We Are Nature

Experimental Archaeology

• Carnegie Museum of Natural History • Season 2 • Episode 2

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What do we know about the early peopling of our continent and our region? What was the landscape and the climate like then? What can we learn from this natural history about interacting with the land and water today, and moving forward as good stewards? Featuring Amy Covell-Murthy, Archaeology Collection Manager and Head of the Section of Anthropology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Kristina Gaugler, Anthropology Collection Manager at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Michael Pisano:

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items, raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's episode, experimental archaeology, collaborative decolonization, and foraging the feral remnants of the eastern agricultural complex. Grab your acorns and your shag bark seeds. It's gonna get nuts.

Michael Pisano:

Welcome to We Are Nature, a show about natural histories and livable futures, presented by Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I'm your host, amateur contemporary human Michael Pisano, and today I'm joined by two professional human experts. Would you please introduce yourselves, friends?

Kristina Gaugler:

Sure. My name is Kristina Gaugler. I'm the Anthropology Collection Manager here at the museum. And my research interests focus around food studies and culinary history.

Michael Pisano:

Awesome, excellent.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

My name's Amy Covell-Murthy. I am Archaeology Collection Manager here at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Head of the Section of Anthropology. And I primarily study how we care for human remains in museum collections and museum ethics.

Michael Pisano:

Awesome. We are going to talk about both of those things at length, I hope. Thank you both so much for joining me today and bringing us behind the scenes of the human culture collection here at the Carnegie. To kick us off, I guess I was wondering if one or both of you could tell me a little bit about the scope of these collections, the archaeological, the anthropological collections.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

So here at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, we have in the anthropology collection total approximately 1.4 million objects. Yes, and they span the globe. We have stuff from every continent except Antarctica.

Michael Pisano:

And over what kind of time? Yeah, so far. What kind of time period are we talking about collecting these?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Um, the actual collection started about 125 years ago when Andrew Carnegie founded the museum. Accession number one is the Chantress of Amun coffin.

Michael Pisano:

Do we have a sense of how old the oldest object in that collection is? Kristina and I were talking about this recently.

Kristina Gaugler:

And I think I figured out an answer to it. The most accurately dated object that we have that we can pretty for sure say. We have stone tools from Egypt that are way predate dynastic Egypt. And so those are anywhere from 15,000 to 18,000 BCE. So those are probably some of the oldest objects that we have in the collection.

Michael Pisano:

And what about locally? Do we have a kind of time range for that? We're going to talk a little bit, I think, today, about local uh eastern woodlands kind of collection items. Oh, what's the kind of oldest object we have there?

Kristina Gaugler:

So oldest, we do have Clovis points, so that's upwards of 11,000 to 10,000 years old. So that's probably the oldest. And there are that time period of projectile points in Pennsylvania.

Michael Pisano:

Awesome. Human history, natural history are often kind of siloed, at least in many uh visitors' minds, but possibly also academically. Can you speak to kind of researching these disciplines, anthropology, archaeology, in the context of natural history?

Kristina Gaugler:

I think that as humans, we are a part of natural history and a part of the natural world. So we are affected by the environment as much as we affect the environment. So I think there's definitely a role for cultural history in the natural history museum. But what you're saying about it being siloed, you know, hopefully in the future we can look for exhibitions that show humans with geology and the plants and the animals and sort of everything together instead of it just being like this is a human culture exhibit and this is a natural history exhibit.

Michael Pisano:

I sure hope so. That sounds really exciting. And I know you're both involved, it feels related in work around ethics and ethnographic collections. And I am curious about this idea of decolonizing a museum, which I know is part of your work.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

I've been lucky enough to be uh chairing our decolonization working group in hopes to create a decolonization council. We're putting in a lot of hard work slowly to figure out what that's gonna look like here. Ultimately, you know, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, just like other museums, have directly benefited from colonialism in the past. We have appropriated native cultures to keep telling a white narrative, and so that's where we need to break down our history as a collecting institution and make restitution with the cultures that we have monopolized for our own benefit over the years. I think one of the best ways to do that is through collaboration. I think that's the only way to move forward. Give the people who we formerly were exploiting the chance to tell the story themselves. And the only way we can do that is through transparency and restitution and repatriation, and going above and beyond the laws of repatriation to make good relationships and to provide a platform for marginalized communities to tell the stories they want to tell.

Michael Pisano:

