Archaeology is a team sport. To make sense of the past, you need a bunch of people with different skills, expertise, and perspectives to gather and interpret the evidence.
This is especially the case on archaeological digs, where you also need a considerable labour pool to painstakingly remove sediment with trowels and brushes while documenting everything from artifacts to subtle dirt changes. Ideally, these teams are made up of a stratified workforce that includes Principal Investigators (PIs) and project directors, senior scientists, community partners, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate and undergraduate students. This not only creates an important flow on site with multiple levels of supervision and training, it also creates a pipeline for young scholars to gain experience and move up the ranks. Going on a dig is the best way to prepare to lead your own archaeological research.
While hands-on training in science is not unique to archaeology, the element of fieldwork adds an extra layer of challenges. A student must not only find a dig that will take them, they also need to find the means and time to travel to often-remote locations for weeks or months at a time. The most common means to get field experience is to go to a field school, with the cost of tuition around $5,000 and even higher for programs located in Africa (Heath-Stout & Hannigan, 2020). Some scholarships and bursaries are available, but they rarely cover the full cost, much less compensate for the loss of summer wages many students depend on to make it through the year.
Yet field experience is considered to be the most important credential for those applying to graduate programs in archaeology (Smith et al., 2015). The result is that only some students can afford to get the field experience needed to pursue a career in research, contributing to well-documented inequalities across archaeology and other scientific fields (Cramb et al., 2022; Kawa et al., 2019; Speakman et al., 2018).
Because students provide vital labour and intellectual contributions to digs, many projects want to take students, even outside of field school opportunities. Unfortunately, it is also difficult for project directors to find funding to cover their costs, especially in this uncertain economy and changing funding landscape. My team, the Later Prehistory of West Turkana (LPWT) Project, usually takes between 5–10 North American and African students on our digs in Kenya. This has been possible because we’re a multi-institutional project with PIs based at CMNH, Stony Brook University, University of Florida, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, University of British Columbia, and the National Museums of Kenya. However, we have relied primarily on the National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) program, which was drastically downsized this year amid budget cuts.
Fortunately, I was still able to bring two undergraduates through the Museum’s Kirtlandia Intern Program. The program has been running since 1980 and has supported over 350 interns. It is one of very few paid internships in archaeology, allowing students to gain dig experience as their summer job while still paying the bills back home. The other crucial piece of the puzzle this summer was the Barna-Pomeranz Endowment through the Museum. Established in 2019 through the generosity of Dr. Barbara P. Barna, this endowment supports student fellowships. This year, the endowment provided funding for the interns’ flights to Kenya as well as their food, accommodations, and medical insurance—ensuring students could fully partake in the field experience without relying on additional NSF funding or personal resources.
This year, our team excavated a site called Ng’imanimania (AKA Manemanya), one of several 5,000-year-old “pillar sites” built around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya by the earliest pastoralists in the region. Pillar sites got their nickname for the naturally occurring pillars of columnar basalt and sandstone that ancient peoples dragged several kilometers to place in large stone platforms. These sites are some of the earliest examples of monumentality in sub-Saharan Africa. LPWT has been working at these sites since 2008 and has found that they are elaborate burial grounds where people are communally interred with beautiful stone beads and other artifacts. Pillar sites are only found in the Turkana Basin and were all constructed between ~5,000–4,000 years ago, raising many questions about why small-scale nomadic pastoralists would create labour-intensive burial sites and what this says about their society.
Ng’imanimania in particular has been a big question mark since our last dig there in 2012. I participated in this dig when I was a student myself—it was my first trip to Turkana the summer before I began my Ph.D. studies. That summer, I excavated a single elaborate burial of a woman with numerous ornaments, including lion and hyena tooth pendants, ivory bangles, a dog- or jackal-tooth bracelet, over 300 stone beads, and about 10,000 ostrich eggshell beads. Needless to say, soon after I changed my dissertation topic to focus on the pillar sites.
Although radiocarbon dates later confirmed Ng’imanimania was constructed and used during the same time period as the other pillar sites, some of the artifacts such as pottery sherds and stone beads seemed to be different styles and raw materials. This begged the question of whether the site was an outlier in an already highly unusual mortuary tradition. However, it was a pilot excavation, and we were only there for about a week. For thirteen years, I’ve wondered about that elaborate burial from Ng’imanimania and if there were more like it, and what it meant for the herders who constructed the site. This year, we finally returned to find out, with funding from the National Science Foundation.
I’m happy to report that the dig was a great success and gave us some much-needed answers. Over the course of six weeks, we collected over 1,400 bags of artifacts, totaling over 10,000 objects. This work was greatly assisted by the two interns I brought through the Museum’s Kirtlandia Intern Program. Hayden Denby is an anthropology major at George Washington University who helped me with the bioarchaeological excavations, and Mohamad Elghazawi just finished his anthropology degree at Case Western Reserve University and was our collections manager and catalogue czar. After the dig wrapped and the rest of the team left, they stayed behind with me at the Turkana Basin Institute (where the collection is curated in Kenya) for an extra few weeks to help inventory the assemblage and get everything into trays, collect data (including for their own summer research projects), and reorganize our lab. Not only was this a huge help to me, but it was a life-changing experience for them. As of now, both have their sights set on Ph.D. programs in anthropology.
We will be analyzing the data over the coming year and sharing our results at academic conferences and with the Museum community here at home. For a sneak peek, come visit me during the In the Lab program in the Museum’s Sears Dynamic Earth Wing on Sunday, September 28! And for more on the history of fossil hunting in Africa, join me on Friday, October 24 for Science After Hours.
Works cited
Cramb J, Ritchison BT, Hadden CS, et al. The Changing Profile of Tenure-Track Faculty in Archaeology. Advances in Archaeological Practice. 2022;10(4):371-381. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2022.8
Heath-Stout LE, Hannigan EM. Affording Archaeology: How Field School Costs Promote Exclusivity. Advances in Archaeological Practice. 2020;8(2):123-133. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2020.7
Kawa NC, Clavijo Michelangeli JA, Clark JL, Ginsberg D, McCarty C. The Social Network of US Academic Anthropology and Its Inequalities. American Anthropologist. 2018;12(1):14-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13158
Smith C, Garvey J, Burke H, Domingo Sanz I. Success Strategies for a Career in Archaeology. Archaeologies. 2015;11(2):300-336. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11759-015-9273-z
Speakman RJ, Hadden CS, Colvin MH, et al. Market Share and Recent Hiring Trends in Anthropology Faculty Positions. PLoS ONE. 2018;13(9):e0202528. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202528
