By Science Moab, originally published on Soundcloud and with KZMU and the Moab Sun News
From the perspective of an archaeologist, the physical body of an ancient person is a gift because a body is a time capsule of the past. They lived in that space and that time, and their bodies are manifestations of what was there. We talk with archaeologist Erin Baxter, teacher and Curator of Anthropology at Denver Museum of Nature and Science, about her work unraveling the ancient southwest culture and her fascination with the archaeology of death.
Science Moab: What is the relationship between archaeology and anthropology?
Baxter: It depends on where you study anthropology. If you study it in Europe, you actually major in archaeology. If you study it in the United States, you study anthropology with sub-disciplines. So if you can imagine a big umbrella that is anthropology, under that fits four different fields: linguistics, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. Linguistics is the study of language, cultural anthropology is the study of living groups of people, biological anthropology is the study of the body and how it evolved, and archaeology is the things that people have left behind.
Science Moab: What part of the interactions of these sciences do you enjoy most?
Baxter: I love the archeology bit – that’s what got me into it. It’s outside, it’s teamwork, it’s problem solving, it’s mystery-finding, and it’s interactive. As I’ve gotten into Southwest archaeology I’ve realized that archaeology doesn’t stand alone.
I’m particularly interested in the practice of ancient burial practices, and… there’s a long history of archaeologists behaving not as we should with human remains. But what I’ve learned is that I work with biological anthropologists who study the body, and then I [also] work with Indigenous descendant communities, and their wishes and their own histories and oral histories about how ancient people lived. We can’t stay in our bubbles. We’re still learning to be the best archaeologists we can be. We’re not great at it yet, but we are miles better than I think we were 100 years ago. So it’s a learning process every day and it’s relationship building.
Science Moab: Tell us about your research on death.
Baxter: I don’t love death, but… a body is a time capsule of the past: [that person] lived in that time and their bodies are manifestations of what was there. So not only can you learn sex, we can learn about height, we can learn general health, if they were injured or maybe had a disease—all of those are written in the bones. We can also now learn more things and this is where science is really fascinating. DNA studies give us hugely important information about migration patterns, occupations, and relationships of individuals across time and space.
Science Moab: So you’re trying to uncover clues and the mystery of how these ancient people lived. How do you go about doing that, scientifically? What are you looking for?
Baxter: My research question when I was in school was [about] how ancient people in the US Southwest lived. You go to…where many descendant communities live to this day… Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and 23 living tribes in New Mexico and Arizona and others…and you see [Ancestral Puebloan sites like] Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon or Wupatki and you sort of can’t imagine what it was like.
I wanted to get at the hierarchy of the ancient past… was there one, is it testable?… We can see hierarchy in the archaeological record. People who are better off are physically healthier, they’re taller since they have access to better foods, better proteins. They tend to live in bigger houses, and they tend to be buried with nicer things. Those are three really simple ways of [looking at the question].
There are other ways to approach these questions. If you look at a place like Chaco Canyon, which has 12 buildings called great houses of five stories, [with many hundreds of] rooms—one great house, Pueblo Bonito, was the biggest building in the United States until about the 1880s when a [larger] tenement was built in New York City. You would think that might be a place where lots of people lived, but we don’t see a lot of trash, or burials, or other stuff there. So people living in big houses that [don’t show those signs of occupation]…who are those people? The hypothesis was that those are people who are in charge of things who are important for a variety of reasons.
I think in our Western, white nation, when we see museum displays about Native American communities, there is stagnation without vibrancy and color. There has been the myth of stasis—a myth of a group of humans who haven’t changed much over time. But yet there are histories with hierarchies, kings and queens, witchcraft, death and violence and unpleasant things. Unpleasant things, unfortunately, are the ones that [tend to] show up in the archaeological record. But, with those unpleasant things, you imagine the really lovely things that might have come on the other side of that. You can see the vibrancy of history.
I thought, by studying the hierarchies and the power structures of ancient groups of people, you might actually [be able to] return a [piece] of what a Westerner would call ‘history,’ which we’ve whitewashed for a variety of reasons… to colonize, to subjugate. But you have to do that not as a white person, you have to do that as a collaborator. And so these studies become complicated.
I think I have arguments to be made for [a record of hierarchy in these ancient societies], but my arguments come from historical burial data found by people who dug this 100 years ago…white archaeologists, largely from the East Coast…and it’s not okay to talk about that [because] I am not of the position or internal to various groups of tribal representatives to be able to say that. So, it’s science, but it’s science with a level of 20th and 21st-century complexity that comes from our colonial past. In the post-colonial world, where do we [white archaeologists] fit in?
It’s going to take relationship building, and I think it’s going to be interesting to publish on this [question] one day when trust has been rebuilt. I think archaeologists in the 21st century are making great strides to do that because we’ve got a lot to make up for.