That's a great answer, and I'm really glad that you're doing that work. You mentioned repatriation, which also I know you're involved in NAGPRA. Can you explain what that is, just for someone who isn't familiar?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Sure. That's the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act. It was signed into existence in 1991, and it governs the return of indigenous material to federally recognized tribes. I'm very lucky that my predecessors here at the museum really put a lot of effort into reporting of collections that we had. And now I'm working on affiliating everyone else that we have in the collection for return. I last year completed a repatriation with the Quapaw Nation in Quapaw, Oklahoma. We've had human remains for about 30 years that someone who lived in Pittsburgh picked up off of a site in Arkansas and brought back to Pittsburgh with it, and somehow they ended up in our collection. A small amount of human bones, but human bones nonetheless. We started the process of this repatriation at this point almost 15 years ago. But because of changes in tribal leadership and the pandemic and a bunch of other factors and full consultation, it took us about 10 years to finally circle around and be able to return this individual. So I flew them to Arkansas where I met Carrie Wilson, who's the NAGPRA coordinator for the Quapaw Nation, and Quapaw. And talking with her about the transfer of the human remains to the Quapaw Nation, we decided that it would be great if I could coordinate the return with the Quapaw Fall Gathering last year. So I volunteered at the Quapaw Fall Gathering with Carrie, and we sold 50-50 raffle tickets and ran an auction and I ate fry bread and chili and it was wonderful. Um, but most importantly, I made a lot of friends, and in particular, I made friends with a Quapaw artist Betty Gaedtke. She has been reviving a traditional Quapaw style of pottery, but putting a modern twist on it. And so the museum was able to purchase two of Betty Gaedtke's vessels. So now we have a better story of friendship and collaboration, and we can tell people about the Quapaw Nation and their vibrant cultural traditions, and we can work with them hopefully forever because of this really for me fun and but also humbling experience.

Michael Pisano:

That's one of the best kinds of experience, isn't it? Moving us back towards the natural history side, those are very intersectional, intermingled sides, but uh, what do we stand to conserve ecologically by conserving culture, by engaging with current representatives from the cultures that are collected here in the museum?

Kristina Gaugler:

I think that conserving cultural traditions and materials and things like that provide us guidance to local and traditional knowledge, the ways to best take care of the planet and to interact with the land around us. In terms of, didd you say, conserving ecologically.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah.

Kristina Gaugler:

Well, one of the things that's interesting that's going on now in archaeology is with technology getting better, we're better able to analyze really tiny seeds and fragments and things like that. And we can do residue analysis to look at plant lipids and animal fats and things like that. We're able to learn about these types of plants and things that people were domesticating and using that are maybe extinct or have gone back to being weedy plants. And so a lot of the people have been domesticating plants for thousands of years, and there's thousands of domesticates, and some of them have sort of undomesticated and gone back to being weedy plants. So we can conserve and have an idea of these types of plants that people used. It can help us. There's plants that are better able to survive in not very habitable, habitable environments and things like that. Yeah, disturbed. So you can can kind of conserve those plants for the future and we can maybe bring them back or study the ways that people farmed them.

Michael Pisano:

There's so much to learn. And it seems like it fills in this picture of what life was like, which I think gets kind of two-dimensionalized, you know, in at least the education that I got. But obviously, it was way more complex than anything that fits in an outdated textbook in this country.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

And I think in speaking about decolonization on this, too, it's really important to include indigenous ways of knowing on top of our scientific information that we find.

Michael Pisano:

Yes. Talk about that and the way that those things can work together because that is very much a part of the discourse in your field now, I imagine.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

It is, yes.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah. And in all science, hopefully.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Well, I mean, we we do have the American Anthropological Association did write an apology to the world for being such a colonial institution.

Michael Pisano:

Oh, that's a nice start. That's something.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

I think as anthropologists, we've been, you know, rethinking our discipline for a while now. But it's important to include indigenous ways of knowing and how we care for the collections, which Kristina can talk about a little bit more.

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, in terms of decolonizing the collection, there's you know, the decolonization touches on all different aspects of the museum. But within the collection that I'm working at, one of the things that I've been trying to do is keep this idea that we have a living collection alive that's still connected to living communities. And this past year we had two really awesome opportunities to explore that. One was when the Apsáalooke Nation, also known as the Crow the Crow people, they live in Montana, they came to visit the collection, and so we showed them the objects that we have in the collection, and they were sharing ideas, and they're like, oh, my grandma had this, and everyone was talking, and it was really a moving experience. And also, I think for both I learned a lot. But they also gave really good ideas for storing objects in the collection that maybe we hadn't thought about. So things are in the cabinet, you know, numerically, but they were saying they opened a cabinet and there was a children's object next to a club that was used for war, and they weren't in love with those two items being next to each other, and so it really made us start thinking about using indigenous protocols for storage and material culture of where we store things. So we're taking into account their preferences for how things are stored. And then in late February, we had the Kuikuro visit. They're a group that lives along the Xingu River in northern Brazil, and their chief Afukaka and his son and grandson came and they were also looking around at the collection, and um, it was really inspiring. They were like, oh, this palm leaf is a little bit brittle. We could come back up and repair it for you. And I think that really fits well in with this idea of a living collection that's evolving and in service to the communities. So that's just one aspect of decolonization that we're working on within the collection space itself.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

And like Kristina pointed out, like we had for multiple decades thought one object was something, and then when the Aspsaalooke came in, they were like, oh no, no, no, this is something totally different. Not at all what you thought it was, which is really important.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, like you said, opening up, yep, opening up the spaces and the dialogue is uh just incredibly valuable. I'm so glad to hear about that work happening here. Uh, not to cut that short, but let's start talking about what's on the table in front of us. My understanding is that they tell a story together kind of as a group, but I would like to start with them kind of one at a time.

