Webinar: Archaeology Fieldwork in Kenya
Aired June 1, 2020
Maggy Benson:
Hey everybody, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Maggy Benson, and I'm a museum educator at this Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. We're really happy to have you here today. Before we begin, I want to give a special thanks to our generous donors, volunteers, and other important partners who enable our team at this Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to discover, create, and share new knowledge with the world today and every day, free of charge.
Now while we wait for more of our friends to join us, take a moment to find the Q&A button. It should be at the bottom or the top of your screen. Use that Q&A button to tell us where you're tuning in from. I'm joining you from my home in Washington, D.C. Today you're going to use that Q&A to send us all of your questions and comments throughout the program. Our expert will be asking you some questions, and so you're going to use that same Q&A function to respond to the questions that we ask you. Now, remember, when you send us a comment there, you won't be able to see all of your friends' responses, but our team here at this Smithsonian can see everything. In that Q&A, you should have two tabs. At the top, one of them says "All Questions." That's where you can see all the questions that have been answered. And you'll see "My Questions," and that's where you can check to see which questions you've sent us.
All right. Now I also want to point out a new function in our webinars, which is live captions. So look next to the Q&A button, you should see a button that has a CC on it. If at any time you want to show or hide the subtitles for this program, click the arrow next to that CC button to go into the settings or to hide those closed captions. Now, these are live, so please be aware of that because they will be slightly delayed and they may not be capturing what we're saying perfectly. That's normal.
All right. Now I am going to take a look here at the Q&A. If you're just joining us, I've asked everyone to put in the Q&A where you're joining us from. I'm going to read off some of those places now. So we have friends joining us from Maryland. Several Maryland. Stockton. Arizona. Virginia. More Virginia and Maryland. New York. Massachusetts, Chicago. Michigan. Virginia. Connecticut. More Maryland. Arlington. All right. Florida. Ohio. Colorado. Florida. More north Carolina. Texas. Utah. California. Illinois. All right. More California. Las Vegas. Pennsylvania. San Francisco. Vermont. Awesome. So many from Texas, Maryland, and Virginia. Welcome everyone. More from Pennsylvania. More from California. Canada. From Halifax, Seattle, Ohio. Welcome everybody. All right. Missouri. I'm seeing if there's any states here I haven't mentioned. Derby, England. All right. India. Wonderful. New Jersey. Florida. Wonderful. Well, I am really happy that we're able to offer everyone a program that can bring people from all over the country and the world together and today to learn about archaeology. Very cool. So a couple people did ask if this is this right place for questions and comments. Yes, you're going to use that Q&A space throughout today's program.
Now, today's program is going to be about 45 minutes in length and archaeologist Ella Beaudoin will be hosting and moderating the conversation. Hey Ella, with Dr. Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist who is going to share with us how she works on her team to conduct field research in Kenya. Now, before we turn it over to Ella and Briana, I want to introduce you to two other special scientists who have joined us. All right, Jennifer Clark and Joseph Gingerich are here today to answer your questions directly in the Q&A. So let's meet them now. Hey, Joe. Hey, Jennifer.
Joseph Gingerich:
Hi.
Jennifer Clark:
Hi.
Maggy Benson:
Hi.
Jennifer Clark:
Hi, everyone. It's great that you can join us today, and we're so happy you're here. I'm Jennifer Clark. I'm a museum specialist that works at the Natural History Museum with Briana Pobiner and Ella Beaudoin and Joe. I've been going to the site of Olorgesailie, that Briana's going to give you a little tour of, for off and on 30 years. Every summer I spend there camping and doing research. So it's going to be very exciting to share this site with you. Thanks for joining us.
Maggy Benson:
Thank you so much, Jennifer.
Joseph Gingerich:
Hi. And I'm-
Maggy Benson:
Hey, Joe.
Joseph Gingerich:
Oh hi. And I'm Joe Gingerich, an archaeologist. I study stone tools, how people make stone tools and the technology behind stone tools, and human environmental interactions in the past. I also work at Olorgesailie in Kenya and throughout North America. Thank you.
Maggy Benson:
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Joe. So Jennifer and Joe are our chat experts, which means they are going to be in that Q&A space, and they're going to try to answer as many questions as they can via text. So make sure you check that "All Questions" tab or "My Questions" tab to see if you have a response from Jenny and Joe during today's program. Now we do have a lot of people joining us today, so we may not be able to get to everything, but we'll do our best to try to answer as many questions as we can. Now, we do already have a question that came in from Megan asking if anybody is in Kenya right now. And right now, Megan, we are all coming to you from our homes. Nobody is coming to you from Kenya today.
So without further ado, I do want to turn it over to Ella Beaudoin and Briana Pobiner for our program. Hey, Ella. Hey, Briana.
Ella Beaudoin:
Hey.
Briana Pobiner:
Hi.
Ella Beaudoin:
I know I'm so excited to listen to and find out more about Olorgesailie. I've only visited there once, so I'm super excited to see what life is like.
Briana Pobiner:
All right, fantastic. Are you ready for me to start sharing my screen and show you some pictures?
Ella Beaudoin:
Yes, very much so.
Briana Pobiner:
Okay, let's do it. All right. Okay.