Science Moab is a nonprofit dedicated to engaging community members and visitors with the science happening in Southeast Utah and the Colorado Plateau. To learn more and listen to the rest of Tim Graham’s interview, visit www.sciencemoab.org/radio. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Watch Tim Graham explore pothole ecosystems with Discover Moab!
Have a press release or story you’d like to see published on Discover Moab? Email asst. marketing director Alison Harford at aharford@discovermoab.com.
A pothole shrimp, captured by Mark Finley in Moab.
Potholes abound on the Colorado Plateau — and not the ones associated with road work. Rather, natural potholes are depressions that occur primarily in sandstone. These depressions house ephemeral pools of water and tiny, unique ecosystems. In this episode, Science Moab speaks with biologist and ecologist Tim Graham about these fleeting environments and the organisms that have evolved to live in them.
Science Moab: So what’s happening inside potholes?
Graham: Potholes are small depressions in rock that form temporary aquatic environments. Many have dark biofilms, which are probably formed by a community of cryptobiotic algae and cyanobacteria.
Science Moab: How do these potholes support living organisms when they are prone to drying out?
Graham: Organisms living in those potholes have three main strategies to survive dry periods. Most insects and amphibians escape the pool when it starts to dry up. That creates some hazard, because the organisms have to reach adulthood before they’re capable of leaving the pool. If the pool dries out before a tadpole can metamorphose into an adult, the tadpole will die.
The next strategy is called the “tupperware” strategy. Organisms seal their surface from water loss and stay wet inside. It’s a good strategy for the short term, because as soon as water falls back into the pool, they can become active within seconds. But it’s really tough to be completely waterproof if you’re trying to remain alive. It works for a few months, maybe up to a year. If you’re dry longer than that, chances are that that strategy will fail and you’ll die.
The third strategy is the one I find most interesting and most bizarre. It’s often referred to as cryptobiosis. “Crypto” means hidden, and “biosis” means life. Organisms stay alive, but you can’t measure that they’re alive because the amounts of heat and gas released are so small. These organisms can lose up to 92% of the water in their cells and remain alive.
The organisms in the big puddles that use this are the eggs of crustaceans: fairy shrimp, tadpole shrimp, and clam shrimp. The egg makes a sugar called trehalose. There are parts of the trehalose sugar structure that mimic a water molecule. So as the egg dries out, trehalose molecules are plugged in where the water molecules would be. Then, when water comes back in, the water molecules replace the trehalose.
Science Moab: How else have pothole species evolved to survive in this limited habitat?
Graham: We all know the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” But the pothole critters are stuck in one basket. Mark Twain had a different perspective: “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket,” he said. The way these critters “watch” their basket is by laying eggs with different kinds of hatching criteria. Crustaceans will produce eggs that hatch after one water filling, or after two or three. They’re in the same physical basket, but they’re in different response baskets.
Science Moab: How do humans impact these potholes by running over or in them?
Graham: Dry potholes get a physical crust on the surface. The crust is resistant to erosion by wind, so anything that breaks that crust is going to make sediment susceptible to being eroded out of the pothole, including organisms waiting for the next rain event.
In the wet potholes I’ve been studying in the Sand Flats area, I’ll be up there and the pools look like they’re doing fine. They’ve got tadpole shrimp and fairy shrimp and maybe some insects. I’ll come back a few days later, and there will be particular pools that are very cloudy. I found a pair of mountain bike gloves sitting next to a cloudy pothole. Chances are some mountain biker decided to take a dip.
These depressions can be quite small. But if you look around, there are a plethora of organisms in there. That’s an ecosystem, and if you walk on it, ride your bike on it, drive on it, then you will wear that system down and kill those organisms. So try to stay out of those potholes.
People who have studied alpine vegetation know the term “belly plant,” where the plant is so short that you have to lay your belly to study it. That’s why I like studying potholes: they’re belly ecosystems.
Science Moab is a nonprofit dedicated to engaging community members and visitors with the science happening in Southeast Utah and the Colorado Plateau. To learn more and listen to the rest of Tim Graham’s interview, visit www.sciencemoab.org/radio. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Watch Tim Graham explore pothole ecosystems with Discover Moab!
Have a press release or story you’d like to see published on Discover Moab? Email asst. marketing director Alison Harford at aharford@discovermoab.com.
A dinosaur track at the Mill Creek dinosaur tracksite.
The world that existed when dinosaurs roamed the Moab area was vastly different than the world today. Science Moab talked with Dr. John Foster about what this region was like 150 million years ago during the late Jurassic period, when a geologic layer called the Morrison Formation was being deposited.
Foster is a paleontologist and former director of the Moab Museum. His work involves excavating the oldest known dinosaur skeleton, right here in Moab.
Science Moab: Tell us about the geologic layer you study called the Morrison Formation.
