Welcome to Ask a Professor, our series that offers an insider’s view of life in academia. This month we interviewed Amy V. Margaris, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College. Margaris is an anthropological archaeologist whose fieldwork has taken her to such destinations as Turkey, Israel, Denmark, the US Southwest, and Alaska. Her primary areas of study are hunter-gather societies, technological change, and human-material interactions most broadly. Her recent projects emphasize the collaborative nature of archaeology and show the value of including community members and other specialists outside the academy in research and curation teams. Currently, she’s researching the Oberlin College Ethnographic Collection and re-connecting its contents with the original communities from which the items were gathered, from Alaska to Micronesia. Her work with the collections supports a hands-on approach to learning: Working with objects from campus collections, students learn current cataloging and metadata standards, explore evolving research methods, and help reconnect cultural objects with their original Indigenous communities. Margaris is also the NAGPRA coordinator for Oberlin College, meaning she’s working to return Native American ancestral remains and sacred items back to tribes. Some of these experiences are documented in her blog, and she’s slowly writing a book about them.
What’s something most people don’t know about your field?
That archaeology is for everyone. Indiana Jones has incredible staying power in the American imagination, and while most people probably recognize that the whip-wielding treasure-hunter isn’t a realistic portrayal of a modern archaeologist, it’s clear we need more realistic role models to demonstrate for the public what an archaeologist really does and who can be one. An archaeologist’s job is to reconstruct, to the best of our ability, a past that we will never directly observe, so it’s inevitable that some of our own background and experiences slip into our interpretations. Having people with a variety of backgrounds work together on a project ups the likelihood that our interpretations are accurate. To do our best science, archaeology really needs a diverse group of practitioners.
What’s the best discovery you’ve made in your research?
Some years ago, I helped direct a community archaeology project sponsored by the Alutiiq Museum, a tribal museum in Kodiak, Alaska. At an 1800s-era site called Mikt’sqaq Angayuk (Alutiiq/Sugpiaq for “Little Friend”) our team uncovered the remains of a traditional Alutiiq style sod house where we believe a handful of Native Alutiiq men were forced to work for the colonizing Russian-American Company, fishing for cod. When we pieced together the broken ceramic bits they resolved into bowls, cups, and saucers—a sort of mess kit for each worker—that were left behind when the site was abandoned. We also found scores of homemade lead bird shot scattered around the central hearth, along with bird bone refuse, and other evidence that the conscripts were hunting, as well as fishing. Whether they were doing so with consent from their Russian overseer or on the sly, we don’t know!
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Homo sapiens Regularly Crossed the Pyrenees During the Ice Age
Do you have a favorite classroom moment?
I won’t lie: It involves chicken wings. My introductory archaeology students try their hand at experimental archaeology by attempting to replicate a prehistoric bone awl (piercing tool). We use chicken wing bones which my family and I have munched and carefully cleaned the night before in our annual “Wing Night for Science.” Attempting to make sharp, functional awls is mostly a lesson in humility—the students are novices, and anyway roasted chicken bones are very poorly suited for the task (in fact, prehistoric tool makers used a variety of skeletal remains to make awls; the choice between deer antler and bird bone in subarctic Alaska, for instance, came down to context). But we have a lot of fun trying different techniques, using our hands as well as brains to experiment and learn.
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What’s the next big thing in your field?
I wish a crystal ball could predict the effects of AI on my discipline. Archaeologists aren’t technophobes; we use techniques like mass spectrometry and remote sensing in abundance, but ultimately we’re people studying people. Will AI somehow change all this? Will my students have jobs? How would ChatGPT respond to these questions?
What’s on your bedside table? What’s your next read?
A stack of mystery novels. The series by the late Dutch writer Janwillem van de Wetering is among my favorites. Maybe archaeologists and detectives are not so different.
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