Ella Beaudoin:
Right now Briana, we're seeing ... Oh, perfect. There we go.
Briana Pobiner:
Great. So right now you see me. I'm actually sitting in a hippo footprint that's at about a million years old from one of the sites where we excavate at Olorgesailie. But first I want to introduce myself a little bit. So I'm a paleoanthropologist, and so I study human behavior from a long time ago before there were written records. Specifically, I do paleolithic archaeology and I study fossils of animals that were around at the same time that early humans were. One of my favorite parts of my job is getting to travel to lots of different places to find traces of past behavior, not now, but in other normal times. And a lot of times my friends and family ask me, "What's it like over there? What do you do and how do you live?" So I thought it would be really fun to focus this presentation on the kinds of things that you don't see in presentations about archaeology and basically show you a day in the life of a field archaeologist. You ready?
Ella Beaudoin:
I know I am, so I hope everyone else is.
Briana Pobiner:
Excellent. Let's go. So where are we going today? We're going to a place called Olorgesailie, which is a prehistoric site that the National Museums of Kenya administer, and it's in southern Kenya, kind of close to the border of Tanzania.
So the first I wanted start by introducing you to the research co-directors of this site. On the left is Dr. Rick Potts, who's the director of the Human Origins Program, and he really initiated the Smithsonian's involvement at Olorgesailie about 35 years ago. On the right is Dr. Rahab Kinyanjui who works at the National Museums of Kenya, and she is now the research co-director at Olorgesailie.
This is what it looks like if you were to just sort of wake up and walk out on the landscape at Olorgesailie. It's pretty dry, it's pretty desolate. And so you might want to know why do we dig here. So most of the sediments that you can see, spanned between about a million years ago and 300,000 years ago. And so we're interested specifically in understanding the lives of early humans. What were they like in that time period? What kind of food did they eat? We can find animal and plant fossils to help us learn this. What kind of tools did they make? We can find stone tools to figure this out. And so what I want to do is to explore the process that we use to find those fossils and stone tools.
Ella Beaudoin:
And that's great, Briana, because someone just asked how do you find bones in this kind of landscape.
Briana Pobiner:
Well, you are definitely going to find out and I will be able to answer your question and I will tell you about the kind of journeys that the fossils and tools go on before we even study them. So these are the kinds of things that we find. You can see on the top and on the bottom right, different animal fossils. On the bottom right is a tooth of an extinct zebra. On the left hand side is a stone tool, on the bottom left.
So this is the kind of thing that we will find during the excavation, but I want to tell you a little bit about how we find them. So the first thing we have to do is set up a place to live or camp when we're at Olorgesailie. We store all of our equipment in vehicles in Nairobi, where the National Museums of Kenya is, where the headquarters of the National Museums of Kenya is. And so everything gets loaded onto a big truck, which you can see in that top picture as well as into our several different four-wheel-drive field vehicles. It gets driven about two hours south of Nairobi where we camp. And you can see the beginning of the unloading process, and on the bottom left, even the beginning of starting to put up camp. So welcome to my summer camp in a sense. The name is called Kampi Safi, which means nice camp in Swahili, and this is what it looks like after a long day of setting everything up in camp.
Ella Beaudoin:
Looks beautiful.
Briana Pobiner:
Thank you. It's a wonderful spot to camp. This is what it looks like. We actually flew over it one year from the air to get a sense of what all the excavations and the deposits look like. So this gives you an idea of what the extent of our camp looks like. And so we have tents for people to sleep in, tents for storage, tens for eating. And so I'll show you what some of those look like.
So when I wake up in the morning, I can unzip my tent and look off a cliff. This is the cliff where we camp every summer. This just gives you a sense, we're looking at a mountain called Mount Olorgesailie, which is what the site is named after. So now I want to ask you a question. What's the first thing that you do after you wake up in the morning?
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay guys, so I want to see what you guys do the first thing you wake up. I know what I do is I always wake up and I make a cup of tea every morning. That's what I do. So I'm wondering what all of you guys do. Okay, I see "Go to the bathroom. Get a cup of coffee." Yes, my coffee people with me. Okay, that's awesome. "Fix the bed. Brush your teeth" is I think ... We're seeing a lot of "Brush your teeth. Eat breakfast." Yeah, "Press snooze," which I think is also a great (laughing).
Briana Pobiner:
I like to do that some mornings. All right, so why don't we talk about what all the morning things look like when we're at Olorgesailie? Okay, let's do that. So I wake up in a tent. It's a wonderful big tent that I can actually stand up in, made of canvas. On the bottom. You can see how I brush my teeth in the morning and wash my face. So we have jerry cans of water. In cooperation with local communities, we use a borehole that we're able to get water from. I dump water into that little plastic bucket and that's how I brush my teeth and wash my face in the morning.
Ella Beaudoin:
So Briana, quickly, what's a borehole?
Briana Pobiner:
Oh yeah. So a borehole is a place where basically it's kind of like a well that's dug in the ground where there's water naturally underneath the ground and then there's a pump in order to actually bring the water up so that we can put it into containers and bring it somewhere that we need. We don't have plumbing out here so we're not able to turn on the tap and use that kind of water to brush our teeth.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh okay.
