Science Friday - Caves And Climate, Environmental Archeology, Scanning The Past. Nov 23, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

When you think of an archaeologist, you might imagine a scientist in the field wielding shovels and pickaxes, screening through dirt to uncover artifacts and structures buried deep in the ground. But what about those areas that you can’t reach or even see? That’s when you call archaeologist Lori Collins from the University of South Florida. Collins uses LIDAR—a detection system that uses lasers—to map out the cracks and details of a prehistoric cat sculpture created by the Calusa people, sinkholes that pop up in Florida, and even a former NASA launch pad. She talks how this technology can preserve these archaeological finds in the face of climate change, natural disaster, and war. When archaeologists unearth past societies, the story of those people is written in human remains and artifacts. But it’s also written in environmental remains: bones of animals, preserved plants, and even the rocks around them. Kitty Emery and Nicole Cannarozzi, both environmental archaeologists at the Florida Museum, lead an onstage expedition through the earliest known domestication of turkeys in Guatemala and Mexico, the 4,000-year-old shell middens of indigenous people of coastal Southeast United States, and even sites that could tell us more about the African American diaspora and the lives of slaves mere hundreds of years ago. Plus, the two archaeologists tell us how understanding the environmental choices of past people can lead to better insight into ourselves. Sea level rise and fall over hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient vegetation. The diets of early human ancestors and the temperatures they lived in. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how it changed over time. All of these are data sought by paleoclimatologists, who study the prevailing climate during times past. And the clues of this data are buried in the rock formations of caves around the world. Paleoclimatologist and cave researcher Bogdan Onac of the University of South Florida travels from New Mexico to Romania to Spain to find the stories hidden in millenia-old cave ice, bat guano, and rock formations. He joins Ira to tell tales from the trail. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from Tampa Theater in Tampa, Florida. Unless you're claustrophobic or afraid of the dark, a cave can be a wonderful place for science. They're natural traps for atmospheric and hydrologic processes. Water drips and minerals precipitate into stalactites and other formations. Or water freezes and gases from the atmosphere remain trapped. Or even bats leave deposits of guano in the same. same place over thousands of years. All of these are clues about the climate of our planet, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and my first guest has roamed the world

crawling and even swimming through caves to collect these clues. Giant ice sheets in Romania, lava tubes in New Mexico, and in the Mediterranean island of Mayorka, ocean flooded caves that hold the keys to how sea levels have risen and fallen over the past 100,000 years. So I want you to welcome Bogdan, Onak, a professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Welcome Bogdan. Thank you for having me. Bogdan, how can caves tell us about past sea waves?

The clue to the past sea level was back in 1970s when some colleagues from Majorca came. Caving, exploring caves, they noticed that there are some bands of minerals, a different color that are very nicely aligned, and you can follow them the entire cave. And say, well, what's a minute, what's going on here? And then at that time, they just thought, well, that's a deposit, a mineral deposit, exactly like when you have a lake that stays there for a long time. But because these caves are next to the sea, so well, probably is the sea level there. And so at the very beginning, in the 70s, there were no facilities, analytic facilities to date the minerals, and therefore they just assumed Mediterranean Sea was moving up and down.

Later on, we got this tremendous boost in the analytical facilities. Now we can date. I have a nice sample right here. All these small holes you see there are 17 ages. This piece of rock grew over. grew over the last 2,700 years. It took 2,700 years for about... To form this bald here.

It's about an inch and a half of bulb. Wow. And so collecting these samples and starting to date them, we figure out that formation of this size or larger, a different elevation in the caves, they will tell us different ages, and that means different sea levels. Can you reconstruct the entire history of pastoral?

history of past sea levels doing this technique or do you need other tools? Well, the first hurdle is to find the caves that were old enough, close enough to a sea to be flooded. And so, like we went first in Florida and we looked around. Florida is so young, the limestone is so young. We went to the Bahamas, the same problem. We could not find any cave that's really old. So when we got to Sardinia and Majorca, the caves themselves are older than five million years. So there was plenty of time for the sea level to come in and out,

and so left over 40 different distinct layers that we are working on those down. How do past sea levels correspond to high temperature or a CO2 level, something we might think about climate change or global warming now? Sea level is going up as soon as it's warming, Earth it's warming. You know, like 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, sea level dropped 100-something meters. So Florida was the size of Texas. Is that right?

