00:00.44 alifeinruins Welcome back to episode 1 62 of a life in ruins podcast I'm here with Dr Charles Koig um and we had finished the last segment kind of talking about your experiences that you got from field school and what what kind of happened next after field school and in your career because yeah. I I know but everyone else doesn't know that you you continued on in um into your career. So like what was the next kind of step after that. 00:25.43 Charles Yeah, so after after I did the field school I came back to came back to Colorado and and ah immediately went fish to salmon flies on the Colorado um, but during that time even though I was you know I had had so much fun. At field school and even though I'm having incredible fun catching fish I realized that my passion was archaeology and it wasn't I love to fish. Don't get me wrong, but it's just like that wasn't providing me as much fulfillment as archaeology did so for the last. You know I went back to school in the fall I applied for grad school Texas State University because there was a new professor that was starting there Steve Black in Fall Two thousand and Eight who was going to start a research program focused in West Texas where the rock art field school was hosted at the same time schumma also offered me an internship. Would start immediately after I graduated so I accepted my master's program at at Texas state deferred for a year was able to work at schumle for a year getting more experience designing designing research programs designing different types of recording forms running field projects. Um, all focused on rock art and then after I finished that year I went to Texas tape for my masters. 01:45.46 alifeinruins That's cool and it sounds like you got a lot of experience and would you kind of recommend people if if if they want more experience or if they want to go to grad school A deferring is always kind of an option. Would you recommend something like that if possible. 02:00.19 Charles Yeah, absolutely and I I still tell students that today they come and ask me that opinion I think it's just speaking from my own experience I was an idiot like I didn't I so so I still barely know how to write and cummings stereed out of undergrad where my papers were total trash. 02:09.96 alifeinruins Me too man me too. 02:20.80 Charles You know, 5 to 7 pages of just utter bs and then going straight into a master's program I would have failed like I couldn't I was incapable of doing that but having that year to just kind of like get a little. Get more experience and and understand like how do you actually do a research design. How maybe get a little bit better with writing I certainly did not get I did get a lot of exposure writing in that year. Um, but just get more experience how to ask like different types of questions that maybe be a little bit more new nuanced than if you. Didn't have that that background to to understand like oh this question is really really simple and basic. But I can get to the next level of asking something that might get a little bit more interesting and have a little bit little bit more depth to it. 03:06.96 alifeinruins And it seems like that's recommended and we've talked about this on the podcast that we say you can go into crm but it sound it also sounds like if you go to internships and other things you might get more experience I think you need a little bit of both. You need like the dirt archeology like you're mentioning. But you also need like. Also mentioning you that theoretical um writing thinking about the past kind of experience as well. And if I think sounds like internships and other things like that can give you a little bit of both in that sense. 03:39.76 Charles Yeah, no I think and especially right now with all the Crm jobs like if you're coming stered out of undergrad and you can get into ah like a summer gig doing doing survey and shovel tests um in a place you really want to be that'd be awesome and then for the next. Like go into the winter months if you can help write reports or help fill out site forms just to kind of get both sides of that. Um, but certainly just experience. However, paid paid paid paid experience. However, you can get it. 04:06.71 alifeinruins Paid. Yeah I mean unpaid if it's really good. But yeah, if you get a publication at the end of it or something like that. Um. 04:15.77 Charles Right? But I yeah and I was really fortunate that internship. It didn't pay a lot but it paid my it paid me to live so I wasn't saving money but I wasn't um I certainly wasn't starving to death. 04:33.31 alifeinruins Would you? Ah and I I think I know the answer this but would you recommend Texas state or as a as a place to go um in terms of the city and the archeology etc. 04:45.24 Charles Yeah I mean if you've never been to San Marcus Texas and it is in ah a beautiful place. The Sandmarkcus River runs right through there. It's a great college town. Um, it's. 45 minutes from Austin it's 45 minutes from San Antonio so you have this incredible blending of cultures. Incredible food and the anthropology department is really great. Um, they have some incredible faculty in archaeology and bio. Ah, archeology and forensic anthropology and primatology. They're doing some incredible work down there. Um, so yeah, like Texas state like I got my I got my masters there. Um, my wife got her masters there. We have tons of friends that have been in the Texas state program and or are in the Texas state program. So it's yeah, it's a it's a great place like I certainly don't regret I don't regret coming to Wyoming at all for my ph d um, but right when i'm. Right? when I moved up here to start my ph D Wyoming in 2019 Texas state had just started ph d program this year before 2018 I think or maybe I think it was fall 2018 and the reason the main reason I came up here was to get different experiences. 