Mackenzie Kimmel:

Collection item one is a roughly rectangular stone measuring four inches long by four inches wide by one inch tall. The rock's warm tan surface is mottled with brown and orange. It appears to be sedimentary with visible tiny grains that create a gently abrasive texture. You might be tempted to overlook collection item one as nothing more than a pleasant but unremarkable stone, if not for the following distinguishing feature. At the approximate center of the stone's top face, notice a bowl-like depression measuring one inch diameter, one half inch deep. Can you identify collection item one?

Kristina Gaugler:

Sure. This is a little piece of sandstone. That's a common stone in western Pennsylvania. A lot of the bedrock and things are sandstone. So this is a stone that has a little cup or a little hole in it. Nuts would have been placed there and then hit with a rock or a piece of wood as like a hammer stone to crack the nut. And over time, that's how that groove developed from use of for uh cracking nuts.

Michael Pisano:

And when and where is this from?

Kristina Gaugler:

So this is part of our teaching collection, so it doesn't have quite as good of provenance as some of the other items, but this is from western Pennsylvania dating from 900 to a few thousand years old.

Michael Pisano:

Uh, this nutting stone, is that what we're calling it, right? A nutting stone. What kind of nuts were available in this area that might have been smushed in this rock?

Kristina Gaugler:

In the earlier time, the Paleo-Indian time, much of northern Pennsylvania would have been covered in glaciers. So um there wouldn't have been as many nuts available. So that's when you start seeing these around the archaic period. And that would have been um every single nut that exists just went out of my head. Uh beech nuts. Um there's one, acorn, um, hickory, hickory was a big one, and chestnuts was a big one.

Michael Pisano:

Yes, and those nuts all have stories. Chestnut I know is one that many people around here know, the story of chestnut blight. Let's talk a little bit about the importance of nuts in the human diet. What would have been important, especially at this back, you know, this time in history?

Kristina Gaugler:

Obviously, people would have had a pretty large type of diet that was involved lots of things. So nuts have a lot of good fats and a lot of fiber and protein, and so they would have really filled out the diet in that way. And they would have been eating animals also, but um, nuts are great. You can pound them into a powder, you can add them to soups and stews, you can store them for long, longer periods of time. So they would have been a pretty valuable food resource for people.

Michael Pisano:

Absolutely. And do we think that people also would have planted and cultivated nut trees, or is that something that they were foraging more? Is that something we just don't know?

Kristina Gaugler:

I don't know if people were for or cultivating nut trees. That's a good question. I haven't read anything specifically about that, but I know that there are accounts of animals seasonally when nuts come, they would they know where the best producing nut trees are, and they can go there not only to gather at the season, but also they know which animals are hanging out around those trees at that time to hunt for them. So there was a lot of different uses for the nuts, nut trees.

Michael Pisano:

Can you tell me about some of the biodiversity, the non-humans that were also enjoying the nuts?

Kristina Gaugler:

One of the ones that first comes to my mind, because a friend of mine did research on this, but the passenger pigeon, which went extinct after uh colonization and for uh habitat loss, but some of the people that study the archaeology of passenger pigeons look for these historic like nut groves because they they love to eat them, but also forest animals, raccoons and squirrels.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Small mammals, small mammals like chipmunks, the animals you might imagine today running around.

Michael Pisano:

In my experience in the woods, which I try to get out as often as I can around Pittsburgh, I don't really see many nut trees. I see black walnut trees pretty often, but besides that, it's a little bit of a rare find, at least around the city proper. I guess I wonder what factors might account for less locally available fresh nuts in our area today.

Kristina Gaugler:

I think probably one of the things that has to do with that was that in the late 1800s PA was almost completely clear-cut. And so there's there's very few old growth forests, there's a few little stands. And also, like you mentioned, the blight, the American chestnut blight, and things like that. But I still see nuts. My grandparents have property up north, and there's shag bark hickory and also oak trees. We don't really eat acorn very much anymore. It takes a lot of processing, but acorn flour is really good. Let's see, I see hickory. I do, you don't you see chestnut, but not American chestnut as much. So I think some of those things contributed to not seeing as many nut trees around.

Michael Pisano:

So part of it you're saying is just knowledge and vision and what we're able to actually interpret in the landscape. Yeah. That knowledge has passed away more than maybe some of the species, though. Also, clearly, you know, it's a combination.

Kristina Gaugler:

And then also what's served in the stores. There's a lot more nuts that are out in the world that we don't you don't eat because it's not in a store, but you can eat them. And so, yeah, what you're saying about indigenous knowledge or traditional knowledge of what to eat. There's some of them are still out there.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Right. So we should use acorns a whole lot more, is what we're saying.

Kristina Gaugler:

I try I've tried it, it is tough.

Michael Pisano:

It is tough. It's a lot of work. Can one of you just briefly describe that process? Because I've I've also tried it and it's quite a bit.

Kristina Gaugler:

My big experience was I was out gathering acorns on a college campus, so I looked like a crazy person. And uh I laid them all out in my backyard to dry them. And the next day when I came back, they were almost all gone because squirrels came and took all of them. Um, so that was hilarious that they had like this big feast that I provided for them. Yeah, you can dry them out in your oven too, and not try to dry them out in the sun like I did, because animals will steal them. But dry them out in their oven and pound them, and you can put the meal in cheesecloths and try and run it through water a lot until it's clear.

