There are many many wonderful things about doing paleoanthropological fieldwork. I spent most of the past week doing survey work in a beautiful, though vast, section of South-Central Kazakhstan. I can certainly think of worse things to do then spend the day walking across kilometeres of beautiful landscape, finding everything from later Paleolithic stone tools, a few fossils, Holocene ceramics and a Bronze Age pestle (plus snakes, scorpions, turtles, and fantastic birds!).
In addition to all of the above, the highlight of the week might actually have come on our final day, when we were invited to the local Kurdish village to participate, as honored guests, at the final day of the school year handing out end of the year certificates.
Why is there a Kurdish village in the middle of South Central Kazakhstan? Because in the middle of the winter in 1937 Stalin decided to relocate millions of ethnic minorities from various parts of the Soviet Union (in this case, parts of the Southern Caucasus) to the vast Western expanse of the Soviet Union. The village we were camped near (the only settlement for about 25km in any direction) represent the descendants of that forced migration, 75+ years later. And it turns out they have a wonderful school these days (As an aside, have any geneticists explored the genetic effects of Stalin’s forced migrations? I would love to see the studies if they are out there.).
But while there are many great and unexpected parts to field work, for me the hardest part of the experience is always the separation from my family. When I was a graduate student, the prospect of completely removing myself from e-mail was heavenly. These days, with a family (including a new born) at home on the opposite side of the globe, the prospect is harrowing. The challenge was made real for me this week when, after a week in the field, I managed to get just enough internet connection to find this e-mail:
Where are u now? We are at hospital w Flora for shoulder fracture. Tough.
Flora is my 11-year old daughter, injured, I later discovered, when she was knocked down on the lacrosse field. She will be fine, but I would certainly like to have been by her side this past week.
Fieldwork is a sacrifice, but it is a valuable one and one that I am happy to partake in. While discovery is at the heart of our discipline, I do not think everyone needs to be actively engaged in fieldwork to be contributing to the advancement of the discipline. The amount of unanswered questions within our field that could be addressed with lab work and/or existing data is vast (and theory is extremely important!). But fieldwork is the fundamental source of new observational data in our field. Less appreciated, but perhaps more important, fieldwork is a major way that connections within our field are made. In my case this week, I was part of an international team focused on researchers from Colorado State (Mica Glantz, Jason LaBelle and a couple of their grad students) and Kazakhstan (led by Zhaken Taimagambetov), but also including American, Belgian, Italian, Romanian and Australian colleagues. The opportunity to contribute to capacity-building activities in less advantaged countries is, in my opinion, the most valuable aspect of such work. But fieldwork is a sacrifice.
UPDATE: Zach Cofran (Nazarbayev U.) has a more thorough update on our activities…
