we’re right. There are a lot of things that are hard, if not impossible, to get at. What were people thinking? If you have writing it, sometimes, they write down what they’re thinking. If you just have objects, even if you have ancient art, which we often do, it’s hard to get at that. You’re making educated guesses.

There are some things that we’re good at. We know where people lived, when they lived, what kind of buildings they had, what crafts they made, what they ate, how long they lived, what their health problems were. All of these things, we can get from the material record of the sites, the objects, the bodies. These all give us information about those things.

The life of the mind is harder to reconstruct. It’s a lot easier if you have a written record.

Ron:  The people back then, the things they had to deal with and the tools they had to battle what was in front of them were nothing compared to what we have now, but they persevered for a long time. What do we pull forward from them as we deal with climate change and rising sea levels and everything else we’re dealing with right now?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Good question. The first part is that they did survive. Some people survived, or we wouldn’t be here. Sometimes large masses of people didn’t survive, but always somebody did. As humans got to populate the entire world in the prehistoric era, the only continent we didn’t get to, and there’s still an open question on that, is Antarctica.

Humans, before writing, were everywhere else on Earth. Pretty much on all the continents. That’s a real success story for humans and for human creativity in problem‑solving. Studying the way they solved problems is really helpful.

For our very large‑scale societies today, probably the most help comes from the later societies that were fairly large, that had productive technologies like irrigation agriculture, where they had solutions to some of the impacts, such as we’ve talked about before.

In general, whatever we can learn about how it was that people survived all of the things that happened to them, climate disasters, wars, diseases, the more we can learn about how we might want to behave now and into the future.

Ron:  What’s next? What projects are on your board in your office? What’s on the bucket list of what you’d like to explore a little more?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Although lots of things that I would like to go into, what would I like to do next? We’ve got a project lined up using the chemistry of shells to understand some nuances of past climate. We have a project we want to do. We know where there are about 4,000 years of a particular shell species that’s available, where we can get them from different time periods.

We know it records El Nino events. One of my PhD students just finished her degree working on this issue and studying living versions of the shell to find out how it records these events. We’d like to go back, recover the shells, and then put together a much more detailed 4,000‑year history of climate‑related to El Nino in northern Peru.

Ron:  You have to sort of think of what we can learn from all of this. I guess if you don’t know your past, how are you going to know where you’re headed? Is that something that you ascribe to?

Dr. Sandweiss:  Absolutely. We’ve talked about paleoclimate and how the archaeological record sometimes has clues to paleoclimate. I said before it’s absolutely essential to understand well what happened in the past. It’s the only way to see if the models that climate modelers make actually predict what happens.

Otherwise, we might make incorrect predictions about the future and act on those and then get caught out flat. All the different kinds of paleoclimatologists, many of them, most of them, are geologists, and there are many different kinds of records from ice cores, from lake cores, from corals, and tons of others. Among those are archaeological sites.

Where I work on the coast of Peru, most of the usual ways of getting paleoclimate information aren’t available. There are no corals. The ice cores are far away and partly record other climates rather than the area that we work in, which is core to the El Nino events.

There are almost no lakes because it’s a desert. For the last 13,000 years, the archaeological sites are one of the best sources of information about what climate was like over that period. There’s a contribution we are making, and I think we can continue to make, that will have direct implications for the future and what we do about how the world’s changing.

Ron:  I’m ready to pick up a trowel and go with you. It sounds fascinating. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk.

Dr. Sandweiss:  Thank you. It was a lot of fun. I love doing this.

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Ron:  Thanks for checking us out. As always, if you want to hear more about the research and the people who do it at UMaine, check out our other episodes on Apple or Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and SoundCloud.

You can also catch us on UMaine’s Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter pages and the UMaine website. Questions or comments, drop us a line at mainequestion@maine.edu. I’m Ron Lisnet. We’ll catch you next time on “The Maine Question.”