Michael Pisano:

It's got a lot of tannins in it, is that right? That makes it really bitter.

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, it has lots of tannins and it can upset your stomach a little bit and things like that. But there are some really great accounts from the Northwest Coast of acorn harvesting and the way that traditional acorn making the flour and the bread and things like that. So, and there's even YouTube videos. So, those are things you can go check out if you want to try and make your own acorn flour.

Michael Pisano:

I think that the effort of doing it is well worth it. I think that there's something to be gained from kind of working for your food, trying to find your food in the landscape, connecting it to the ecology. I wonder what your experiences with that are, and then maybe we'll move on to the next object here.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Kristina and I both love cooking. So we're, I mean, I know I'm speaking for both of us right now, but we love YouTube videos that tell you how to do stuff, and we've tried to make everything. Personally, right now, I'm trying to find a good recipe for dandelion wine.

Michael Pisano:

Nice.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

And my grandfather, my great-grandfather made it and it was delightful, but he didn't teach anyone how he did it. So I've been for years trying to perfect it with things I find in my backyard.

Michael Pisano:

It's a quest, which I feel like you know, is that gets at kind of what I enjoy about it is that there is a little bit of effort, and through that effort you connect to a story, right? A family member, uh a cherished memory, right? There's there's really something there. And then there's also the connection you make to nature and the ecology of the place where you take the food from, or you, you know, try to hopefully respectfully take the food from. Do you you just talked about acorn flour? Do you have another kind of story about connecting to your food like that?

Kristina Gaugler:

Well, I like to, like I mentioned, my grandparents have a little bit of land north of here. And so there's lots of berries on the property, so we were always picking berries. There were a few pawpaw trees, which um they're not there anymore, so I want to replant those. But I love the thrill of finding a pawpaw tree or mayapples if you're familiar with those along the ground.

Michael Pisano:

I am, but you know, I think people I talk to don't know what pawpaws or may apples are. So could you just describe both of those really quickly?

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, pawpaw is a tree that this is about as north as you can find them in Pittsburgh. And they some people call them custard bananas, but they have a really tropical flavor and they're really creamy inside and they have these big, big, dark seeds inside. They're delicious. They almost are like eating like a tropical creme brulee. Once you pick them, they ripen super fast. And so they really you can't find them in the grocery stores and things like that. Sometimes farmers markets will have them, but you really have to eat them right when you pick them. Eating them as you're sitting underneath the tree is really the best, the best thing to do. Yeah.

Michael Pisano:

Yes, a trail side nibble is uh they call it. Okay, and then a maypop if you're looking a little lower in the forest.

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, these were all over the ground when I was growing up, and it was not until very long.

Michael Pisano:

Maypop, I'm sorry.

Kristina Gaugler:

Mayapple.

Michael Pisano:

Mayapple. Maypop is another local fruit.

Kristina Gaugler:

I thought that was like a slang. 

Michael Pisano:

Maypop is our local passion fruit variety, the Appalachian passion fruit, which is another insane tropical native fruit. Oh my gosh. Well, check it out. Maypops, um, it's in the passiflora zone. And yeah, they taste like sour, and uh they have this very showy, huge white or purple flower with kind of like an architectural spiral y structure. They're wild, they're so tasty. U

Kristina Gaugler:

I want to try one.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah.

Kristina Gaugler:

Well, mayapples, yeah, they're on the ground, and you can sometimes find this little fruit underneath of the leaves if you look, if you lift it up. And I actually haven't made anything with it, but I've heard that you can make, you don't want to eat them raw, but you can make jam or things like that out of it. And so that's something I'm excited to to try.

Michael Pisano:

They're wonderful. Um, it probably is important to say that every part of the plant, besides the very ripe fruit, is not good to eat in the toxic kind of way. So anyway, but check them out. There's plenty, like you said, of beautiful stuff on YouTube, online, resources for foraging wherever you live. We are moving on, in fact, to this other object we've got.

Mackenzie Kimmel:

Collection item two is also a rock. It is heftier than collection item one, comparable in size to a generous potato. Like collection item one, it is also sandstone from Pennsylvania, but something has happened to change it. The tan surface is darker and deeper. The orange mottling appears richer and more pronounced. You might hypothesize that the sediments that agglomerated to make this piece of sandstone were simply different colors than collection item one. However, note that along the rock's side there is a conspicuously flat circular section ringed by an orange outline. This appears to be a cutaway to the interior of the stone, revealed by a section that has cracked and sheared off. The color within looks lighter, almost identical to collection item one. What happened here? What is collection item two?