Because all that water was locked up in the ice. Exactly. At that time. Once it starts melting, it's coming down. It's coming back. Now the connection with temperature, it's evident. With the CO2, what we noticed is that back 3.5, 4 million years, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reconstructed by other specialists

showed that was higher than the day. Temperature were higher than today, three, four degrees centigrade, sea level was 15 meters above present sea level. Wow. But Bogdan, what's the surprise? Is there anything surprising? Isn't this exactly what we would expect to happen when you have higher temperatures? Well, I mean, we know from others' researchers that Greenland and Greenland ice sheets are melting. Antarctica, chunks of Western Antarctica ice. It's breaking and getting into the sea. like icebergs and then they melt, sea level would come up. Florida experiences about 3.4 to 4 millimeters per year, sea level rise. Yeah, so you have models of what would happen,

and now you're just collecting the data to show that that's what's happening. Yeah, that's correct. I mean, we are trying to help this community that makes models and make the projection, what's going to be in 2100 and so forth. And so providing precise dates from different locations around the world, Whether there's from the caves or corals, these guys can make better projections for the future. Wow. What else can the caves tell us? Well, there are many things in the cave. One of the fascinating deposit is when you find ice.

Ice. Yeah, large ice deposits, like the one you see down in the back. That's about 17 meters thick wall. Actually, the ice in that cave, it's 23.5 meters. and it's about 11,000 years old. So as long as you do, take a core out, you do all the isotope analysis for oxygen, for hydrogen, you date different small leaves, pine tree needles and so forth that came from outside, you have the age.

That's how we know that it's 11,000 years. That's a huge, we're looking at a picture of a huge ice sheet. How big is that? It's the largest in the world, actually. It's 125,000 cubic meters. It's a big surface. It's like a huge underground scale place. It's lovely.

And you can see this on our website at sciencefriady.com. And you take cores of ice, you drill into the ice, get a core. We have two cores. One is 23.5 meters. The other one is 25.5. And so we were able to reconstruct what was going on, where the rain was coming from which water, in the cave and accumulate ice over the time.

And is that predictive of the future climate? Probably not. I mean, it gives some clues, but not so much, because compared to Greenland or Antarctica, this is only 11,000 years. In the Antarctica, you have 800,000 years ice. So this is a small scale. So regionally talking, Europe,

it's going to give us good information. Interesting. I heard there's some cool stuff with bat guano in cage. True. What are we looking at in this picture? Well, we need to core this poop.

Can I quote you on that? We need to... Hashtag, we need to core this poop. Correct. So when I went first and asked for fund, somebody said, are you crazy? Who is going to give you money to digging poop? Well...

A lot of people. Yeah, well, I got money and we collect. I have a PhD student here who is just about finishing. And incredible information because bats are flying and it ends insects. Insects are feeding on larvas and other bugs which are eating leaves. Right.

So they take everything in, they digest, and they poop. And the poop accumulates. And sometimes it's 2,000, 3,000 years old. How much is that? How old is that one? This one is only 1,200. But does the vegetation inside it also tell you? Maybe, you know.

What we find in the bad guano are pollen grains. You process all the guano, you take the pollen out, and then the students, they will have to sit hours and weeks and months looking at the binocular and identifying those grains, telling me what the vegetation was at the surface. Wow. Wow. So you have said that caves are really good places for trapping history, and I can see that. What kind of caves actually do this?

Because caves come in a lot of varieties, right? That's correct. The kind of caves do this to best. For ice, you need to have caves at higher elevation or high latitude. For guano, you have to be almost everywhere in the world. The problem is that if you are in the tropics, the microorganists will digest and will bioturbate. They will mix the guano, the poop. Okay.