Briana Pobiner:
And so the next thing some people said of go to the bathroom. So how do we do ...
Ella Beaudoin:
No plumbing.
Briana Pobiner:
... when we're camping? You can see on the left hand side this is our bathroom stall basically. So when we arrive at the site, we dig a very deep hole into the ground. That becomes our long drop toilet. If you open the curtain and look behind it, you can see what it looks like when you walk into our kind of camping bathroom. To give you a little bit of a closer look, you can see some toilet paper strung up there. On the bottom left, you see buckets full of sand. So after you use the bathroom, since there's no plumbing as I just mentioned, you can't flush anything, we dump sand down to cover up anything that goes down that hole.
That flag on the right is very important. And so if you are somewhere in your house or if you're at your school or at your workplace, you can see closed doors that let somebody know that you're in the bathroom. And so we have a flag system where the flag is in one position if you're in the bathroom and then you put it in another position when you're done. It's very important to be able to communicate when someone's in the bathroom and not in the bathroom so that nobody walks in on you, but also so nobody stands there waiting for a long time because you've forgotten to move the flag.
Ella Beaudoin:
That's very important. Yeah.
Briana Pobiner:
That's the first rules we talk about when we get to camp. And so some people talked about eating breakfast. So this is what it looks like when we first bring all of our food into camp. But we don't just leave it sitting out, otherwise it would get rotten, it might get eaten by other animals. We have tents that have food storage. And we are lucky enough, you can see on that top right picture, it's a little bit blurry, but you can see that there is a little refrigerator back there. We don't have a refrigerator that we can plug into the wall because there's no electricity, but we're able to actually use propane or gas powered refrigerators to keep some of our food cold.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh cool.
Briana Pobiner:
Which is wonderful because cold water in the middle of a hot day is fantastic. Also, just being able to help the food last longer is great. You can see a propane stove on the bottom right picture as well.
So how do we make breakfast? I can't plug in a toaster or turn on a microwave or heat up a stove, but we're able to actually cook on locally sourced charcoal. So you can see on the left hand picture, one of our cooks, Kenola, is basically baking bread in like a tin that we're using, that he's using as an oven. You can see tea kettles or hot water kettles to boil water and tea coffee. And on the right hand side you can see some of those charcoal stoves that we can actually put big pots on in order to cook. So it's cooking and camping outside.
I just have to first give a shout out to the amazing cooks that work with us. They're up well before us in order to make breakfast. They cook three meals a day and they somehow manage to stay cheerful. In the middle is Kenola. On the left is Francis. You see a pie there. And so on special occasions, they're even able to make and bake things like pies in the field. That's my favorite food.
Ella Beaudoin:
Ooh, that's amazing. I feel like you guys are eating better than me right now. I don't even want to get up and make anything for breakfast.
Briana Pobiner:
We are very lucky to have wonderful cooks as part of our research team. So this is the table where we eat breakfast in the morning. You can see the sun is beginning to come up. So we usually get up at about 6:00 in the morning, eat breakfast starting about 6:30 or 6:45 so that we can start to get ready for our work day.
So now I want to ask you all, okay, you've done all your morning stuff, what do you do during your school or work day? What are some typical activities that you do?
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah, I'm curious to see. Yeah, what are you guys doing on ordinary day? I know for me I often will write emails. Oh, we see study, learn math. I don't like math. So "Play with friends." That sounds really good. Awesome. More math. Lots of math I will say.
Briana Pobiner:
Oh, okay.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah. Write a book. Read a book. Oh my goodness, this is awesome. A lot of mathematicians out here.
Briana Pobiner:
Fantastic. Math is really important for doing science.
Ella Beaudoin:
Yeah, a lot of reading and studying.
Briana Pobiner:
Excellent. So we do some of that too. And I'll take you through our typical journey of what we do during our field work day. So we start off usually by figuring out where we're going to go to excavate. So normally when we're working at Olorgesailie, there are multiple excavations going on at a time. We often use our vehicles to be able to drive out somewhere. You can see on the bottom left people piling into the back of a vehicle. On the bottom right I'm getting ready to hop in one to drive. On the top right that's my vehicle, which was broken down on that particular morning. And so we have a few wonderful drivers and mechanics who help keep our vehicles going. So we commute to work either in vehicles, sometimes by walking if the places we're excavating happen to be close enough. We have a few members of the local community, the Maasai who work with us, and sometimes they commute by bicycle to the places that we're going.
So the first thing that we do, I'm going to walk you through what it's like to set up an excavation.
Ella Beaudoin:
Wait. Briana, can I have a quick question though?
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah.
Ella Beaudoin:
So you're talking about you're commuting to work. We have a question as how do you even know where to start digging? Where do you even go to start setting up an excavation? How do you know that's where you're going?
Briana Pobiner:
That's a really good question. And I was just going to say, so how do we know where to dig? What we need to do is look for particular layers of sediments or layers of dirt basically where the fossils or stone tools are eroding right out of. And so it's important to find them what's called in situ, or in place, because then we can figure out how old they are. Most of the time we actually date those layers using a variety of different dating methods as opposed to dating the fossils or the artifacts themselves. So figuring out. The first thing that we often do in a field season is spend a few days just walking over the landscape called surveying and looking for the places where those artifacts or fossils might be coming out of. Finding those particular layers and targeting those to set up an excavation. So that's a great question.
