00:00.24 alifeinruins Welcome back to episode 1 62 I'm here with Charles we are talking hertz as ah I also want to tell everyone this that I had a brilliant idea we're we're gonna get Charles on a tlc show or hgtv or something like that and it's a show called hearth hunter. You go around trying to find hearts. Um within your time range within your budget etc. It's it's going to make millions. So ah, you'll see hgtv. All those things call me and we can ah we can negotiate this um but continuing on. Ah. 00:38.64 alifeinruins Ah, so what? what did you kind of find out or how did you analyze all these features and what did you ultimately kind of find out about feature morphology shape through in Wyoming. 00:53.10 Charles Yeah, so that's ah, that's a really great question because I'm going to I'm going to take a probably long roundabout way to answer this first off the data that I was collecting ah was um, features that had been directly rated carbon date. That's where I was starting with I had this list of. Of something like I think it was twelve hundred radiocarbon dates and then I had to go back into the the records in the shippo database where Connor and I work right now and pull out the actual feature morphology. How length with depth was there rock if there was rock how much did it weigh. And I had really grand ambitions that I was that I was hoping that every single one of these features had recorded the amount of rock that was the mass the total mass of rock because for my work in Texas I knew that and and ongoing experimental work that. As I kind of mentioned before the bigger the more rock that you have the larger that earth oing heating element the longer it's going to be able to cook or the more food you're going to be able to cook. So if you have really big features. That's probably going to indicate something different behaviorally than if you have a bunch of little small features. And from my outside perspective on Wyoming I thought that it was probably mostly a bunch of really small features and so as I get into the shippo records though there's a ton of variation. The problem is archaeologists have done a kind of bad job about being really systematic and consistent about how we. 02:19.42 Charles How we record that information. So some folks would would give length width depths mass of burned rock size class of burned rock within that you know identification of macromettanical remains faa remains all this type of analysis. But at the other end of the spectrum. It would basically be this is a hearth feature. It is. Fifty centimeters by 50 by 10 and there's a rate of carbon date and you'd have very very little information. So what I had to do was in my in my data collection just narrow it down. Um, ultimately kind of some of the main key points were just basic morphology length with depth. And presence and absence of burned rock because less than 30% of the features had that I know had burned rock actually had a company um rock mass and so what I ended up finding out was as other folks who've worked in Wyoming Craig Smith lance mcnee Russell Richards and many others had. Had noticed during their long careers doing contract archaeology that early ah late pleinene the earliest holocene around Eleven Thousand years ago those features have almost no rock. You still have pit features. They're probably using just charcoal as their heating element cooking things like rabbits. Potentially. Small amount of meat or starchy geophytes like biscuit root and then as you get into the holocene of brown sony five hundred years ago suddenly there's like a drasic increase in the amount of rock that's showing up in these features suggesting that it's either a different type of food potentially more of us. 03:52.50 Charles An inulin-rich, um, ah geophyte. So maybe sego lilies. They have a little bit more complex carbohydrates or more more starched geophytes biscuit root more rabbits. And 1 of the really cool things looking at the funnel record is that it's very clear that indigenous folks were cooking large games so deer Antelope Bison probably Elk And earth ovens beginning at least seventy five hundred years ago in the northern plains and the first canvas oven so canvas is and is a really important. Ah, geophyte resource for folks in the pacific northwest and and especially along the klumby plateau and into Canada and the the earliest canvas oven that it looks like we have in Wyoming that came out of the out of the tetons around around Jackson Lake is around forty five hundred years ago and that has. Over a hundred kilograms of rock. So what's two hundred two hundred and twenty pounds of rock something like that. But and that's I only looked at that early that early half first half of the holone record but it at the end of the day. It just shows. 04:44.38 alifeinruins Wow. 04:56.42 Charles Indigenous people change their technology and we can see that archaeologically to cook different types and different amounts of food and more work needs to be done. There's a ton of additional research questions as well. 05:08.12 alifeinruins I feel like that's the end of all dissertations and thesissispleasedomorework. 05:13.97 Charles Yeah, if there's some,, There's some really I really resonate with a lot of the memes I've seen recently and in like academic pages of like at the end of a Ph D You just feel like a total idiot and you. You realize that you know you start an undergrad. Oh you know so much about the World. You get to Masters Oh I don't know that much about the World. You get to end your Ph D and you're like shit I know almost Nothing. You're back to feeling like a total.. You're back to feeling like an idiot again. 