And so. So because of that, we prefer to be in the temporary areas where there are large colonies of bats. Like for instance in the lava tubes in New Mexico, it's about 100,000 bats that are coming from Mexico illegally. And they, the problem is they can... It says Florida after that. They are coming, they are having this maternity colonies because only during the maternity, the, you know,

females are feeding. and so they poop a lot. But then in the winter, they're going back in Mexico because it's warm and nice. Yeah. You know, it's a such thing because we're looking at pictures of scuba diving in caves, people collecting. That to me is pretty scary,

but there are people who are going under the water of scuba diving. It's beautiful. We are fortunate enough to have a very good team in Spain, in Majorca. I'm not a diver. I can swim, I can do a lot of things in the caves, but that is something I will never do. And so these guys are going down, and so they collected for us samples

from as low as 35 meters below present sea level, this nice shape formations that we date and we work, and we figure out how low Mediterranean Sea and the global ocean was 70,000 years ago. I see you hate what you do, Bogdan. Tell us what it's like to spend so much time underground and the kind of work that you do. You know, sometimes it's fun, like here. It's cold, nice water, swimming, seeing lots and beautiful things.

Sometimes you have to be under 12,000 beds that are pooping on you, and you have to collect samples. In the ice caves, you are freezing, and you are freezing really badly. Did you always want to study this? Yeah, I was talking to my wife just before the show and I said, well, boy, it's 41 years since I read a book. I read a book and I said, that's what I want to do. What book was that?

It was in Romania and it was about the caves and it just knocked me off and I said that's what I want to go. Well, we're very happy that you came and shared your interest with us and we wish you all great success in the future. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you, Don Onak, Professor of Geosciences at the University of South Florida, in Tampa. Thanks again for joining me today. Thank you, having me.

Taking us to the break, our musical guests for the evening, the Jackettes. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, coming to you from the Tampa Theater in Tampa, Florida. How many times have you gone to a museum and seen a really cool artifact? You stare at every little detail, right, and you get that urge to pick it up for just a second, but there's always that sign that says, do not touch. Right? Well, my next guest works with a kind of virtual collection of artifacts. And the good news is you can get up as close as you want to prehistoric sculptures and

even entire buildings and you can virtually touch them. You can even spin them around 360 degrees. How? Well, she's doing all of this with lasers and she's here to explain it. Laurie Collins is co-director of the Digital Heritage and Humanity. collection at the University of South Florida Libraries in Tampa. Now we have microphones in the audience. If you want to step up to the microphones and ask questions, please.

Feel free to do that. Now, Lori, you create a type of virtual reality museum. You already have the real artifacts. So why is it important to scan them and preserve them if you have the real stuff? Right. Well, I think we really can just turn on the news every night and see reasons why there's a necessity for that. We've got war and conflict and we've got natural disasters and even things that we think are protected in a museum environment we saw in Brazil recently.

You know, we can see that these things that we want to preserve for all time, maybe there's other kinds of techniques that we need to look at to be able to do that. Now, you use something called LIDAR. We're hearing a lot about archaeologists scanning entire areas of a landscape with us, and it's also being used in self-driving car. What is LIDAR? How are you using? We actually have a rig right here. Yeah, there's a lot of different platforms for it. There's a lot of different resolutions and scale is really the difference between them. So LIDAR is light detecting and ranging. It uses a laser pulse to actually detect distance and derive distance. The different types that we have include longer range and shorter range kind of applications, some that use a patterned light to actually measure deformation and distance in that way.

And this we use for artifacts and for close-up kind of objects. Looks like an electric iron for my clothing. It does. A little more expensive, I imagine. A little more. So that emits a structured light pattern onto an object, and then we're able to derive a three-dimensional measurement and figure from that. The other types of instruments that we have are meant for landscape and further out distances.

So we can go out 330 meters with this instrument over here, and about 120 meters with this instrument here. Lots of different configurations. We can also mount these on planes and derive the surface of the earth and three-dimensional information that way. We can put them on mobile platforms. There's a lot of different ways

of collecting these types of data and information. And how much granular can you get with it? How much detail can you pick up? The shorter range applications that we're using are about half a human hair. Half a human hair. Yeah, and so we can really approximate reality. with that. This piece we

recently scanned that's coming back to Florida. This is from the site of Key Marco. It's a Key Marco cat. Yeah, it's about 500 years old. It was found in a peat deposit at an archaeological site near Naples, Florida. This artifact, it has some preservation issues, conservation issues, and so

being able to scan and document this, we worked in a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution on this one. And this is an exact replica of it. Wow. Yeah. That is a 3D print. So it's a sitting cat. It's a shapeshifter.