06:03.37 Charles You know at Texas um, like I said my my my master's advisor Steve Black and who was still at Texas state at the time he's since retired but I had gotten some incredible um mentorship from Steve I got some incredible mentorship for other folks in the department. Um. But I wasn't necessarily the ph d program. There wasn't necessarily going to challenge me in the ways I needed to be challenged just to think about earth ovens and and hot ra cooking. Ah which is the focus of my dissertation in ways that I needed to be challenged and so that's that was what brought me to Wyoming ah working with Todd Servel working with Bob Kelly um and the rest of the faculty and and challenging how ah how I'm thinking about things and and even though like I don't necessarily I always agree about like ah human behavioral ecology and and return rates and all those things it is a really useful way of looking at the past. 06:58.33 alifeinruins So did you write your um thesis on herths. 07:00.68 Charles Yeah, so this has been I mean seriously like I as at my field school is when I built my first earth oven and there's a huge shoutout that has to go to 2 people Phil darring and Jack Johnson and Phil is an established archeologist who's done a ton of earth oven research. Um, her research over the past. Oh 50 years um he did his. He did his master's at Texas a Texas a and m university in the 70 s he's a paleoethobotanist but Jack Johnson is ah is a little bit younger. He's a little bit older than than you and I are but he's. 1 of the most enthusiastic people that you'll ever meet in your life and ah that his excitement Jack's excitement and it was like Jack's excitement and knowledge and Phil's knowledge and experience if those if those 2 things it just made a great pairing to get a 22 year old super pumped about. Building big fires and heating up rocks and cooking plants and so I met some so after after I did that earth oven in field school I knew that's what I wanted to do I knew that's what I wanted to do for my masters and the funny thing was I told Steve this ahead of time. Um, via an email and I went down for my visit. This would have been I think ah Thanksgiving or Christmas sometime around there of fall of 2008 and I walk into Steve's office and he had just started so he was looking back now I know that he was frazzled and he just like. 08:34.84 Charles And I was like oh I really want to look at burned rock bidens as as as a lot of Texas archaeologists and other folks call these different types of site types and he looks at me and he leans back and he grabs this book off his shelf and he goes and he slaps it on my laugh knees. What the fuck else. Are you going to learn about sorry. And he says what the hell else are you going to learn about earth ovens of Burn Rock minzy I haven't already written down here and I was just as I was just like oh my god what am I doing like I want to I want to learn something about these and and my advisor I'm I'm looking to work with is like basically you're an idiot how you ask these types of questions. Um, and so what I did was um, there's some incredible landowners Rick and Mary Rylander and they have a big ranch on the Devil's river and so I want and they have some incredible rock art and that's how I got to know Rick and Mary was recording rock art on their property. And I was like I'd really like to do a survey of your ranch and and look for sites and I had a vague idea of like I wanted to look at settlement patterns. How how vague is that just looking at how sites are distributed on the landscape and so I did that and I I spent you know? ah. 09:48.30 Charles I don't know twelve weeks or fifteen weeks surveying that ranch over the summer and and into the next fall and um and yeah looked at looked at how those specific sites so these burned rock middens what they are on the landscape are massive piles of burned and fire cracked rock. And so if you can imagine if you've been to a campfire and there's a ring a rock ring around the campfire those rocks get get a little red or maybe carbon stained in black and if they're in the directly in the fire. They'll start to fracture and so what happens at these burn Rocke Hidden sites is people intentionally use rocks as. Thermal heating elements for cooking foods underground and basically what they do is they would dig a pit in the ground into that pit you put a bunch of wood and on top of the wood you put a bunch of rocks and then you light it on fire and as that wood burns those rocks are going to heat up. They might fracture. If. There's if ah, if water is in there and starts to expand and and fractures out the rocks. But as those rocks sit on top of that pile of wood and where burns down they start to get really really hot and just you know you can imagine like this is the reason why you cut a piece of steak or cut your. Your baked potato if your baked potato has been the oven for an hour at three seventy five if you tried to bite into it. It's going to be really hot. You're going to burn the shit out of your mouth. So we we cut those into pieces and the same to to help them cool down so the same principle applies where the larger the rock you have the more heat it can hold. 11:17.96 Charles The smaller the rock the less heat it can hold and so for different types of plants and animals all across the world. Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years have used this technology earth ovens to cook different types of plants and so once a wood burns down you have this bed of hot rocks in the bottom of your pit. You put a bunch of green packing material on top of that bed of hot rocks. That's going to provide a barrier between your food and and what's your your heating element. It's going to provide a lot of moisture too. So you put your food on top of packing material covered with more packingt material and then seal it all with earth. So if you've ever done a. Like goat roast or a sheep roast or a pig roast underground or even done a barbecue pit. It's the same type of idea where you seal that in so all the heat and all the moisture stays in that environment. Um and in an earth oven with all that green packing material. Everything essentially heats up to around the boiling point of water so around °c°f°f and it cooks at that temperature for a really long time so you can think of an earth oven as a preindustrial crockpot. And so when you look at the landscape in Texas and across the southwest and arguably all over North America you have these locations that are these massive piles of fire crack and burned rock a burned rock mid and a roasting pit an earth oven facility and what they represent are places where indigenous folks return to many times to build earth ovens. 12:45.37 Charles And a lot of depending on what foods they're cooking if they're cooking plants like a gave or canvas where things with lots of inulin a really complex um, carbohydrate or complex chain carbohydrate that has to be broken down so we can digest it. Um, they had to have really big rocks because those have to cook for thirty six plus hours if you're cooking a few rabbits or some some like biscuit root or sega lily or things you can cook for shorter amount of times you can use a little bit smaller rocks and so we can look at how those where. Where are these sites located on a landscape. What were indigenous people kind of why were they choosing to use those specific locations. How does this play into the bigger picture of their settlement patterns mobility cosmology so on and so forth. 13:32.47 alifeinruins And I don't know if a lot of people think about hearth hearths or these earth ovens as something like that but they are and you've you've fully convinced me through your research is that they are kind of an interesting and I do touch on all those aspects of culture and of human life ways. Etc. It's really really interesting. Um, and this kind of like transitions. So you, you're doing some of this work and you're looking at this kind of larger landscape and then that kind of continues right? when you go into Wyoming and that's kind of part of part of your larger dissertation right. 14:07.32 Charles Yeah, so um, I was fortunate enough after I after I finished my masters to go back and help Steve Black and I helped to run excavations at several big rock shelter sites out there. 1 of them being eagle cave and a eagle cave. We have this incredible stratified record going back. 10000 years of of indigenous folks returning to build earth ovens there and so what I wanted to do my dissertation on the the first thing was like why are folks choosing to go back to that site and ah and a major aspect of this is we know from contemporary folks in the ethnographic record that earth ovens were used. A lot of times to provision fees. It's a really good way to get a um, big amount of food that you can use to feed a larger amount of people and and a good example this and and I'll share some of these resources at the end. Um the mescaularla apaches still to this day. Um, have every year do ah do a girl's pubity. Girls puberty ceremony which is ah which is a really important core aspect of their culture and and tradition and um and maintaining their their identity and so this still happens and they build a massive earth oven. They cook a ton of of a gave. Um and so we have we have this like rich ethnographic. And contemporary counts that say people are doing earth ovens not just to scrape by and this is one of those ideas when you look at the calories that you get out of these features. Normally you don't get very much and so especially western archaeologists. We have often looked at these and saying oh these are probably for starvation or these this is a signature that folks are barely scraping by. 15:42.46 Charles But that's probably not always the case. It's not not I'm not trying to paint with a big with a very big brush but it's like sometimes it's probably for that that people need food to eat and they're probably struggling but at the same time. There's other instances where folks are coming together. They're using these big features to provision feasts and and aggregations and have big parties and so that was kind of the lens I was looking at Eagle Cave is trying to evaluate can we look at these 2 different hypotheses of why folks spent so much time in that site. And invested so much time in in building ovens and then so at Wyoming and this is the beauty of coming to a new place that folks are going to challenge you and that was one of the things that Todd said was well how does this, you need to take a bigger picture stab at this like what? Ah what is what is what can you do? That's going to. 16:32.80 Charles Um, you know he was like I don't remember the exact conversation but it's like Eagle cave is really cool, but what does this mean for the rest of North America let's say that and so then fortunately Bob Kelly ah was compiling his radiocarbon database with a lot of folks and that was ah that was a way that I could take a. Sample of dated earth oven features from wyoming is what I ended up focusing on my dissertation and trying to say something a little bit broader about when people started to use this technology in the Northern Plains how does a morphology of these features change. Do they go is it always the same amount of rock as. Same size of pit does it change your time if it does change what does that mean for the different types of foods that are being cooked. 17:16.95 alifeinruins Yeah, and I I think we'll continue this little bit and hopefully get talk about your results and um in the in the next segment so we will be right? Backc.