So our excavations can be different sizes and shapes, and you just see a few examples here. Most of the time we will set up square meters in which we dig. And so the excavations can be different numbers of square meters in length and widths. You can see on the picture on the bottom right hand side, one that sort of looks like a set of stairs. And so sometimes also some of the specialists that work with us, geologists, are looking to figure out exactly where those layers are. And so they'll dig step trenches in order to find specific layers that we're looking for. And so the excavations can be small, some of them can be very large.
And very important to choose the right tools. So I want to ask you all the question, what kind of tools do you see in these pictures here?
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay. Ah, this is kind of hard, but I'm excited to see what people see what kind of tools. Okay, a chisel. I see we have one from Jata, chisel. We have a wrench, a lot of question marks. It's like, "I think I'm seeing what I'm seeing." Pickaxe. Pickaxe. Nail, pick. Awesome. Yeah, I think that's kind of what I'm seeing as well.
Briana Pobiner:
Yep. Excellent. So we use a lot. We use different kinds of picks. We can use nails in really delicate excavations. Sometimes we even use dental picks like the kinds that the dentist used. We use paint brushes. You can actually see that all of those tools in the picture on the left are sitting in a metal bucket, and we'll get to those metal buckets later because they're pretty important. So sometimes we use bigger tools, like bigger picks, in order to go through sediments that we know don't have any fossils and tools in to get down to that layer. And once we get down to the layer that we're looking to excavate, we go a lot slower and more carefully.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
Good job everybody. So as I just mentioned, we dig slowly and we dig carefully. And you'll notice that no one in these excavations has their shoes on. And that's because one of the rules at Olorgesailie and at some other places where I work is that you need to have your shoes off when we're excavating so you don't accidentally step on a fossil or a stone tool and break it. So we're careful and we dig slowly.
One thing that you may not think of is that part of the process is taking lots of notes. So this is Rick Potts, who's, as I mentioned, the director of the research at Olorgesailie from the Smithsonian side. And he's one of the best note takers that I know. So he's taking notes. You can see in the picture on the left is a green field notebook. So his office is lined with green and orange field notebooks for the 35 years in which he's been doing excavations at Olorgesailie. It's important to be able to go back to be able to see what we've done on any specific day. We document our excavations. We use drawings, we use photographs, we use grids, and we even measure the positions of the artifacts and bones within them.
Ella Beaudoin:
So we're taking notes so that if we want to come back in years and we've already excavated it all, we know exactly what's come out of the ground, right?
Briana Pobiner:
Exactly. And also in case we need to ... If I'm writing up a report and I'm here in the museum and, I'm not here in my house, but if I'm back in the states, but I need to figure out, oh, what did we pull out of that specific place on that day? Then we have those notes for that kind of documentation. And if another team in the future comes in to do research, they can look back at our field notes and also figure out what we've done before.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay, that's awesome. We do have a question kind of I think relating. You're writing down notes, writing with a piece of paper. And the question is like, a lot of these images look like they're out of Nat Geo from the Leakey, who was a very famous paleoanthropologist, camps in the 1960s, is how has modern technology impacted your daily life in the field? Or has it at all?
Briana Pobiner:
That's an awesome question. So I'm going to get to that in a moment.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
So thank you for asking that. So one of the things, I mentioned that our notes include drawings. And so these are drawings by Kay Behrensmeyer, who's also a Smithsonian expert, and she helps us with geology Olorgesailie. And so she has very detailed drawings of the stratigraphy of the layers in the ground that we can then translate into something that we use for our scientific publications.
But talking about technology, so one kind of piece of more sophisticated technological equipment that we use is called a laser transit or an EDM, an electronic distance meter. This part right here where Rick is standing shoots out a light beam which reflects off of this part over here, which is called the prism. So this basically measures the distance between the transit and the prism. Once you know how big that pole is, that red and white pole on the left hand side, and that pole is sitting right on top of or carefully next to that artifact or fossil that we're excavating, you can actually map in every individual fossil or stone tool before it's removed from the ground. This is really important because basically as we're excavating a site, we're essentially destroying it. We can't put it back, we can't re-excavate things so it's really important to have those three dimensional coordinates of where all of the fossils and artifacts are.
I'm sitting here writing something. And so every object that comes out of the ground also gets a card on it, a card that goes with it that has the information, what date is it, what site are we excavating, what level did it come from. We have those three dimensional coordinates that are being written down in the book, but also written down on the cards. And then what are we pulling out of the ground? Is it a fossil? Is it a stone tool? Then we wrap the objects in toilet paper and put them in individual bags. And then eventually, as I'll talk about later, we bring them to the museum in Nairobi to study. So that's kind of the process of how artifacts and fossils come out of the ground.
Ella Beaudoin:
So can you remind us again how old Olorgesailie is?
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah, a good question. So there are lots of different layers at Olorgesailie. The older ones go back to almost 1.2 million years ago.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh wow.