It's actually a Florida panther. It's a personage that's becoming a Florida panther, essentially. It's about, as you say, it's not very big. It's about the size of my hand. What did you find out about how the cat was made? Well, what's interesting about the cat is it's a perishal material. It's made of wood. Often we don't find these types of artifacts.

As soon as you pull them out of an anaerobic environment, they're disintegrating. This one has some problems with it, some cracking. and some deformation going on with it. And so to be able to preserve it digitally, we're also helping the conservators with how to treat this and maintain it for future generations to see. It's not going to last forever,

but we could have the digital version of it. We can, and our unit is actually in the USF library, which people are like, why are you doing 3D research in the library? Well, it's because we want to create these digital collections, and we want to be able to have these digital materials for everyone to see and appreciate and use in the classroom, for example. And once you have it, you could virtually turn it around. You can, and we actually

have an application that we use where we can do augmented reality and virtual reality tours with it. So we can actually view and see the object. Everybody can use their phone and actually check this out online and have your own little museum display right in front of you. I love it. I love it. There is another other fact that you scanned, and it's a powder horn that has very detailed surface. What's the image that we're looking at on the horn? This horn is a horn. part of a collection with the Tampa Bay History Museum. It's very hard for them to display this piece because it's in the round. You can't touch it. And so our team scanned this using the scanner that you see here, the shorter range instrument. And then we texture mapped it with photos so that we

have a very rich detail model. And it's a map of Spanish St. Augustine, actually British St. Augustine before the Spanish. It contains a whole cityscape on this powder horn dates to about 1760s. In the picture, you were able to take the horn and unfold it. How do you do that? So we have this whole team of amazing 3D specialists, and one of our members of our team is able to do some algorithmic change to this and actually unroll things. So now we can all see the map that's created

that contains the Spanish St. Augustine scene that we see today. Let's say you go to a site, can you take one of your LIDAR instruments and actually sort of look through the ground, to see if there's something under there without digging it up. Right. So that's a different type of technology. So these are all surface scanners. But then we can integrate and combine different types of tools. So we often will work with other geoscientists that are doing research with ground penetrating radar, for example,

or other types of remote sensing radars that will allow you to see beneath surfaces. And then we can bring those datasets together. We have a question up in the balcony. Go ahead. Hi. So did you guys say that you use Lasel? Yeah, we use laser scanners. What are they made out of? What are they made out of? I told you they're going to be hard questions.

So there's actually like a mirror in there that spins around and it emits a pulse laser light, basically just hard plastic, ruggedized plastic. That laser and that mirror help you to collect. It moves around in a circle and it collects 360 degrees by going 180 and 180. It also collects camera images. So there's cameras integrated into the scanners. And so after it finishes scanning, it'll take photos from the very same perspective, and it can overlay the color images with the laser data.

So you have measurable data, and you have it look like the real thing. I know that sometimes you will work on spots that pop up a lot in Florida. I'm talking about sinkholes, right? You mapped out the Land of Lake sinkhole that opened up. I am not a geophysicist, although I did stay at a holiday, so. But, no, I work with a lot of different diverse people across campus. We have some amazing research teams, and one of our professors in geosciences, Sarah Cruz, really interested in this stuff. I was super interested in it because I grew up right around the corner from it.

Oh, is that right? Yeah. So my childhood home was literally with a block away from where this happened. And so I used to ride my horse back where this happened. And so I was there when the whole development went in, and I kind of had an understanding for why this might have happened. So did you volunteer to go in there? We did.

Our whole team basically responded. We kind of feel, you know, we're part of a community here as well. So it's really a duty almost of the university to be a partner with the community. And when a tragedy or disaster happens, we step up and help. Okay. So you go in and you scan the sinkhole. are you able to go under the sinkhole to see why there is a sinkhole? So, again, combining sort of different sets of data and understanding of geomorphology,

not something that I'm doing. We're documenting, providing base maps for all these other researchers that are studying what's going on under the ground. We're really interested in this case to know how is it spreading? Is it stable? Is it moving? and so one of the things we did was repeated mapping with it. So we were mapping for monitoring, really. So we would go out like almost every day and scan and use drones to capture.

