 |
BONING UP: DeGusta and doctoral
students Jason Lewis and Stephanie Melillo examine
animal remains found on campus. Faculty work on six
digs worldwide. |
Rod Searcey |
Dig up any square meter on an
archaeological excavation, and you’re
likely to find bones, ceramic and stone-tool fragments, textiles—and
dirt. Figuring out what all those pieces mean takes a village
of scholars.
“No one person knows enough,” says David DeGusta,
assistant professor of anthropological sciences. “Gail
Mahood [professor of geological and environmental sciences]
could look at the soil and tell you something about the
conditions under which the site was formed. [Assistant professor
of anthropological sciences] Ian Robertson could look at obsidian
instruments; [professor of cultural and social anthropology]
Ian Hodder would know about the ceramics; and I could look
at the bones and tell you whether an animal had been butchered
or had died naturally.”
Archaeology is more interdisciplinary
bridge than discipline, spanning the humanities, arts,
earth sciences, genetics and biological sciences. “The
way we feel here is that archaeology is a global discipline,
with the humanities and sciences completely interlocked,” says
Ian Morris, professor of classics and history, and past
director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. “No single
approach is going to give us answers.”
Today’s
classicists are still expected to know Greek and Latin,
but they’re also up to speed on advanced statistics
and mitochondrial DNA. As faculty and students begin their
second year in the renovated archaeology center, which
has the rock walls and sloping passages of an underground
dig, they’re having the kind of hallway conversations
that Stanford administrators dream of. “On other campuses,
geneticists wouldn’t recognize the art historians if
they fell over them,” Morris says. “But we’re
in the same building, and it makes for a much more interesting
mix.”
Tucked away in one huge room, with blinds that
are always drawn, is the center’s osteology laboratory,
or bone room. DeGusta has spent the past three years bringing
together all of Stanford’s once-scattered collections
of human and nonhuman skeletal remains, and arranging them
on padded trays in climate-controlled cases. They’re
protected for ethical as well as practical reasons.
“Human remains have the potential to evoke emotional
reactions,” DeGusta says. “We don’t give
public tours; there are no human bones on display; and everyone
who uses the lab has to sign a series of rules. We’re
very careful to educate students about treating bones respectfully.” Once
they’re up to speed, DeGusta’s undergraduate and
graduate students in human osteology put in long hours sorting
cervical vertebrae and molars as they learn the 206 bones and
32 teeth in the human skeleton.
“Bioarchaeology” is the term researchers use to
describe the process of looking at skeletal remains to
test their hypotheses and answer questions about prehistoric
behavior. DeGusta’s work at the site of Navatu, Fiji,
for example, showed that human remains were treated the same
way the remains of food animals were treated. The conclusion:
a past culture practiced cannibalism. Similarly, DeGusta can
pick up a femur of a howler monkey and point to a naturally
healed fracture. Or make calls about an individual’s
age at death, sex, height, illnesses and general diet, based
on skeletal remains.
Faculty at the archaeology center work
on digs in Monte Polizzo, Sicily; Catalhoyuk, Turkey; Chavin
de Huantar, Peru; the Presidio of San Francisco; and the
Stanford mansion on campus. And, says DeGusta, “most
archaeological excavations have an osteologist with them,
or wish they did.” |
