Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits Team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Jenny Carballo, an archaeologist and researcher at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. I asked her about her journey into her field and a project she’s been working on to refresh one of the Peabody’s largest galleries in a way that highlights the continuity and resilience of indigenous cultures in the Americas. Here she is. Jenny Carballo, welcome to the show.
Jenny Carballo 01:02
Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 01:09
You didn’t grow up wanting to become an archaeologist, tell me the story of your journey into the profession.
Jenny Carballo 01:17
I think that I didn’t grow up knowing I wanted to be an archaeologist, because I just didn’t know that it was a profession that was available to me. I had, of course, seen movies like the Indiana Jones films, and had visited museums and some archaeology sites as a kid. But I didn’t have a sense that it was a profession that a regular person could have, and it wasn’t until I went to college and took some very different courses than what I had learned in high school, that I thought, “wow, this is something that combines a lot of different disciplines that I’m interested in and that I liked doing in one place.” And it became something that I thought, “wow, this is something I could actually do. And people will pay me to do something that I really enjoyed doing.”
Jennifer Berglund 02:08
What were the disciplines that you were interested in?
Jenny Carballo 02:11
My father was an aerospace engineer. He had a PhD in physics, and my family was very focused on math and science. I have a younger brother, who is a math genius. The focus was on “Wow, look at all this great stuff you can do in math and science.” And I felt that I leaned a little more towards the social sciences, but that I had that interest and background in math and science that you could combine history with things dealing with science and statistics and seeing patterning in the world in a way that math helps you understand patterning in the world, but thinking about humans instead of other things.
Jennifer Berglund 02:52
As an archaeologist, what kinds of patterns do you see that inform your work?
Jenny Carballo 02:57
One of the questions that I get the most from people when they find out I’m an archaeologist is ‘what’s the most exciting thing that you’ve found?’ And I think people are often thinking of that as one single thing that you found like this a-ha moment of you’ve opened something, and there’s one wonderful thing there that’s going to tell you something wonderful about the past. And really, it’s the many different things that are found with where they were last used or deposited — these many different patterns of the many things that you’re finding that tell you something about daily life, for example, in the past, and so just finding one pottery vessel really doesn’t give you that much information. But it’s the patterning in the hundreds of years of use and different kinds of pottery vessels or different kinds of stone tools or how people’s architecture, living spaces have changed over time, and that bigger picture of all those things together that really provide a richer vision of the past than single items or a single story, for example, a historical document. I got to Harvard not really knowing what I wanted to study, so I took the opportunity to take a variety of classes my first year, but I was still kind of in a high school mode of thinking, “Alright, I need a math, a science, a history, then an art or language.” And so I did that, and the elective that I chose for the second semester of my first year was an introduction to archaeology class, really that sort of eye opening moment of like, oh my gosh, this is something I could actually study this and look at all these other classes that they offer in the anthropology department. And there was a poster on the wall of come join this archaeology dig in Italy this summer, and I thought that just seemed like the absolute best way to spend my summer so I participated in a dig that was in a middle paleolithic cave, which if you know what the archaeology in Mexico is like versus something that’s over 100,000 years old in Italy was very different, but I just hadn’t been exposed to other places or knew what other kinds of digs there were available. So it sort of perked my interest, and when I came back, I started taking classes in Maya archaeology, there was also a class on the archaeology of women and children that I really found engaging. Then my second year, William Fash and Barbara Fash started in the Anthropology Department and had a Field School in Copan in Honduras, and that’s how I really got my start in thinking about Mesoamerican Mexican Central American Archaeology.
Jennifer Berglund 05:51
What is a Field School?