We did photogrametric techniques from our drones and were able to capture the surface elevations and the topography. Can you learn something about a sinkhole that you would not normally learn using this technique? In this case, what we did early on was we looked at the environmental history and we knew, because I had grown up there, I knew how that development had kind of happened, and so we looked at early aerial imagery,

and we looked at the development as it had changed, and what they had done was they had dredged the lake, and they had put dredge material up on the shore, and then built on top of the dredge material. And so we were able to show that using geographic information systems approach, and so it was really important for us to know the entire history of the land,

and to understand what was happening today. as well. Let's talk about another part of history that you are documenting here in Florida. You are mapping out Cape Canaverum. We're in our third year of a five-year project to document all of the old historic launch complexes at the Cape. Reason being these are, they were meant to go away, right? They were in some cases portable or in some cases meant to change through time. So we're kind of snaps shot imaging what is becoming ruinous today. A lot of these launch complexes are not going to be with us, perhaps another 50 years. And so to be able to...

The ocean's rising and it's right on the... It is. It's right on the coast. They face a lot of pressures from sea level change. They have just the salts. Oh, the salt are deteriorating all of the metal. To be able to document these and to really kind of use our data to tell the story of the Cape is really something that we're looking forward to doing.

And one of the images we're looking at now is the launch known as the Apollo 1 memorial site, a very sad site. Yeah. So this was the tragedy with Grisham White and Chaffee, where in 1967 they caught fire during a test. They were locked into this capsule. They couldn't open the capsule hatch, the way it was designed, an electrical fire that took over the capsule. And all three perished there. So this is now, today, a memorial to them that people come to every year on the anniversary.

2017 was the 50th anniversary of this tragedy. You actually have the Napalo Memorial 3D that you know. We do. So all of our things that we're documenting for preservation, conservation, understanding how to preserve things at the Cape, we're also using for interpretation, and we're creating digital collections online through our library that can be accessed.

There's another site that NASA has that looks like a beehive. Yeah, these are really kind of unique buildings. So not only was Cape Canaveral all about the space race, but it was also about missiles. the Cold War era. And so in the 60s and 70s, these beehive structures were the launch command for the Minuteman missiles were launched from here. And they had these underground silos that the missiles would emerge from these. And the silos here are really interesting, too, because in 1987, after the Challenger disaster,

parts of the Challenger are actually buried in these silos. They're contained in these silos. So we're really documenting quite an amazing site when we're capturing all of this. 3D. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Lori Collins of the University of South Florida. We are here in Tampa, Florida. Let's go to the audience. Get a question here. Hi, Ira. Hi, Lori. Hi there. I am curious if this technology can be used on textiles. You've been talking a lot about three-dimensional objects. I'm wondering if it could also be used for relatively flat but still three-dimensional things like maybe the Bay of

the tapestry I'm thinking or some of the really ancient linens that are really hard to preserve once they get exposed to the air? Absolutely. And, you know, I don't want to give the impression that this is sort of a one-size-fits-all kind of technology. We often use different types of tools. So we might use photogrametric or photography kinds of imaging, as well as the scan data to provide us with information maybe on how a textile was actually made.

and so we have used this on material. In particular, Guatemala, with the textiles there, we've done some work with the museum on collecting data and information on textiles. I see, I've got one more question for Dr. Collins from this side. Yes. So there's a new product coming out called the Google HoloLens, and have you heard of it?

Yeah. So are you going to team up with Google and do something with that? Because you could put a hologram, like, right in your room. Actually, my nephew, He knows who he's talking about. Tell us what he's talking. The hollow lens is actually a mixed reality tool.

