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.”