Briana Pobiner:
The younger ones can be as young as about 50,000 years ago. But most of the ones that we've been excavating are between about 300,000 years and about a million years.
Ella Beaudoin:
So while we're talking about kind of excavations, how do you know which kind of tool to pick? When you're digging, you're excavating, how do you know what would be good for what you're looking for?
Briana Pobiner:
That's a great question. Some of that comes a little bit from figuring out how hard or soft the sediments are that you're excavating in. Some of it comes from what are the tools. If they're very loose, you can maybe use a paint brush and just brush the sediment away. Sometimes if they're hard, you have to use picks in order to loosen the sediment and then you're able to brush it away. So it comes from a combination of what tools do you have with you, what's the sediment like. And also if you have tons of fossils and artifacts around, you have to be really careful.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay. Awesome. Thanks.
Briana Pobiner:
Sure. So when we are able to map everything in the three dimensions, we can create maps like this. So it's really important to collect that kind of information. And then we can also even make maps that show how the concentration of artifacts and fossils is changing as you go up, as you go down, or left or right. So sometimes we even come back to camp and we're able to look at these maps every day and say, "Huh, well it looks like the artifacts, there's a lot more over here, so maybe we should continue to dig in that direction."
Ella Beaudoin:
That's awesome.
Briana Pobiner:
So when we're excavating, you can see in that smaller picture on the left, we're also sort of creating a lot of dirt as we're digging dirt and sediment away. You can see those metal buckets, which I mentioned are going to be important.
Ella Beaudoin:
All they're ones that had all the tools in them before, right?
Briana Pobiner:
That's right.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
So the ones that ... Because we can carry them out to the site with the tools in them, but then we actually use them to carry the sediment that we're excavating. So once an excavation happens, it's not that we throw all of that sediment away. This is somebody carrying sediment up to our sieving operations. And so the sieving operations are basically metal mesh. And so we dump the sediment into that metal mesh that has very small holes in it. You shake those sieves. And you can see on the bottom it gets real dusty particularly when it's dry. And then you look inside the sieve to see if there's any little artifacts or fossils that you might have missed and accidentally brushed away.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
So we always do that in places that are not near where we're excavating so we don't accidentally mix up the stuff we've excavated and the stuff that we're still excavating.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
Some things that we're doing that you might also do. So sometimes if we're we're excavating at a site that is a pretty far drive away, we will stay there the entire day. We will take a nap. And so if we're digging close by, we will come back from our morning excavations by about 1:00 p.m., have lunch and then have a rest. Because between about 1:00 and 3:00, it's really super hot at Olorgesailie. We're normally there in June, July and August to excavate, it's the hottest and driest time of the year in Kenya.
Or sorry. It's a cooler and dry time of the year in Kenya, but it's still quite hot. So that's me in the front with a hat on my face trying to get some shade, although there's not really much shade out there. And then this is Rick and I and Christian Tryon who's another researcher who's worked with us at Olorgesailie. We're all snacking on beef jerky because we get hungry also if we're out there for all day. So these are things you might even do in school.
We constantly discuss the plans. So we revisit the excavations planning for the next day, deciding when we think an excavation might be finished, what direction we might want to extend that excavation. And we also do data collection and have meetings right in camp. So you can see on the right hand side I'm sitting, collecting data, actually studying some of the fossils and artifacts in camp. Just behind me is Alison Brooks, who's a professor at George Washington University and also a research associate with us at the Smithsonian who works on stone tools at Olorgesailie. So we have constant, basically, meetings to decide what we're going to do the next day, decide kind of make shorter and longer term plans, and also collect data while we're still in the field.
You could see Joe, who's on the left here, who's one of the Q&A chat experts. So he does something called refitting in the field. So we take all of the stone tools that have come out of particular sites and he wants to see if he can actually fit them back together like puzzle pieces to figure out how people were actually making those stone tools. You need a really good 3D mind in order to be able to kind of do that when you're fitting, so he's working on some of that. On the right hand side, you could see some of our Kenyan excavators, including Musembi who works at the National Museums of Kenya, also doing some sorting, cataloging, making sure that the cards are written properly, gluing anything that might have broken back together and doing labeling and preparing all the fossils and trays that they'll then get used to transport back to the museum in Kenya, in Nairobi.
We work six days a week when we're in the field because it's a really special time, a limited time that we have. And so even on our day off, we're often doing these organizing tasks or downloading and labeling photos and other things to kind of keep the research going.
Ella Beaudoin:
So it seems like a lot of archaeology is studying, learning, talking to each other, lots of meetings. So we do have one question from the Q&A. When you're excavating, you're labeling, you're refitting pieces, do you bring any of that back to the museum in Kenya or do you bring it back to the museum in Washington, D.C., that we are at?
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah, that's a great question. So all the antiquities of Kenya belong to Kenya. And so everything that we excavate goes to the central National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi and goes to their collections and we're able to study them there.
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. Okay.
Briana Pobiner:
That's a good question. So yes, you mentioned studying and learning. And so we borrowed some modern bone specimens from the Department of Osteology at the National Museums of Kenya in order to help do further training and education of the wonderful Kenyan staff who are excavating with us to help them learn more about bones and be able to recognize the shapes of different kinds of bones from different animals. So we're even able to do sort studying and learning and training days while we're in the field.