Jenny Carballo 05:53
A Field School is an opportunity, like you’re an enrolled student, where you get to go and participate in an archaeology dig with faculty and other archaeology team members, where you’re really an archaeologist in training. You’re watching and learning how an archaeology dig takes place with the process of thinking about “How do you choose where to dig?” What are the larger questions that you’re trying to answer — you don’t just show up and start excavating anywhere that you want. You need the required permissions from the place that you’re working. You have specific questions and goals in mind that this excavating of perhaps a house or palace or a complex is looking to answer. And so it’s like you’re shadowing different specialists and learning the sort of tools of the job. When my field school went to Copan, the archaeological team there at the site of Copan, so it would be something it was joint with the Honduran Institute who was interested in what was happening outside the center of the site. So around the main plaza of Copan there are various buildings like a large ball court, this hieroglyphic stairway that Barbara and Bill had worked on and done excavations at, various temples there in the center, but then they were interested in who were the people who are living on the outskirts. There are some what seemed like palatial complexes that might be related to the center, and so we were doing excavations at this complex that has the very exciting name of 9J5 based on the quadrant where it was founded. It’s the, you know, the number of what that space was on the map to understand what connection this place might have with the center for these elites that were connected with the center, or is a some other kind of political organization. And it was also part of wanting to conserve different parts of the surrounding site. So a lot of times with archaeology sites, you’ll have a main central part that gets designated as the archaeology site, and that gets the fence around it, and that gets, you know, where people, tourists, can enter. But then, mostly, a lot of these places were much bigger than that, and so you have archaeological settlements outside the fence that may be more danger of being destroyed by modern development. And so this project was also to see who lived here, what the history of this place was, even though it wasn’t inside the fence and to get that information before perhaps the hotel or some other kind of modern development was placed there.
Jennifer Berglund 08:36
And so what kinds of things would you find as you were going through the dig, and what was this matrix of material?
Jenny Carballo 08:44
Because I was a lowly student, I was given this job that was more to figure out how this site was connected with the center. The Maya had raised roads that connected to different parts of sites and other sites to each other that are called sacbes, and a lot of times these were covered with white stucco or sort of pounded Earth to give a more formal connection between parts of the site. And so I was tasked with trying to find the remains of whether or not there was a formal road connecting this site to the main center and see was there sort of a large grand staircase that connected these places, so that when you came from the main part of the site, was this like, grandiose place that you entered, or was it something not quite as elite as what you were seeing in the center. You know, it’s hard to mess up excavating a road. That’s my task. And I found it!
Jennifer Berglund 09:43
After this field school that you participated in, you ultimately finish Harvard. What happens next? What led you to pursue a PhD in Archaeology?
Jenny Carballo 09:53
I knew that I wanted to try to become an archaeologist and so that’s the next step that ou have to take. There are no paid jobs for students just with a B.A. in archaeology who wants to be an archaeologist in a place like Mexico or Central America. There are opportunities to do things in the US, but to have the ability to do research in this area that I became very interested in, that was the necessary next step, and so I went to the University of Michigan, where I wanted to study with two archaeologists who worked in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mexico, and also in the Maya area. You know, Michigan had a different approach to anthropology than Harvard, or certainly, I felt like the undergraduate education at Harvard was very different than the graduate education that I got, where I took a lot of classes as an undergrad where I was learning more like the culture history of certain places, like this is what archaeologists have reconstructed about these different time periods. But then at Michigan, it was thinking more about to what are the big theoretical concerns? What are the big issues that we can learn about humanity through the study of archaeology? But I think that that just has to relate to being an undergrad at one place, and then a grad students out the other grad students at at Harvard are learning those things, too. And so that was a big shift for me in trying to think about, what do we want to know and why? It’s not just trying to say, “oh, from this time period to this time period, this is what the site looked like.” It’s like, “Why? Why did it change? And how can we understand, for example, these dynamics of social inequality? How do you have the shift in certain places at a certain moment, where it seems that people are living of a similar sort of status and social class that then some people start to have more than others and are setting themselves apart? And how did those processes take place?
Jennifer Berglund 11:55
Can you describe one of these major changes that happens in the general area where you study?