05:42.65 alifeinruins Ah, yeah, just like that that that lessening of the field. You know a lot about a little but not not a little about a lot anymore. But it's um, so. 05:47.52 Charles Yeah, yeah, yeah. 05:55.62 alifeinruins And another part of your dissertation. Um, was also doing experimental archaeology and using sort of mathematical equations. Do you mind talking about that because I found that super fascinating um being a Colorado person who's never studied Texas archaeology and. Never knowing what a leguguia is. 06:15.16 Charles Yeah, so so I'll start I'll start there. Lecheguia is a gave letugua is a scientific name. It's one of the smallest species of a gave in North America and it's ah how it's about like whenever whenever folks would cook a gave. What you do is if if you've seen in a god picture in agave and on a bottle of tequila or something like that. It has really long leaves and so you cut you cut all the leaves down to you get to the leaf base and all the edible material in a gave. It's kind of like an artichoke. It's it's at that. It's at it's above ground storage. So it's at the bottom that leafs it's not a geophyte like a canvas bulb or a biscuit group or anything like that. So when you trim when you trim a gavi let you Gia. It looks like truly looks like an artichoke that you get from the store. And so that is one of the plants that folks in along the rio grande in Texas and Northern Mexico and and further down in Mexico that's one of the different plants that they would cook in earth ovens and so one of the questions that we have archaeologically and this is where experimental archeology is really good is. Is understanding the basic physical processes that go into it like because we have we know archaeologically we know ethnographically we know contemp from contemporary folks that these are plants are cooking. The question is how much food could be cooked. How does how does how hot does x amount of rock stay given. 07:38.34 Charles Using y amount of wood. Um, and so those were kind of the the idea that I went into my experiments with was trying to understand ultimately how much food could the features that we see in southwest Texas based on the overall amount of rock that's in the earth oven features. If you have a earthon feature with a one hundred Kilos a rock could that cook the same amount of food as 1 with 350 ee hundred and fifty kilos a rock um and we didn't really know the only experiments that have been done. It basically just been to kind of proof of concept like this is how an oven works build a fire heat up the rock cook food underground and you get 30 lechugua plants. And so to kind of get to that point though, how much food can we cook I started the basic very beginning asking. Um, how much wood does it take to heat up differing amounts of rock to see if we can minimize and this goes like you just said goes back to these mathematical equations looking at return rates and. And inputs and outputs and trying to minimize the amount of work that you're putting into it and so I built 3 different ovens at a time with differing amounts of rock heated those with different amounts of wood. Ah found that if that regardless of the amount of. Rock. You have up to at least two hundred and fifty kilograms it takes about 100 to one hundred and twenty kilograms of wood to heat those rocks up hot enough to cook something for at least 36 hours and so then using that data which was which is ah that amount of wood was about 50% less. 09:06.76 Charles Um, then it been previously used like 10025 kilos 50% less than previous experiments and then what we found is especially with our biggest oven 1 with two hundred and fifty Kilos of wood we could cook probably between. We kind of maxally maxed out our experiment a little bit. We cooked 62 plants 62 leugua plants. We could have cooked a lot more the leua almost burned There was so much heat in the rocks there was there was like a gave syrup a gava molasses like dripping down out of the plants it coated all the heating element rocks. Um, so that's all the sugar that you really don't want to cook out right? because that's all the good stuff. Um, but um, what it what it really opened our eyes to is that and this is again one of these of course stop being stop being an idiot griingo looking at these things right in indigenous people knew exactly. How to do all these things and you know unfortunately we don't have generations of traditional knowledge to to kind of help us figure out how to do these different types of features specifically with letugea and so what it what it looks like is number 1 people are cooking a lot of food in these plants. Um, so depending on the size of the so if we take our two hundred and fifty Kilogram heating element. We're probably looking at somewhere in the order of like 40 to sixty Thousand calories which is equivalent like a whitetail deer. Um. 10:34.94 Charles So it's it's a lot of food at 1 time based on plants. Obviously it's a lot of work to get there. There's there's still a lot of investment. Um, but you can get a lot of lot of food and then for a lot of experiments and this is true with a lot of return rates. It's always considered from the standpoint of 1 person doing it and earth ovens in this type of technology is something. That this is and again we know from contemporary ovens we know from ethnographic accounts. This is never something you do by yourself and so what we what we realize is these are communal features. We didn't realize it. We just provided numbers behind that that assertion to say it makes a lot more sense to work together to do this. And by working together. You get a lot more bang for your for your investment buck. Let's say and that even though you have these tiny little lechugua plants that are this big and and don't provide a lot of calories by themselves if you pool your energy and pool your resources you can provision. Arguably some sort of feast and aggregation. Especially if you had other foods like a deer. Let's say or a bison to go along with it. 11:36.96 alifeinruins And I think that's kind of the beauty with experimental archeology is that it does create that kind of Baseline or it creates the science or you know it does that but but also there's culture involved and and things like that change it. But I think that's the kind of beauty of. Experiment archeology the record and kind of the ethnographic record as Well. It's that that where we really kind of get good information from is really combining those 3 different places and um, really analyzing it like that and I I think it's It's really cool that you found out that ah white people aren't as efficient and ah. Might not be as good at doing this stuff. But um, yeah, it's really interesting. 