Tell me about yourself, your background, and how you got interested in anthropology.
I went to NYU for undergrad, and I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I always liked dinosaurs as a kid, that classic cliché, but NYU didn’t really have a good paleontology or geosciences department. My academic advisor was like, “Why don’t you take this human evolution class?” After that, I was invited to go on a dig with one of the professors at NYU, Randy White. He worked in southwestern France and on Upper Paleolithic sites. So, the summer after junior year, I went with him on a dig there, and I was hooked basically from the beginning.
What drew you to studying the Paleolithic in the South Caucasus?
I was applying to grad school and got into work with Dan Adler at UConn. He has been excavating there for a few decades and focuses mostly on the Middle and Lower Paleolithic, but they’ve excavated a few Upper Paleolithic sites, and he had no one who was really interested in studying the material. So, there were these assemblages that were available to study, and the Caucasus is just a super cool region, right? We have some of the oldest evidence for Homo erectus outside Africa; we have early Levallois technology; we have some sites with evidence of fire-making during the Middle Paleolithic. It’s a really interesting geological region, but it hasn’t had the long-term history of scientific archaeological research that somewhere like France has for 100 years. So there are lots of questions still to answer, and that’s what makes it a really interesting place to work.
Tell me a bit about your most recent project in Armenia and Georgia.
Last summer, we excavated a site called Solak-1, which is an Upper Paleolithic site. It’s in central Armenia, about 30,000 years old. It’s an open-air site on a plateau over the river. It was excavated in 2015 originally, really quickly, just a test excavation. So, we wanted to return to it, more focused, and do just one meter by one meter to get some good spatial data with the total station, do water sieving for more total recovery, and get some more radiocarbon and OSL dates. We did that with a field school last summer, so that was a lot of fun. This summer, we should be going up to Georgia and restarting excavation at a couple of sites there to do the same thing, except these sites were excavated even longer ago. We’re going to try to better understand what was happening at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic and the end of the Middle Paleolithic.
What application do you think your research has to present-day anthropology?
Neanderthals in particular have always played a large part in our fascination with the past — trying to understand who they are, how they differed from us, and what makes modern humans special. Why are we the only species left? I do work, I would say, in a framework of questioning those ideas about what modern human behavior is and isn’t and about what Neanderthals could and couldn’t do, and trying to fully understand what it meant to be a Neanderthal. Holistically speaking, who were the Neanderthals? And I think that has relevance to anthropological questions outside of just archaeology, this idea of who we are and why us.
What brought you to the University of Michigan?
I found out about the Michigan Society of Fellows, and it seemed like a really special program focused on interdisciplinary research and conversations, which sounded interesting. I feel like you get kind of siloed into your department, so it’s nice to have that outlet of people working on other things to talk with. I was also chairing a session at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) that Raven Garvey, U-M associate professor and UMMAA associate curator, submitted a proposal to, and one of my colleagues at UConn said, “Oh, Raven’s great.” I reached out to her to ask her about U-M. U-M Archaeology is a historically famous department, so getting to be in this department is really cool, too.
What is the interdisciplinary nature of your work as a Michigan Society Fellow?
There are about 15 junior fellows and 15 senior fellows. All the junior fellows give talks on their research, and while you’re used to giving talks to archaeologists, you have to think through how to give talks to an academic but non-specialist audience to get them engaged, to hear their feedback on what you’re doing, what they resonate with, and what they question. You get those outsider perspectives, which seems like the main benefit of interdisciplinarity.
What is different about U-M’s anthropology program compared to other places where you’ve worked and studied?
It’s nice to have all four fields. Anthropology is normally a four-field department, but here, it really is. You actually have linguistic anthropologists and biological anthropologists. I found the model of dissertations is really interesting here because it seems like grad students are really encouraged to find a site, excavate the site, do the analysis of the site, and write up a site monograph as their dissertation. I excavated as a grad student, but none of those excavations were part of my dissertation.
Do you know what courses you’ll be teaching here?
Next semester, I’m teaching ANTHRARC 181: "Past Meets Present, Discovering Archaeology," which is the broad survey archaeology course. Then, I don’t really know yet. Maybe I’ll teach a lithic analysis class. Maybe I’ll teach a class on Neanderthals.
WHAT ARE YOU...
...Watching? Slow Horses. A new season just started; it’s a British spy drama.
...Reading? For fun, I’m reading The Last King of Osten Ard series by Tad Williams, which is a fantasy series. Academically, I was just reading a paper by John Speth, professor emeritus here, sort of pushing back on a lot of assumptions people make about lithics and their importance to people in the past, and our ability to understand people in the past and their technologies from just their stone tools.
...Listening to? ’90s playlists.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