Ella Beaudoin:
That's awesome.
Briana Pobiner:
All right. So fieldwork day is done, we're wrapping everything up, so what do you do after your work or school day? Once you've sort of gotten back home, what are the kinds of things that you do at the end of your day?
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. Okay. So what are the kinds of things that you guys do at the end of your day? I know I keep telling you about what I do, but I know I come home and I either take a nap or eat dinner. Okay. So what are the kinds of things? "We read. Eat dinner. Watch TV." A lot of watching TV and homework. Play piano, which is cool.
Briana Pobiner:
Cool.
Ella Beaudoin:
A lot of reading video games, watch TV. Eat, sleep, and relax. What about you?
Briana Pobiner:
Eat, sleep and relax. Excellent, I love it. So one of the things, because we've been out dirty and dusty all day, we take showers. We usually get back to the excavations after we've gone out again at three o'clock in the afternoon. By about 6:00, we're hot, dusty, and ready for showers. So here's how our field showers work. You can see the picture on the left hand side of our solar showers. You can get those in camping stores. You fill them with water. They lie out in the hot sun all day. They get nice and warm. They get hoisted into our field shower stall, which you can see in the middle. And they hang on a tree branch. You can see what it looks like inside on the right hand side of that photo.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh, that's awesome because I know I hate a cold shower. Ooh.
Briana Pobiner:
Cold showers are one of my least favorite things ever. So even though it's really hot, still by the end of the day I still want to have a warm shower. So we don't shower every day. We have limited water. So usually we have a rotation on days that we're showering and other days you can just kind of wash off in your basin. So these bags only hold a few gallons of water.
And so this is the procedure for bathing in the field. You bring your towel and you bring your soap into the shower stall. You hang your towel over the side to make sure it doesn't fall into the dirt. In the second picture on the left, you can see the spout. You basically pull the spout to open the flow of water. You get yourself wet. You push the spout back in so the water stops flowing. You soap yourself up, you pull the spout again in order to rinse yourself off. You stand. You can see the slatted wood on that third picture. You stand on there because if you stood right on the dirt and got wet, your feet would instantly get muddy. Once you've rinsed everything off, on that last picture on the right you can see a little sort of a tunnel or a rivulet that's dug into the ground, that's to let the water drain out.
So usually you bring flip-flops or shower shoes to the shower that you walk on back to your tent so you try not to instantly get covered in dust again. So that's our field shower procedure at the end of the day.
Ella Beaudoin:
We have a ton of questions in the Q&A soon, so we'll get to all of them soon. We're just going to finish up with figuring out what we do at the end of the day at Olorgesailie and then we'll get right to your questions.
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome, thank you. So a few of you mentioned TV. We do not get to watch TV in the field. We do not have a generator in camp. We like to keep the noise to a minimum. It's beautiful and quiet out there. But we have electronic equipment that we need to use. So we have laptops, we have the electronic distance machine that you saw, we have cameras that we need to charge batteries for. So we use a solar system that we use to generate solar electricity. So on the left you can see solar panels. Those solar panels are hooked into a solar battery. That solar battery, the electricity that get stored in there then goes through an inverter. And on the right you can see plug strips where we're able to plug in and charge all of our electronic equipment. So we have to be pretty sparing with how much we use our electronics and it's something that we think about, but we're really glad to be able to use the solar generated electricity.
The other thing we use for lights, because as I mentioned there's no electricity out there, is we use kerosene lamps. So we can use these particularly for light at night along with our own personal flashlights. So at the end of the day when it starts to get dark after having a shower, we rest in our tents for a while, do some reading, and then we all usually gather back at the table for dinner starting at about 7:30 in the evening, starting with some snacks and then getting ready for dinner time, which is about eight o'clock.
I did want to mention before we finish up, I've had some of ... So I have a summer birthday. I've had some of my best birthdays in the field at Olorgesailie. You can see on the right-hand side the cake that was made for my 30th birthday. The team was wonderful in getting some party hats and candles at this time.
Ella Beaudoin:
That looks so fun.
Briana Pobiner:
I want to mention I've only been able to highlight a few of the people that we work with, but it really takes a team in order to do really good field work. And so here you can see one of the teams from several years ago from our cooks, excavators, researchers, the drivers, everybody that basically comes together to make this field work possible.
The last thing I want to talk about, I won't get into it in too much detail is that when you've asked the question before about what happens to the fossils and artifacts, they go to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. And so here I'm studying some elephant fossils from one of the sites at Olorgesailie. So we work in the museum. The museum is like ours in that the collections are incredibly well cared for and there's experts on staff who are able to help curate them.
I also want to mention that we work hard to build good relationships with the Maasai local community whose land that we camp on and excavate in. So here, this is a visit that we facilitated with community elders, both men and women this past January. So you can see on the left our team member, Musembi Kolomzi, he works at the museum in Nairobi and excavates with us in the field. On the right, you can see Rick Potts. They're both explaining to the Maasai what gets us so excited about these objects from their land that until we excavated them, hadn't seen the light of day in a million years. And so we really put effort into local community engagement.