Foster: Most of the really famous dinosaurs were found in the Morrison Formation starting back in the 1870s, like Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus and Brachiosaurus, which was actually first found in what is now Grand Junction. So it’s a pretty well-known formation for dinosaurs. At that time, none of the mountains were here. What is now the Rocky Mountain region was essentially flat. So the whole region that we see now, the Colorado Plateau, all the canyons, the mountains of the Rockies, all that was basically just a big flat floodplain. So it was a very different world.
Science Moab: When was the Morrison Formation being deposited?
Foster: Roughly 100 and 50 million years ago. The Morrison represents a time that’s about 7 million years long. It’s late Jurassic, but we’re lucky in that there were mountains off to the West that had a lot of volcanoes in them. That means they pumped a lot of ash into the mudstones in the floodplain and it’s because of those ashes that we can get the dates on how old the rock is.
Science Moab: What was Moab like 100 to 50 million years ago?
Foster: We’d be probably at least 100 miles or so from the mountains. There would have been rivers flowing through this area and there were also a lot of wetlands. The environment would have been not quite a rainforest or anything like that, but it was certainly a lot wetter than it is today. We have a plant study site down by Blanding that we’ve been working, and one that was found about 25 years ago down by Bluff, that show abundant ginkgoes and ferns and conifer wood and a number of different plants that are a lot more wet-adapted than plants we see now.
Science Moab: And what were the animals like?
Foster: There were a lot of animals. I think they were probably about 20 to 25 different types of dinosaurs at least. There was a diversity of the big long neck, long tail guys, some of which have been found near Moab. Among non-dinosaurs, there was everything: fish and frogs and salamanders, turtles, lizards, crocodiles, pterosaurs and about as many species of small mammals as there are dinosaurs. In total, there were a little over 100 different species of vertebrates known from the Morrison Formation. And then, of course, there are snails and clams and crayfish and other invertebrates.
Science Moab: So if we were standing right here during the Jurassic, we would be surrounded by a lot of life?
Foster: Yes, there’s a good chance we’d be standing in the mud with a lot of conifers around, a lot of little burrowing water-dwelling animals, and few dinosaurs probably in the distance. The neat thing about a lot of animals that we’ve been finding recently is that we thought they were all just little herbivores that scurried around at night, but their ecologies were not that simple. In fact, many of them turn out to be quite similar to animals around today.
Science Moab: What does it feel like to find a fossil?
Foster: Sometimes you actually do have to stop and remind yourself that this thing has not seen the light of the sun for 100 or 50 million years and you just exposed it. You forget that sometimes. But of course, every once in a while you find something really rare that shocks you. And you get really excited about that.
Science Moab: What value do you find in the study of paleontology?
Foster: I think the biggest thing is understanding the way past ecosystems function. As jealous as we get of modern biologists being able to actually see these things interacting, I think the value is in the long-term perspective on ecosystems: How they react to change and how the animals and plants really can influence the physical environment as well. Providing that long-term input on biology, in general, is probably the most important part of it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To learn more about Science Moab and listen to the rest of John Foster’s interview, visit www.sciencemoab.org/where-dinosaurs-roamed. You can also find this interview on KZMU and in the Moab Sun News.
Have a press release or story you’d like to see published on Discover Moab? Email asst. marketing director Alison Harford at aharford@discovermoab.com.
Photo by Kegen Benson, BLM Wildlife Biologist.
Media Contacts:
JD Mallory – BLM Utah, jmallory@blm.gov, 801-539-4089
Robyn Macduff – RINS, rmacduff@rins.org, 801-554-0807
For immediate release
Need an excuse to spend more time in Moab this year? The Bureau of Land Management’s Utah State Office is calling for community involvement in the Raptor Inventory Nest Survey (RINS), a unique opportunity to participate in a critical citizen science project focused on the state’s raptors, including eagles, hawks, falcons, osprey, and owls.
Through the RINS programs, citizens help collect data on these birds of prey, including identifying their presence and nesting behaviors. The data collected is crucial for the management and protection of these species in Utah.
Volunteers for this project do not need a scientific background. The program is open to anyone with a love for Utah’s natural landscapes, especially remote areas, and a commitment to conserving raptors. The key requirement is a willingness to engage in this important environmental initiative.
Training workshops for prospective volunteers are scheduled for February and March. These sessions will provide the necessary skills for identifying raptor nests and collecting vital data. Participants are encouraged to have their own binoculars, GPS unit, digital camera, and an active email address. The commitment involves regular monitoring visits to an assigned area from March through July.
For more information on the workshop locations, timings, and training details, interested individuals are encouraged to contact RINS at 801-554-0807 or via email at info@rins.org. Additional information about the Raptor Inventory Nest Survey can be found at
http://rins.org/.
Have a press release or story you’d like to see published on Discover Moab? Email asst. marketing director Alison Harford at aharford@discovermoab.com.