So there's augmented reality, there's virtual reality, and there's mixed reality. Augmented reality puts layers of information sort of in front of you. Virtual replaces it. You kind of put something over your eyes. And mixed lets you actually interact with the information in front of you. So things like medical kinds of applications and surgeries and things, it's a great way to train and teach and learn. and I see a lot of these things are being more and more integrated. We have a whole virtual reality studio where we look at all of our 3D models

and take people into sites. And it's a great way to teach and learn, especially everybody can't go everywhere, but we can take them to these places virtually. Speaking of going everywhere or anywhere, what site would you like to go or what would you like to scan that you haven't been able to? Maybe they're listening, you know,

give you access. Stranger things have known to happen on our ship. I mean, it's kind of interesting with these technologies because people are actually scared of them. And so things like drones, you know, when technology comes out, people tend to shut down, and there's that sort of reaction to permitting and being able to have access to things.

So, for example, a lot of the national parks that we work in, we have to really go through a lot of red tape to be able to fly a drone. So I would just like to be able to work in areas with greater access and with greater sharing capabilities with these data sets that currently don't exist. And my favorite site to work in is probably Mexico. We have a site there called Chalkat Singo that is one of the 100 most imperiled rock art sites. And we've been documenting all of the ancient carvings at that site. And it's just an incredible place to be.

and it's got lots of stuff to scan. Well, you have to bring stuff back in from Mexico and let you go there? Well, virtually. Thank you, I'm fascinating. Lori Collins is co-director of the Digital Heritage and Humanities Collection at the University of South Florida Libraries in Tampa.

When we come back, from the ancient Mayans to the indigenous residents of the coastal southeast, the world is full of human stories we haven't fully told yet. Meet archaeologists who are unearthing those stories with the help of animal clues, the trails left by oysters, dogs, and even turkey bones. And now playing us another song, the Jack Cats. Welcome back to this day.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato coming to you from the Tampa Theater in Tampa, Florida. Now, I want you to picture an archaeologist, let's say Indiana Jones. And he's digging carefully through the remains of a destroyed civilization. He uncovers his prize. He triumphfully, he holds up a turkey bone. Not quite like in the movies, right? Not what you pictured.

Maybe you were hoping for an ancient statue or a tool or even a long-dead queen, but for environmental archaeologists, like my next guest, those turkey bones and plant remains, even oyster shells are the treasures that tell the stories of past peoples. Take the folks that lived 4,000 years ago on the coast of Georgia. How can we tell what their lives were like?

Did they migrate up and down the coast, depending on this season? Well, the answer may be in clues they left behind like shellfish, huge rings of which can be found on islands like St. Catharines. And half a continent away, the Mayan people built a civilization in the rainforest of Guatemala. They left behind buildings and art and everything. evidence of the earliest domestication of the Turkey, thousands of years before our own Thanksgiving, Turkey. Yeah, here to tell the tales to environmental archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Dr. Kitty Emery, Associate Curator, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you, Ira. Nicole Canaraazi, collections manager and a PhD candidate at the University of Florida. Welcome, Nicole. Thank you. Katie, do you have a hat and a whip like Indiana Jones? I do, but I was told not to bring them. Nicole, tell us what kinds of treasures you were hunting as an environmental archaeologist. Well, as environmental archaeologists, one of the things we study is the human relationship with the environment in the past. So as the archaeologists, we're studying animal bones. And then other subfields in environmental archaeology is archaeobotan.

and archaeobotanists study the plant remains, and archaeopodologists study soils and sediments. Now, Kitty, people may say why aren't you fixated on human remains? Why animals? Well, animals can tell you about the ancient environment, but also about people and their relationship to that environment. So if you just study humans, you only have one species to look at. We get to look at all of the different species of animals. and really the lessons that we can learn from how people reacted to their animals and the way they perceived those animals,

the things that they thought of when they dealt with animals, can tell us an awful lot about modern day and our own biodiversity problems that we have now. So you can learn a lot from the animal bones. And Nicole, your work focuses on the people I talked about that inhabited coastal Georgia. Did they have a name? Do we know who they were? We don't.

So these sites were formed about 5,000 years ago, and they're called shell ring sites, called so because they're made up primarily of shell in these rings that you see with these central cleared plazas. And so one of the things we're trying to learn about these sites is how people use them when they were living at the sites, what types of resources they were using at the sites. So that's primarily what we're looking at so far in these sites. Do we know why they have so many shells in these sites, what they used them for? Well, some of the theories are that these were ceremonial sites. So they were people coming from all over to celebrate various ceremonies or coming to meet each other

and that they were the result of feasting events. So they were depositing all of these shells and bone and other artifacts into these sort of ring-shaped sites. and then the cleared central plaza, which looks like they have been continually cleaned and maintained for potentially for these ceremonies. There are other theories that say these are sites where people were just daily living, and this is their general daily garbage that they've collected in sort of this circular shape. So you can learn a lot from the shelves. Yes. Do they come in different sizes?