Ella Beaudoin:
That's awesome and essential.
Briana Pobiner:
Thank you. So we hope you enjoyed your field trip. Look, there's Ella on her visit to Olorgesailie. And also you can see beneath me, that's my son named Toby. He actually got to visit Olorgesailie two years ago when he was six. I was doing field work in another part of Kenya. But it was really wonderful for him to be able to meet all of my friends and colleagues at Olorgesailie and just get a sense of what it's like there. He still remembers that ... He's eight now, but he still has really fun memories of visiting Olorgesailie.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh my goodness, that is so awesome. And now we kind of understand what it's like to have a day in the life of being a field archaeologist. I think that's amazing. We have a ton of questions. So are you ready to answer some of our questions?
Briana Pobiner:
I am happy to do that. When we're done answering questions, I'll give you a little bit of sense of where people can learn more.
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. That's perfect. Okay, so let's start with the very beginning. How did you become interested in becoming a paleoanthropologist?
Briana Pobiner:
Great question. So I started college not actually really even being that interested in science, not knowing what anthropology was. I took a class. I went to Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate in Pennsylvania and I took a class with a professor named Janet Monge that was about human evolution. I fell in love with paleoanthropology, with solving mysteries about the past. And then the summer after my third year of college, I went on a field school in South Africa ran by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. The hands-on experience, I fell in love with field work and it was just all over from there.
Ella Beaudoin:
Awesome. You didn't mind getting covered in dust and dirt then?
Briana Pobiner:
It was great fun.
Ella Beaudoin:
So do you go to Olorgesailie every year?
Briana Pobiner:
I don't go to Olorgesailie every year anymore. I have another field site that I work at in central Kenya where I'm studying modern bones to understand more about the ecosystems and the past there. But I, for six years, helped run the excavations at Olorgesailie and I'm still helping to study the fossils that are coming out of the oldest layers of the excavations at Olorgesailie. Usually twice a year I'm in Kenya, in the museum in Nairobi where all those collections are so well stored and kept and studying the fossils that have been excavated over the last 35 years.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay. And so that's what you do when you're not in the field, is in the museum studying?
Briana Pobiner:
Absolutely.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay, awesome. So we have two more questions. We have, are there dangerous insects like scorpions and thorns? You don't want to be barefoot?
Briana Pobiner:
Yeah, that's great.
Ella Beaudoin:
Related to that, we're wondering are there wild animals out there? How do you protect yourself against scorpions, thorns, and potentially other wild animals.
Briana Pobiner:
All of those things are there. And so there are snakes, there are scorpions there. And so we do not walk around and camp barefoot. And also when you put on your field boots in the morning, it's important to tip them over and shake them out so you don't accidentally put your foot where a scorpion is. And so because you saw how many people were on our field team, usually there's a lot of people in camp and so wild animals tend to stay away. We're also pretty aware. We know what the wild animals locally sound like, and so we keep pretty vigilant about that. And the same thing really goes for the scorpions and the snakes and the other, and solifuges, which are pseudo spiders, and other dangerous animals. Yep, they're not my favorite part of field work. And I have had incidents with scorpions in my tent and things like that. And I will just say that they don't last long.
Ella Beaudoin:
So you kind of mentioned before that you are looking at some of the oldest parts of this site and stuff that's coming out of the oldest levels. How old is that? And then also what's the oldest bone or stone that you've found?
Briana Pobiner:
Ah, great question. So the oldest layers at Olorgesailie date back to about 1.2 million years old. The layers that I'm looking at are 992,000 years old, so just about a million years old. I'm looking at the fossils from multiple excavations across a landscape where all of the layers date to about that time period. Probably from Olorgesailie the oldest fossils that I study go back to about 1.2 million years old. And in general, in other places, I've worked at other places in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Romania, even in the U.S., and so probably the oldest fossils that I've worked on go back to about 1.8 million years old. I've worked at a site called Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. So I think those are about the oldest fossils that I've excavated myself and worked on.
Ella Beaudoin:
Wow. Can you help me wrap ... I think we have a question from some of the audience, but also I want to know how can you wrap your head around that? So what kind of hominins or early ancestors were living at that time?
Briana Pobiner:
Great question. So from that time period, from between about a million to almost 2 million years ago, there are three species that are pretty common. One is Homo erectus, which is sort of our grandparent species. They evolved into another species called Homo heidelbergensis. We see those fossils also. And actually some fossils of Homo erectus like fossils have been found from Olorgesailie. And so we see Homo erectus around at that time period, Homo heidelbergensis, but also another type of early human called Paranthropus. So the Homo erectus are usually associated with stone tools. We think Paranthropus may or may not have made stone tools. Maybe they made tools out of bone. But they had much bigger teeth and much stronger jaws. And so they seem to have been doing a lot more chewing where it's likely that Homo erectus has been doing a lot more tool making and processing food outside of their mouths.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay, that's awesome. So we are kind of at 45 minutes now. We can take a couple more questions. So let's kind of look through some of the questions that we have, okay? Awesome. Okay, so we've figured out what kind of species we're there at that time. Maybe a really simple question. What's the difference between an archaeologist and a paleoanthropologist?
