My interest in archaeological science grew out of a love of both the arts and the sciences. When I was in high school, I was equally excited by experiments and writing lab reports for IB Chemistry and learning how to deconstruct musical pieces from anywhere around the world in IB Music. I had both of these subjects, and others, in mind when I was entering university. After my third year of undergraduate study, I participated at an archaeological field school in Jordan and learned about the variety of scientific tools that archaeologists use to answer questions about our human past. It was then that the penny dropped, and I realised I found a career path that would allow me to put my creative and my analytical skillsets to use while also continuing to learn about the diversity of human cultures around the world.

As an archaeological scientist, I dive into challenges of how to extract biomolecular data from archaeological material and how to imagine the lives of real people who lived in the past. In a recent study, I collaborated with archaeologists from Denmark and Iran, biologists from Germany, geochemists from Australia, and a science illustrator from Canada to reconstruct the effort involved in organising feasting activities in the Zagros Mountains during the Early Neolithic. The findings [‘Transport of animals underpinned ritual feasting at the onset of the Neolithic in southwestern Asia’] and the illustration [‘Making cutting-edge archaeological science accessible to others’] bring us closer to understanding just what it meant for the ancient communities to come together for social feasting and celebrate their regional connectivities.

My favourite part of being an archaeological scientist is guiding students to build bridges between creative and analytical skillsets. In my class ‘Scientific Dating in Archaeology and Paleoenvironmental Studies’, my students demonstrate learning across a variety of formats. They build chronological models to test a hypothesis about the movement of people across Europe during the Palaeolithic. They write creative narratives about a scientific dating technique to play a game modelled on the BBC Radio show The Unbelievable Truth; except our version is called The Unbelievable Truths of Scientific Dating. Finally, they choose a creative format to synthesise the main concepts they learned throughout the whole semester. In the past, students have made laminated notebooks to take into the field, drawn comic strips and storyboards, and wrote letters to family members to explain how each technique works. One student even made a web-based dating app that someone can use to decide which technique should be applied and when.

My hope is to create a learning environment where skills across the arts and sciences are valued and where students get to experiment with learning strategies they may not have tried out before. But archaeological science is not the only arena where we can do this, as the recent passing of Tom Lehrer, reminds us. 

How do you build bridges between the arts and the sciences?

Video Transcript: 

When I was young, I couldn't decide if I wanted to become a scientist or if I would want to go into humanities. 
On the one hand, I really liked the idea of working in a laboratory and making discoveries about the world under a microscope. 
But on the other hand, I was fascinated by the diversity of human cultures, and wanted to learn more about how people live in different parts of the world. 
Then at the age of 19, I found out that I could do both –– by going into the field of archaeological science.
 
As an archaeological scientist, I study the teeth of animals that came into contact with ancient societies. 
I use techniques from biology and geochemistry to look at the microscopic structure of teeth and extract information about the animals’ lives, and the types of environments in which they lived. 
 
In this horse tooth, we can see weekly growth patterns that formed in the first year of the animal’s life. 
The chemical composition embedded in these growth patterns holds information about what the animal was eating and how its life may have been impacted by decisions that people in the past made.

Video credit: Nic Veers/Australian National University and Stephen Noce.