Big ones, little shells? The shells or the show rings? Yeah, the shells. Yeah, the shells themselves, yes, are come in all different kinds of sizes. So the example up here is a very teeny tiny gastropod that's no bigger than about six millimeters that are actually found in these shell ring sites. And they come in with the oysters, which are the primary component of these sites. If you'd like to ask a question, step up to the microphones on the side here.

We're not taking questions from home, but we are taking questions from here in the audience and the aisles and up in our balcony. And just in time for Thanksgiving, Kitty, you've got a story about turkeys in Guatemala. I do. The Maya might have domesticated turkeys in Guatemala? They might have. There could be some arguments from the Mexicans about that. How did turkeys get to Guatemala?

Are they native birds to the area? Well, one species is. So the turkey is really, it's an amazing story. And kind of one of the biggest puzzles about turkeys is why they were domesticated in the first place. And the clue actually isn't how beautiful these birds are. So when you guys are looking at your turkeys on your table, you're thinking about having them domesticated for the meat. But what we've discovered is that in fact, they likely were not domesticated just for food. The cool thing about the turkey is that it was domesticated in Mexico or in that area.

And that one domestication event is what led to all the turkeys around the world. And because when the Spanish arrived, they were so intrigued by this turkey. The first thing they took back with them was the turkey. And within a couple of decades, the Spanish turkey had, which was also called the Aztec Turkey at that time, was passed all around Europe. And so the Europeans loved it as well, and everybody had this turkey.

They all started breeding different breeds of the turkey. And then when the Europeans came back to North America, they brought that turkey back with them. So then that turkey ended up being the turkey that we have the many breeds of now here. Who would have thunk this? It's such a beautiful bird. Yeah, I mean, we just take it for granted. We did it, but we didn't do it.

No, we did not. It was 2,000 years ago that this bird was domesticated. Wow. Let's go to the floor question. Yeah, you have a question? Step up to the mic there? That's a good question. Okay, so, wow, that's weird.

Go ahead. No, we can hear you. So if you like animals so much, wouldn't you like a $2,000 diamond? Or do you like animal bones more? I like animal bones more than a $2,000 diamond. But that's a great question because the information that we can get from doing science, I think all scientists would say that the knowledge we get from doing this work is way more valuable than sort of the material things that you might think.

Where else would you have learned about the turkey this holiday season about the truth about the turkey? Yes. What led you to become an environmental archaeologist? Well, actually, as an undergraduate, I was pre-vets, so I thought I wanted to work with live animals. And then I started taking anthropology classes and started learning more about history. And so the next step I took was interning at the floor. Florida Museum, and I started out washing artifacts in historical archaeology, and while doing that, I found an animal bone. It was a really big bone. And so I took it to, who was the collection manager at the time, and asked him what it was, and he told me it was part of a manatee skull. And so then I was like, this is where it's at. So I stopped watching artifacts, and I started. working in environmental archaeology.

Never know where that road is going. Life is a journey. Let's go over here, yes. How do you get the information itself? How do you get the... I forgot how to explain it. How do you collect the information? Yeah, I think that's an excellent.

Yeah, it's an excellent question. And so one of the first things we have to do is identify the bone. And this is, it's really fun because it's like a puzzle. because it's like a puzzle. So we have to compare the archaeological bone to modern bones of all the different kinds of animals. And then we can decide what the species was, but we then also need to know what age the animal was,

and we have a bunch of different techniques we can use for that. We also want to know what sex it was, and so we can study that. But then we can also look at it and try to understand whether it had diseases, because pathologies show up on the bones, and we can also, learn whether people use that animal bone for other purposes by looking at the marks on the bone to

see whether they tried to carve it into something or whether they used it. You know, there's a bunch of different techniques we have to use to get all that information together. That's interesting. And, Nicole, you also have a project on the island of St. Croix. What are you doing over there? Yeah, so that is a project that we're working on in collaboration with the National Park Service Southeast Archaeological Center. And that work is looking at slave life at a Danish military fort. So this fort was built back in 1733,

and the slaves that lived in the compound were actually royal slaves in the sense that they serve the Danish military. So sort of within slave social hierarchy, they occupied sort of a higher position. But we're looking at there is trying to understand what slave life was like in that context, where they're living sort of in close proximity to these Danish soldiers.