Briana Pobiner:
That's a really good question. And so paleoanthropology is broadly the discipline that studies kind of everything about early humans. An archaeologist studies the traces of behavior. That can be the tools that humans left behind. That can even be the traces of butchery marks on fossils, on fossil animals which is what I study. Another kind of major, major bucket under paleoanthropology is there's archaeology and then there's biological anthropology. And so biological anthropologists study the fossils of the humans themselves, also study modern humans to understand about our biology and physiology. And then you can also study the genetics of modern and fossil humans. So paleoanthropology is kind of the larger umbrella and archaeology is a part of that, studying the traces of behavior as opposed to the traces of the body.
Ella Beaudoin:
Okay, that's an awesome description of what that is. So we have I think two more questions that, which kind of fossils do you most often find when you are excavating? And then I guess how much stuff comes out of an excavation?
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome questions. And so we mostly find fossils of herbivores, of animals that eat plants. And that's because if you think look at large animals on landscapes today, just about anywhere there's more herbivores than there are things like carnivores or even sometimes rodents or primates or other categories of animals. So we find a lot of things like antelopes. We find zebra. We find things like giraffes and elephants or the fossils of those things. And how many fossils do we find in any excavation? It totally varies. Sometimes we find thousands of fossils. Sometimes we dig a lot and not find any. Those excavations are a little more disappointing. And it's pretty impossible to predict how much you're going to find in an excavation until you really start digging and figuring out whether you've found some really fossil- or artifact-rich areas or not so much.
Ella Beaudoin:
That's awesome. So how can the people who are here find out more about paleoanthropology and archaeology? Where can we go if you have more questions that we didn't get to or answer?
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome. So I'm going to share my screen. Hold on a second. Let me move that over.
Ella Beaudoin:
I think Briana's going to start sharing a list of different resources. So if you guys want to get your phones out, this might be an easy time to take a photo of your screen so that you can go to those links later on.
Briana Pobiner:
Awesome. So there's three places that I want to show you too. So on the Human Origins website, humanorigins.si.edu, if you want to explore Olorgesailie, you can look for under research, under our East African research projects, Adventures in the Rift Valley. This is a really fun interactive where you get to search for evidence yourself based on all real data and information from Olorgesailie.
If you want to know more about our daily life in the field, we actually kept a field blog for a few different years from the excavations at Olorgesailie, also under East African research projects. You can go to our Olorgesailie Field blog from 2011, 2004 and 1999. And here if you want to just take your phone out and snap a photo, here's where you can learn more about Olorgesailie in general. Here's the interactive, our field blog. When we can all start traveling again, if you're a college student and you're interested in getting field experience, we have a page that lists different field schools. And then if you happen to be local to the D.C. area, there's an organization called Archaeology in the Community, which is a nonprofit educational organization founded by Dr. Alexandra Jones in 2009. And it's a wonderful place to look for archaeology programs for students of all ages.
Ella Beaudoin:
Oh my goodness, this is so awesome. I know what I'm going to do and spend the rest of my evening doing is looking through the interactive of Olorgesailie. If I can't go to the field, I can pretend.
Briana Pobiner:
Yes, we miss being able to be in the field. I also want to give a shout out to Jennifer Clark, who's one of the chat experts, for providing me with a lot of the pictures for this presentation. The ones that I didn't take myself were often ones that she took. But yeah, we miss being in the field this summer and we miss all of our colleagues at in Kenya at Olorgesailie. But this is the next best thing, is going on a little bit of a virtual field trip.
Maggy Benson:
Thank you so much, Ella. Thank you so much, Briana. It was so awesome to hear about your life in the field in Olorgesailie, Kenya. We had so many amazing questions. Thanks to all the students for participating with us today and sending all of those awesome questions. Now, if you didn't snap a picture of these resources, we did paste them into the Q&A. So if you look into the answered questions, on the Q&A you should see a list of the same links. So check those out to explore the Human Origins Program website to see some of these things. Also, Briana, some folks are asking for an email address. Does the Human Origins have an email account?
Briana Pobiner:
Yes, we do. If you have questions for us, you can email us at humanorigins@si.edu. So please do. We'd love to hear what you thought about the presentation today. If you have questions, we're happy to answer them.
Maggy Benson:
Wonderful. Thank you so much Briana. And today, when you exit the program, there will be a survey that appears in your Zoom window in the browser window. If you could fill out that survey, we would love to hear from you so that we can continue bringing you programs that you find valuable. So thanks again today, Briana, Ella. Also Jennifer and Joe who are answering all those questions in the Q&A, we really [inaudible 00:50:58]. Woo! Yay. Hey Joe. We really appreciate your responses there.
So our programming is available at naturalhistory.si.edu, the Natural History Museum's website. So we have a lot more programs coming this week including on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So make sure to check out our website to sign up for some more programs happening this week with our Smithsonian scientists. So thank you all so much for joining us and we hope to see you on a future webinar. Bye guys. Thank you.
Ella Beaudoin:
Bye.
Briana Pobiner:
Bye. Thank you. Bye everybody.