Kristina Gaugler:

This is a piece of burnt rock that archaeologists call FCR, which stands for firecracked rock. And this is something that you find everywhere because if you have been camping and you build a fire pit and you put rocks around it and they get burnt, you have created firecracked rock and it stays there forever. And so the remnants of campfires and hearths and cooking stick around for a long time. And the reason that I was interested in studying this, because it's really common at archaeological sites to sort of note that this is present and then they sort of discard it or leave it there. And I was trying to make the case for the fact that these have a lot more interpretive potential for understanding. So what I was looking at was specifically how were people using heated stone in the eastern woodlands to cook their food. There's accounts in other parts of the country and the world for stone boiling, so heating rounded stones and submerging them in water or mush to bring it to a boil to cook your food. But there's not as much evidence for that here. And so I did some experimental archaeology, so cooking with stone, and I was trying to look at the way that rocks fractured to see if if they fracture differently if you take a hot rock and submerge it into liquid, it rapidly cools. Does it fracture differently if it's sort of a hearthstone?

Michael Pisano:

So you actually tried different methods of cooking to see how they shook up or how the rocks would crack and things like that.

Kristina Gaugler:

So I all the rocks that we created experimentally, I compared to burned firecracked rock from archaeological sites, and it's the early stages of the research. It did seem like there was some evidence for stone boiling, which was really exciting. So yeah, more experiments to come. And I want to cook acorn mush with doing stone boiling. That would be really fun.

Michael Pisano:

Uh well, what might humans have cooked over a fire that you know featured this rock or with this rock submerged in it, helping it boil?

Kristina Gaugler:

In this part of the world, stone boiling is more common, as far as we know, before the introduction of pottery. And so it does seem like some people in some parts of the world still will put heated rocks into pottery, but it's a little more fragile. In other places, you would um like the rocks might crack the pottery. In other places you could dig a pit or you could use the lining of an animal's stomach or hide and you can stone boil in that.

Michael Pisano:

I wonder what kind of foods people were eating that you know would have uh they would have cooked over a fire or with stone boiling. What what kind of you know diversity of diet are we talking about?

Kristina Gaugler:

Sometimes at archaeological sites you find these big piles like middens of burned stone. And one of the things that people think are that maybe these are seasonal examples of catching fish and laying the fish all across the top and roasting them or steaming them, and then also parching nuts, so you have these big burned piles of firecracked rock that maybe they were during nut harvest putting all the nuts on there to pre-prepare them for cooking and things like that. So that's one thing. Also, just generally, you know, you're cooking pretty much everything over stones and things like that. And also, people use stones in non-cooking applications, like in sweat lodges and type of things like that, too. Um, I've heard accounts of people heating stones and just putting them under their blankets for warmth at night. So there's lots of things that people used those for.

Michael Pisano:

I mean, a rock is a very good friend, I think. We've got two examples right here. Yeah, and I guess aside from cooking, not just rocks, but what can you tell me about the relationship between humans and fire at this period? Because I think in other parts of the world, right, we have either direct evidence or ongoing tradition of fire used in land management and indigenous traditions. What do we know about the peoples here, which I know it's it's a little bit more scant maybe?

Kristina Gaugler:

I think that people think in this area that there was slash and burn type of agriculture happening. So fire in that regard is obviously used for cooking. But in terms of land management, I I think it's it's known that in this area people were practicing slash and burn, at least in later times.

Michael Pisano:

And so that's where you're clearing an area of woodland to then cultivate something else in?

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, grow gardens or you know, later on in time when corn and beans and squash came in, when you were farming that type of plant, you know, you would have used it for that. And also there's a term that archaeologists use called the Eastern Agricultural Complex. Thousands of years before corn and things were introduced, we have evidence for plant domestication in this area. And I think that people kind of assume that early agriculture, like domestication, began in sort of the fertile crescent. But now it seems like there might have been independent centers for domestication around the world. And so a lot of there's a lot of weedy plants like quinopodium, which is related to quinoa, it's called goose foot, um, marsh elder, sunflower, this type of local native squash. There's lots of little plants I'm forgetting. So there's a plant that's called little barley. You see a lot now, they're just sort of weedy plants, but paleoethnoethnobotanists that studies seeds, you can tell the difference between a wild variety and a variety that's domesticated or becoming domesticated. And so archaeology is really improving our techniques. We can analyze much smaller samples than we ever could. You can look at phytolys, these little silica pieces within plant cell walls, and you can do starch analysis, and like she was saying, residue. You can scrape a little piece off and see plant uh fats essentially. So it'd be really neat to learn more about these uh types of plants and how we can use them to help uh increase the diversity of our of our food today.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, that's exactly where I would love to go next. Talk to me a little bit about that kind of relationship to food today and what you think we can learn from the nuances that are now coming to light from these advances in technology.

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, I think archaeology, specifically paleoethnobotany, has a lot to offer us with extinct species and also just giving us an idea of what types of plants can be domesticated. I would love to start growing like goosefoot and myself picking the best or see if I can start to just domesticate it or something like that. But well, the foods that we eat today, the diversity of them has gotten really low. And uh, I think bananas are like the big case everyone talks about. It's one type of banana. It's you can get the same banana everywhere. And if there's any sort of crop failure or blight that hits a monocrop, yeah. So I think just increasing the diversity of the plants that we eat is beneficial to the local environment that the plants grow, but also to us, and they're healthful.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, absolutely. It's like there's a microbiome in the soil that needs a diversity of life. There's a microbiome in us that needs a diversity of inputs. And then climate-wise, like you mentioned, the monoculture problem, it's not only susceptible to things like blight, it's also kind of terrible in the industrial scale practices that we have instituted for maintaining that sort of system. It doesn't help the diversity of other living things. I could go on about that, I'm sure. Yeah, I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say, right, that the food system is a little bit busted and in need of reform, I would say, towards food sovereignty as much as towards ecological concerns. I know food justice is part of your scholarship. I'd love to hear from both of you, but I imagine starting with you, Kristina, kind of about, I mean, what is food justice and how does it then connect to your work here?