We have a shell button back there. Tell us why that's significant. Well, I think it's just pretty cool. So it's actually... Works for me. It's actually, it's handcrafted from a shell called a West Indian top shell, and we can tell that because it has that shiny surface. And so many times some of these artifacts will find they'll have designs on them that may mean something

or we can sort of look at maybe what they were using these for. So one of the reasons I think this is cool is because it has five holes that are drilled into it. What's interesting also about this is this is not an ancient something. I mean, this is not thousands of years old. This is just hundreds of years old, right? Right. You deal with that also. Right.

Yeah, so historical archaeology is another subfield of archaeology where we study people who have left oral and documentary histories. So there's also things that we have to discover about people where we may think, oh, we have a historical record of this, so we know all of this. And that's not always the case. There are still hidden puzzles in the archaeology. Hi, Mara Flater, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about in this. environmental archaeology. Let's go to the question on this side. Yes.

How long does it take to get the appropriate schooling to do what you do? Yeah. How much schooling do you mean? Too much. Too much. More than a couple of weeks? Way more than a couple of weeks. A good number of years.

And so it depends too on what you want to do. So if you want to get your PhD like I'm doing, it'll take you a little bit longer. you know, if you have a good advisor that, you know, that injures you along, you'll get there. So Nicole, as we wrap up, tell us on a lot of youngsters here, what do you get out of understanding the animal relationships that people have in the past? Why do you study? Well, animals are pretty important for us, right? So we have pets, they form a large part of our life, their foods. So a lot of things we study are really just to understand how people lived in the past

and then use that also to think about ourselves now and then how we can deal with certain situations in the future. So not only are we just looking at animal bones and environmental remains, we're also looking to answer these broader questions about how people lived in the past. And Kitty, can we apply any of what we learn about the past to how we're living today? Absolutely. So one of the things that we study is, as I mentioned earlier on, the perceptions that people have of their environment and how they use their environment. So a lot of our research is based on trying to understand what makes people make the decisions that they do.

Why do people decide to use an environment sustainably? Why do they decide to overhunt or not overhunt? So in one of my studies, I was able to show that the Maya people were not generally overhunting their animals. They knew how many animals they should hunt. But when you looked at the hunting practices right close to sites that were very politically active, those were the places where they were overhunting their animals, which leads us to suggest that, in fact, although people who are living on the land know what they should do sustainably to maintain their animals or their environment, the more that there's a political pressure to pay your taxes or

to give extras to the kings or the nobles, you start to make poor decisions. And that's a really important lesson for today that we're actually getting out of the past. Can't think a better way to end this conversation because as they say, the rest is history. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My guest's Environmental Archaeologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Dr. Kitty Emery, associate curator, thank you. Nicole Canterazzi, collections manager and PhD candidate at the University of Florida. Thank you for enriching us. Thank you.

That's about all the time we have. Our heartfelt thanks to Leslie Laney, Chris Sampson, Craig George, Sheila Roo, Scott Kaufman, and Scott Nolan. And all the great folks at WUSF for hosting us. Thank you all. And thanks also to Lloyd Pearson, Kathy Prance, and all the amazing staff here at the Tampa Theater for making this wonderful evening possible. And special thanks to Elizabeth Moore. And thanks to all our Science Friday staff. It takes a lot of people behind the scenes to run the ship and to make me look sort of good.

And they're terrific at what they do. And thank most of all to you, our fans, for coming out this evening. you have been a great crowd. Oh, and let's give one last round of applause for the Jackettes who are going to be playing us out tonight. Thank you for coming. In Tampa, Florida, I'm Ira Plato. Drive safely and good night.