Finding Clues
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.
Meet the Scientist: Erin Baxter
Erin Baxter has worked in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Turkey, Bolivia, Ireland, and Tunisia, but has returned (quite happily) to Denver and the American Southwest where guinea pig and cat are not on the menu. She’s super interested in using old museum collections (museums have the best stuff) to answer questions about the ancient past. In her other life, she is an instructor of archaeology at CU-Boulder and teaches courses on Southwestern archaeology, method and theory, human prehistory and her personal favorite, the archaeology of death. Currently she’s working on projects related to cannibalism, ancient witchcraft, the superlative architecture from Aztec Ruins, the Toriette Lakes Great Kiva, Magic Mountain, and W.S. Ranch.
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Interview Excerpt - Finding Collaboration and Trust Uncovering the Past
We talk about uncovering mysteries of the past, with the newest curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Erin Baxter.
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 archeology. Linguistics is the study of language, cultural Anthropology is the study of living groups of people who are not like ourselves, biological Anthropology is the study of the body and how it evolved, and archeology is the things that people have left behind.
Science Moab: Your research includes the interpretation of artifacts and architecture and how these analyses shed light on the development of social and political organization in order to reconstruct the deep history of Pueblo society. I understand that one of your personal favorite topics is death, or rather, the archeology of death.
Baxter: I don’t love death, but I do think that the physical body of an ancient person is a gift. That’s because a body is a time capsule of the past. They lived in that space, and that time, and their bony bodies are manifestations of what was there. So not only can you learn about sex, we learn height, we can learn general health…if they were injured or maybe had a disease…all of those sometimes 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 into migration patterns and occupation, 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: Well, we are fundamentally science based. So because of that, we asked research questions. When we read about ancient people, Pueblo people who are the descendants of modern day Hopis, Zunis, and 23 living tribes in New Mexico and Arizona and others, we read about sort of the egalitarian nature of their current living, but there’s not a lot of hierarchy. What if they weren’t always this way? We hypothesize this because we can see hierarchy in the archaeological record. People who are better off are physically healthier…they’re taller, they have access to better foods, better proteins…they tend to live in bigger houses, and they tend to be buried with nicer things. So those are sort of three really simple ways of doing it. There’s other ways to get at these sorts of questions, but if you look at a place like Chaco Canyon, which has 12 of these great houses, five stories, 800 or more rooms. Pueblo Bonito was the biggest building in the United States until about the 1880s when a 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 stuff there. So people lived in big houses that weren’t occupied. 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 wanted to get at, for instance, the hierarchy of the ancient past… was there one, is it testable? Because I think, in our western, white sort of notion, we see a display in a museum of a Native American community, its stagnation without vibrancy and color to it, because as they are now is how they always have been. They have been the myth of this noble group of humans who haven’t changed much over the time. I think there are histories with hierarchies, kings and queens, witchcraft, and death and violence and unpleasant things. Unpleasant things, unfortunately, are the ones that show up in the archaeological record, but if you see those unpleasant things, and you imagine the really lovely things that might have come on the other side of that, you see a vibrancy of history that might have been. So I thought, by studying the hierarchies and the power structures of ancient groups of people, you might actually return a level of what a Westerner would call history, which we’ve whitewashed for a variety of reasons… to colonize, to subjugate. I think I have arguments to be made for it, 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. I am not of the position or internal to various groups of tribal representatives to be able to say that so it’s science with a level of 20 and 21st century complexity that comes from our colonial past. It’s going to take relationship building and I think it’s going to be really interesting to publish on this one day when it’s okay and 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.