Kristina Gaugler:

For me, food justice is such a large topic. I think that my part in it, I have a just the small part that I kind of contribute to this topic has to do with studying the ways that people cooked in the past and also in the present, like looking at traditional knowledge around the world. That's sort of a small part. But in general, you know, food justice is a social justice topic, looking at social justice through food and access to food and things like that. And then also food sovereignty, you mentioned that. That's not only that everybody has a basic human right to healthy food, but that also people have a right to eat what they want and how they want. And so having access to your cultural or communities or your religions traditional foods, that you also have a right to have access to culturally appropriate food. Learning about the ways that people are cooking around the world and things like that. And in the past, it's just sort of one part of that sort of bigger discussion.

Michael Pisano:

Okay, so these objects are still here. We can still talk about them, but let's let's get into this third collection item that you've brought and then kind of put this together as a picture.

Mackenzie Kimmel:

Collection item three is not a rock. It is, however, rich in minerals and sediments. The collection item includes six discreet pieces, which are all housed within a single 9-inch by 12-inch case shaped like a picture frame. This collection of items is sandwiched between a clear pane and soft white felt. The surface of each piece is covered in faint uniform bands. Some feature lightly engraved patterns in addition to the banding. They range in color from pink to ochre to charcoal gray. Looking closely, you can see many tiny, smooth, light gray flecks embedded throughout. Can you identify collection item three?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

So we brought a couple of pretty decorated rims from uh ceramic vessels that were all found at a site called the McJunkin site, which is an archaeological site that's located in Allegheny County. The site number is 36 AL17, meaning it was the 17th site to be reported to the state. And at that time it would have been reported to us because it would have been when we were the repository for the state museum. Most of the ceramics that you find in this area were meant to be used. We don't find anything purely for aesthetics, really. But as you can see on these, well, people at home can't see. Um, there's a lot of heavily incised decoration on the rims, which is where most of the decoration would be. These are shell-tempered ceramics, meaning that crushed up shell was mixed with the locally dug clay to keep the pots from exploding when being fired because they expand and contract. That was because at this time there were, as you know, lots of freshwater mussels that we don't see as often now, but happily are making a resurgence in a lot of places.

Michael Pisano:

Very excitingly. We just talked about that with Tim Pearce.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Oh, did you? That's amazing. Um, I grew up closer to Erie PA, but near Franklin, Pennsylvania.

Michael Pisano:

Sure.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Along French Creek. And French Creek is filled with freshwater mussels. So I've seen them my whole life, but didn't realize that they didn't exist in the lower Allegheny River or other places.

Michael Pisano:

Yes, they have needed some assistance to come back to these systems, but thankfully, like you said, it's a little bit of a success story in the making.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

So I fell in love with Eastern Woodland ceramics when I was an undergrad at Clarion University and wrote an undergraduate research grant to create them myself. So we're talking about some more experimental archaeology.

Kristina Gaugler:

I love it.

Michael Pisano:

Please tell me more.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

So I went and dug my own clay at a stream bank in Clarion County, closer to the National Forest, because I had been working on some archaeological sites along the Allegheny River near Tyneesta PA. And I wanted to recreate a pot that we had found at a site that I had dug that summer. And the pot itself was in about 800 pieces. So, you know, first thing was to put it back together.

Michael Pisano:

The most infernal Lego available. Very cool.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

I mean, in order to even do this experiment, I had to actually take ceramics classes at the university and ended up almost getting a minor in ceramics from taking so many ceramics classes. So I dug my own clay on out of a stream bank and I camped out with my husky and a few friends and fired it overnight in a in a pit. You have to kind of bake the pottery in like a makeshift oven. So what I used to seal everything in, first you burn the fire as hot as you possibly can for a really long time, and then you let it go out naturally. And when the embers are really hot and covering your pots, it's really awful because you have no idea what's going on with them. So they could all be broken. Um so uh what I did was I I took a bucket and filled it with leaves and water and then used wet leaves to seal in the top of the oven and then slept. And in the morning got to dig out my pots, and none of them were broken when I pulled them out. But um, most of them broke a little bit later because I had made them too thick.

Michael Pisano:

Gotcha. Okay.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

But it was really a fun experiment figuring out what the shape of the pot was.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, can you describe a little bit about what it might have looked like?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Most of the Eastern Woodlands pots are are bag, we call it bag-shaped. It's they have rounded bottoms and rims on the top, and they were mostly cord impaddled, meaning they wrapped a cord around a stick and hit the outside of it. It makes a little pattern, but scientifically speaking, it like strengthens the molecules on the outside of the vessel and so it'll last longer.

Michael Pisano:

I had a um ceramics teacher in college. I I am an art student uh by training.