12:17.41 Charles And yeah, yeah, no, it was. It was cool and I'm really excited. You know as I the 1 thing that's happening is I'm again at a transition period where I'm I'm you know I'm technically a student intern at ship at shippo right now. And in the in the fall I start a position at Solross State University in alpine as an assistant professor and so I'm really excited about continuing to do this research and and continuing to experimental work and continuing all of this earth oven like these various earth oven things. We've talked about other. Other projects and and working with a lot of different collaborators and building relationships especially with the mescule apache who are just up the road in riodoso right now. Um to to get a ah a broader um idea of what was going on with earth ovens in the past. 13:06.39 alifeinruins Right? Very cool. Um I Met you I know you're passionate about hearths or Earth ovens. Um, what? What would you recommend and I I do know the answer this Well what would you? what? What is the one attribute you would have people record. Um when they're finding. Scattered Rock fcr whatever you want to call it like a thermal feature.. What would you recommend? they record. 13:29.16 Charles Yeah I think I think the most important one is going to be the total mass of Rock um, a secondary really. Also important is the size of rock that's in those features. Um and what we've done. We've we've kind of done some cool studies. We. We did this procedure called rocksort and this is kind of in 1 version or another is becoming more common within contract and academic spheres where you size sort the rocks into different size classes. And then weigh the rocks by that size class because no one in any project has the time to weigh and count every single rock that comes out of a giant pile of burned rock and fcr just is no. It's not feasible to do but um, number 1 if you can just get an overall weight but number 2 size class and way by size class. Oh. Why why is the size class important because again the larger the rocks that means the the longer that cooking time is going to be occurring for smaller rocks are just going to cook for for less time and and 1 thing that's really cool also is if you have deflated features so deflated earth oven that is no longer in a pit. Shows exposed on a sand dun or something like that you can pay attention to where does the largest set of rocks cluster and that was probably where that oven originated and everything else is eroded out from there. 14:46.83 alifeinruins Very cool. Well thank you and you hear that crm folks find a way to do it. It'll be appreciated by all of us who are studying these things. Thank you Charles so much you know for coming on and and chatting me with me I really appreciate it? Um, but and. Before we end the show. Um, do you have a couple sources books articles videos that you would kind of recommend for anyone who's interested in leguguea her's earth ovens, etc. 15:20.80 Charles Yeah, well first off, you know? Thank you again for having me on this has been a lot of fun. It's always fun to talk about this type of stuff. Um, especially with ah with a friendly audience. Um, but I I would certainly I would certainly also say. There's a ton of information out there about this type of cooking technology earth ovens some people call them roasting pits other posts other people call them earth ovens other people as as Connor's been saying call them hers. But I definitely recommend checking out a lot of the um. Um, public like newspaper articles and magazine and radio clips specifically about the mescala apache and and a lot of their earth oven. So it's a really cool 1 ah from marfa public radio. It's pretty short. Um, if you can get access to the documentary that's called a gave is life. 16:12.53 Charles Um, it's not always free online I don't I don't know how to get it a free version but you can look look at trailers and things. It's a really good. It's about actually it's over 10 years old at this point but a gave's life is a good one. There's a cool photo essay that was compiled by Alan Ferg and published in desert plants which is um. Available ah for free. Ah, you can go I can give Connor the link. Um, but it's hosted by the University Of Arizona and it just is a really cool compilation of ethnographic photos showing different groups of Mescalero. Or not just mescalero different groups of Apache ah building earth ovens um, there's ah is a ton of academic articles on this one of the foundational ones, especially it's fairly recent is by Steve Black and Allson Tom's earth ovens in the hunter gather archaeological record. Ah, if you Google that you can find it for free through the Texas beyond history website or download directly for american antiquity and a little self um a little self ah advertisement I was just a co-editor on a book that was published at University Of Utah Press called earth ovens desert lifeways. That is available as a hard copy or ebook right now. So yeah, tons of references and I'd also like to say that there is some incredible work coming out of the pacific northwest looking at canvas ovens and so check out like Shannon Tishingham and ah 17:43.80 Charles And her students um work on on canvas ovens in Washington and Oregon. 17:47.98 alifeinruins Very cool. Um and all those the links for those and the information about those will be in the show notes. Um, you know we are going to do something a little corny. Um, so because this show is called a life in Ruins. Um I have to ask you. Would you choose if you had to do it all over Again. Would you choose to live a life in ruins. 18:11.65 Charles I Would the the biggest change I would make is just more phishing. 18:21.23 alifeinruins Well, we hope that you can get a lot of that in Texas and get some rafts going in some floats. Um, yeah, so we just interviewed I I just interviewed Dr Charles Koenig um this is the part where David's promise you a sticker and. Ah, if you give us a review on Itunes. He's a liar and I hope he doesn't listen to this um Carlton usually says something here about us being out. Um, but I guess we're out all right connor tell us a joke. It's your joke time. Connor. Okay, fine. Ah I just got fired from the keyboard factory they said I wasn't putting in enough shifts. 18:58.81 Charles Nice. 19:02.76 alifeinruins And with that we are actually out.