A couple of years ago, I gave a guest lecture in a friend’s
Environmental Anthropology class on the use of zooarchaeological data to
support conservation biology and restoration ecology. Of the research I do, I think that this
particular material is some of the coolest.
In fact, my mentor Lee Lyman and I have an edited book coming out on the
topic entitled Conservation
Biology and Applied Zooarchaeology. Tangentially,
I am (of course) quite proud of the book and am shamelessly plugging it here,
but that is beside the point. After I
finished the talk, which included some definitions of zooarchaeology and
conservation biology and the details of a few case studies, the floor was
opened for questions from students. The
most interesting question was: “how do you manage to sustain interdisciplinary
research?” A follow up question was: “what
things do you do to encourage interdisciplinary research?” Indeed working from the perspectives of
archaeology and ecology is interdisciplinary.
However, my conservation research is not the most interdisciplinary
research I do. I lead of team of
researchers that explore the uses of analytical chemistry to study biological
residues of food from ancient artifacts, such as cooking pottery (see post on Archaeoproteomics
for an introduction to this project). This research entails integrating one of the
hardest sciences, chemistry, with the social science of archaeology. Further, the research is also cross-cultural
as we work with Native American artifacts.
Thus, whatever results we obtain in terms of identifying biochemical
residues (e.g., fats or proteins) from artifacts must be communicated in a
clear fashion to archaeologists and to interested Native Americans,
particularly people from the Pueblos of the American Southwest, one region from
which we are studying cooking pottery.
This has been a rewarding challenge, and our team has been successful,
garnering several years of research support from the National Science
Foundation and publishing multiple academic papers on our methods and outcomes. So, to address the student’s questions, it is
interesting to reflect on what makes this interdisciplinary team work well
together.
Our success can be boiled down to two factors. First, membership on our team is based on
friendship. This may seem trite, and if
that’s your impression, then feel free to believe that. However, this is the most important element
of working with others: we enjoy working together. This factor is critical to our success
because there are endless opportunities for frustrating miscommunication. The language of chemistry is not clear to the
archaeologist, and the goals of archaeology are often too broad and
uncontrolled (in the experimental sense) for the biologist or chemist. We have the forest (the archaeological questions
about what was eaten in the past) and we have the trees (how to build valid
methods through detailed experiments to produce valid food residue data). It is easy to talk past one another, and
there must be a bond of trust, such that the archaeological colleague can ask (yet
again), “Why must we run all of these controlled procedures?” Along similar lines, the chemist must be able
to ask, “Why are we interested in that odd question about the past?” The archaeologist does not know much
chemistry and the chemist does not know much archaeology; it is easy to feel
stupid, and a trustworthy bond is required to allow colleagues to laugh off
differences in order to proceed toward shared research aims. Work
with people you like, and if you cannot find the right team members then do
something else.
Second, there must be an intriguing research question, the merits of
which exist and can be communicated by each team member. In the case of the food residue study; it
became clear to a colleague who studies analytical biochemistry and I that
there is much room for improvement in the methods applied to studying food
residues in archaeology. We saw an
opportunity to improve methodology, and we built a team of close colleagues to
tackle that topic. For the
archaeologist, there is the potential to do higher quality research with
increased accuracy and precision of results.
For the chemist or biologist, there is the opportunity to do something
new and fascinating.
Today in academic research, there is a notion that one must be ‘the
best’ at something to be successful.
Yet, we have found that a sense of community and friendship related to
goals that fascinate us are more enriching.
I cannot imagine working across the boundaries of hard and social
sciences, not to mention cultures, if we did not put the more human elements of
what we do ahead of academic prowess.