Kristina Gaugler:

Nice.

Michael Pisano:

Uh and on the first day of ceramics class, he had a um a wooden paddle that was much more kind of like fraternity aesthetic, not great looking, pretty terrifying object, actually. And he uh said, you just have to really connect with your clay. And he uh had a huge, you know, maybe 10-pound mound of clay, and he ran around it just slapping it, slapping it. And he explained that actually this would have some sort of structural integrity impact on the lump that he was uh demonstrating on. But anyway, that just brought that back, and I felt like I had to say it out loud. Thank you.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Um it's true.

Michael Pisano:

Yes.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

You have to really want to work with your hands to make clay pots.

Michael Pisano:

Similarly to this kind of question about you know connecting to your food by doing it maybe the hard way or the scenic, you know, kind of route. We I think consume a lot of objects, we get a lot of objects just with a click at this point, or um there's many ways to procure, but I think it's much less common to make your own. I wonder what you kind of took away from that experience. It sounded like a potent night of camping with your husky next to the embers of your fire, right?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Like I mean, the terror of not knowing if they had cracked or not was really the big it was so exciting to open up because they changed color completely. Like the clay I had dug was gray and my pots were pinkish red um with fire clouds on them.

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, the fire clouds all over the place.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Yeah, you never know what they're gonna look like when they come out. Where the ash falls on it will change the colors on the outside of it.

Michael Pisano:

Um collaborative with the fire.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

It's kind of and then the I mean, once they're when they're used for cooking, that that changes them too. Yeah. Um we don't find a lot of whole pottery in Pennsylvania, mostly because, as Kristina said, everything was cut and most thing most every archaeological site is under what was farmland. So we find them in plow zones spread across really long distances in lots and lots of pieces. It's it's not very often that we find fully intact vessels here.

Michael Pisano:

And you said that there's cooking that's going on in these pots, or are these vessels used for anything else that you speculated?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Storage mostly, especially the big ones. The big ones were probably storage.

Michael Pisano:

And that's storing what kinds of objects?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Like the nuts that we talked about earlier.

Kristina Gaugler:

And in later times, corn.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Yeah.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, awesome. Okay, so we've kind of gone through these things one at a time, but I do want to kind of imagine together, leaning on your kind of maybe back and forth, build build me a little picture of the kind of like scene of life suggested by these this collection of objects.

Kristina Gaugler:

So you're walking in the woods, no, I'm just kidding.

Michael Pisano:

No, come on, let's do it.

Kristina Gaugler:

And you gather a nut.

Michael Pisano:

I play Dungeons and Dragons. We can do this.

Kristina Gaugler:

So do I.

Michael Pisano:

Well.

Kristina Gaugler:

But um, yeah, gathering some nuts, you can crack them with a nutting stone and then potentially parch them over firecracked rock. And there's still recipes today of different types of acorn soups and and mushes and things that you can create at home, but some of these may have been cooked in in the smaller vessels. Or I know sometimes you add nut, ground nut to thicken soups and stews. That kind of also is time dependent. So if people were traveling, especially earlier, the closer you get to, you know, the Pleistocene time period, the Paleo indian period and the Archaic, so people were traveling seasonally to get, you know, there was nuts at this time, there was berries at this time, and fish and shellfish and and things like that. And so those would have been smaller bands like mom, dad, grandparents, kids, things like that. And then the closer you get to now, and especially with the introduction of crops like corn, beans, and squash again, the three sisters, people were becoming a little bit more sedentary, still leaving to hunt and things like that, but staying closer to one place, so having gardens and that type of horticulture. And yeah, so that's sort of generally people are becoming traveling less, traveling less and shorter distances through time.

Michael Pisano:

And let's say you're walking through the woods and you arrive and there's a clearing and you see some structures, maybe. What might the architecture have looked like? What might this kind of area where people settled have looked like?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Oh, that's also dependent on time periods. But if we're if we're sticking around the woodland period, the culture that we refer to as the Monongahela cultural tradition, we don't know what they call themselves. They were more sedentary and they started building palisades, fences around their villages. Um, they built roundhouses instead of long houses.

Kristina Gaugler:

They the Monongahela have a really interesting structure that seems to be unique to them that we sometimes call petal houses. You would have a palisade, a fortified village, and then you'd have the roundhouses around the outside, and then sometimes in the middle you'd have this larger, what we are thinking it might be a communal structure, called a petal house, so it's a roundhouse, but then it has these little structures going around the outside that resemble the petals of a flower. And we think that those might have been used for storage. You sometimes find like caches of seeds or charred nuts or even FCR or pottery. So the I the thought now is that maybe it was a storage structure. So that's sort of what you would see in that type of type of village.

Michael Pisano:

Like what would you want people to know about the people living in our landscape at that time? Like what do you think would maybe surprise them? What gets you excited about imagining and reconstructing some of the details of these times?

Kristina Gaugler:

As a native Pittsburger, I remember in school, you don't really learn very you learn a little bit about some of the generalities of Native American culture and things in history, but I don't think people realize the time depth that people have been living in this part of the world, in Pittsburgh. For example, the Monongahela group, but there are many older, older groups that lived in this area. Just some of the history of this area. People have been living in southwestern Pennsylvania as long as almost anywhere else in the country. There's really old sites around here, so...

Michael Pisano:

That brings us to a question of how long people have been living in this country, in this land.

Kristina Gaugler:

Archaeologically, and now, especially with advancements in DNA, we are we know that people came across the Bering Land Bridge, that the current Native American population is ancestrally connected to Asia. Let's see, they came across the Bering Land Bridge, probably in multiple migrations. There's some evidence that they came, people maybe walked across, but also maybe came down the coast by boat. It's interesting because paleo sites, there's not really an epicenter. They're sort of spread all across the United States in Central and South America. There's not really a line of archaeological sites that we can sort of follow. And one of the oldest sites of human habitation in the entire country is in Pennsylvania at Meadowcroft. And that's very far from the Bering Land Bridge. So that's sort of interesting. So in Pennsylvania, there's evidence between 16 even to 19,000 years ago, evidence for people living in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Michael Pisano:

What about the movement of so you mentioned Three Sisters before, and there's some story of domestication in like Central and South America of corn, for example, and then you see some of that moving across. Is that what story does that tell?

Kristina Gaugler:

As far as I know, there is a type of squash that's native to the eastern woodlands. But corn and beans did sort of develop in Mesoamerica and make its way up here. I think the earliest evidence for corn in Pennsylvania is about 2300 years ago. And then for domesticated beans, I think like the 13th century or around that time in Pennsylvania. So, but you see squash a little bit before that.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

We haven't mentioned this yet, but the soil in Pennsylvania is pretty acidic. So archaeologically speaking, organics don't preserve here very well. So we don't see people's clothing or their footwear, any of those types of things. So it's really hard to try to figure out a lot of stuff when those things are gone completely.

Michael Pisano:

How do you go about filling in those gaps? I mean, is this like something that you're very careful to not do? Is this something that you are looking at other parts of the country for?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Yeah, a lot of both. I think one of the best examples for me is the first time I saw what it looked like to excavate a longhouse or structure. Yeah. Because the you know poles that held the walls up aren't don't really exist anymore, what you're excavating is a different colored cylinder of dirt.

Michael Pisano:

Yes.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Like 12 feet below the ground. So archaeology is very tedious and very time consuming. And because we don't have beautiful aesthetic pots like they do in the southwest, we don't have as many people studying in this area. So I think just for me, getting more people interested in pursuing graduate degrees and working in southwestern or western Pennsylvania would be really exciting.

Michael Pisano:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Amy Covell-Murthy:

I also want to add too that like archaeologically speaking, sometimes we perpetuate the myth that Indigenous people are only in the past. Um and that's really damaging. And it's important to remind everyone that that even though we might not have any federally recognized habitable tribal land in Pennsylvania, that doesn't mean that indigenous communities aren't thriving and surviving and alive, and there are lots of Indigenous people who live in Pittsburgh and around. I always want to make that abundantly clear. And that's something that I think is pervasive in discourse in local public school curriculum, maybe that we only talk about indigenous people of the past and not what's happening now.

Michael Pisano:

I'm curious about more broadly in terms of policy, culture, conservation, science, right? These things you engage with, what we can learn from this natural history that you've brought today about interacting with the non-human world, with food, the land, the water, you know, the whole thing. What do you think about moving forward as good stewards and how that's informed by this sort of scholarship?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

I think it all comes back to collaboration and including Indigenous voice. That's the only way to know what you have in your backyard and to be able to use your resources. But also, we need to maintain a platform for giving Indigenous communities sovereignty over their land and things. I think there's a lot of good projects going on. There's a rematriation project at the University of Michigan where they're sharing uh their seed collection with Indigenous communities and they're they're growing uh native gardens. In some native cultures, seeds are relatives, and the fact that they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing was extremely offensive and bad. So I think there's a lot of stuff, and and like I said, starting with collaboration and education, I guess we can all work better.

Kristina Gaugler:

Yeah, I think trying to take guidance from local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, and traditional knowledge can help us think of new ways to increase plant diversity and to learn about different methods for farming and agriculture, and just try to incorporate some of those lessons into the into the way that we we eat and do our and our food systems locally. There are people who and books that I would recommend. I love Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. That's a great book. And also there's a culinary historian named Michael Twiddy who wrote this book called The Cooking Gene. That's a really great book.

Michael Pisano:

Both of those are fantastic recommendations that I second heartily. Is there any last thoughts that you you hope people would, you know, when the next time they come into the museum and look at artifacts from the past cultures that inhabited this land?

Amy Covell-Murthy:

Remember that most of those cultures are not in the past, although they still exist.

Michael Pisano:

Approximately 1.4 million thanks to Amy and Kristina for inviting us into the Carnegie's Human Culture Collections, and to the amazing items therein for inspiring better understanding and collaborations towards better futures. We Are Nature is produced by Nicole Heller and Sloan MacRae. It's recorded at Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Matt Unger and Garrick Schmidt. DJ Thermos makes the music, Mackenzie Kimmel describes the collection items, and Garrick Schmidt and Michael Pisano, that's me, edit the podcast. Thanks for listening.