Jenny Carballo 12:01
I’m teaching a class right now where we’re focused on through food in Mexico and using that as a case study to see what some of these bigger changes are in people’s lives and how food interacts with that. Food is something that permeates our lives every day. There’s so many layers to the ways that people eat, and that it’s tied into political and social changes, too, and we’ve just been talking about sort of these changes. You know, have people living as hunter gatherers, or foragers in the Valley of Oaxaca, for example, where the archaeology is showing people are living in pretty small groups and sort of moving about the landscape going to different environmental zones and resources to get their food and that as they start to turn to farming, and relying more and more on corn, agriculture, maize agriculture, that there’s villages that start to appear that people settle and live year round because they have access to a reliable food source there. But that at some point, within a couple 100 years after people settling in these villages, some people have greater surplus of corn, for example, than others, and that they start to have ways that they’re signaling to others that they have more. And using that to set themselves apart that then, you know, if you take out very long view, over several 100 years, what kinds of symbols people associate themselves with, you have early on different people in a specific village called San José Mogote in Oaxaca, associating themselves with different supernatural imagery. Some people are more associated with rain and lightning. These are images that are depicted on pottery that are associated with different parts of the site. Others are more associated with symbols have been interpreted as having to do with the Earth, more earthquakes. And over time, that symbol of lightning and rain, and associated with fertility and sustenance possibly is associated with the elite. And that many hundreds of years later at places like Monte Albán, this lightning god, Cocijo is how people call it there, is a symbol associated with that elite status. I first became interested in studying pottery because of the symbols that were on these early vessels at early farming villages, and I was able to participate while I was a graduate student at a project that was happening in the state of Tlaxcala, which is about two hours east of Mexico City, and I was working on a project that was interested in finding the very earliest sites there. So that early transition from being hunter gatherer foragers to farming villages and tracing that dynamic over the first several 100 years of what early village was like. And something that’s really interesting about this early time period in Mexico is that the same kind of symbols appear over huge swaths of Mexico. So Oaxaca is somewhere from Tlaxcala today, it’ll take you several hours in a car to get there. But people in Tlaxcala about 3000 years ago, were using similar kinds of pottery styles and symbols, as people in Oaxaca, and even farther to the south and other parts around Mesoamerica. And so I was really interested in how do people have these long distance connections with each other and sharing some of the same iconography and symbolism. And so the pottery was the line of evidence that was the most available to me. Pottery is pretty indestructible. In Highland Mexico, it’s the most abundant thing that you’ll find at an archeology site, and so I wanted to trace the patterning in that pottery and see if I could understand how people were appropriating different symbols on the pottery, what they were trying to say about themselves by the pottery that they’re using, and how that connected them with sort of this broader community at that time.
Jennifer Berglund 16:22
Part of what motivates you to do what you do is to fill in the gaps of the histories you didn’t learn in school. How does this factor into your work today?
Jenny Carballo 16:33
I think I realized pretty quickly going to college that, you know, I was just really surprised that I grew up just two hours away from the US-Mexico border, but my public school education didn’t include anything about the indigenous past of the Americas. It was really presented in a way that focused on European colonization, and thinking of the Americas in reaction to Europeans and colonists, and so I really wanted to study this thing that I didn’t know anything about. I was kind of embarrassed that I didn’t know anything about the Aztec or the Maya before going to college, and if I hadn’t taken these classes, I probably would have learned about them at some point, but I wanted to fill in that gap for myself. I realized things have definitely changed since then. I’m dating myself. This is more than 30 years ago, but I do think public school education has focused more on the indigenous past today than it did when I went to school.
Jennifer Berglund 17:04
So a lot of the questions you’ve asked in your field have involved social inequality in the ancient world and identity in early communities. Can you elaborate a little bit more about how you learn about this through pottery?
Jenny Carballo 17:57
Pottery is one of these most ubiquitous things that you’ll find at an archeology site in Mexico from these earlier time periods. Fired clay is just very hard to destroy. Yes, there are certain conditions that will make it not preserve as well as other things, but it’s really a very abundant resource for archaeologists to reconstruct what’s happening in people’s daily lives in the past, and so depending on where you’re finding the pottery sort of contributes to the different kinds of questions that you can answer. And so for a lot of the things that I was working on, people were living in pretty small houses in these early villages and digging large storage pits outside their house to store dried corn to use throughout the seasons. And once something like that, you know, maybe started to collapse a little bit, or you had some mold growing on the side of it, people would just dump a whole bunch of their trash in there and close it over so nobody would fall into it and dig another one. And so you have these really helpful for an archaeologist moments in time. Sometimes you have different stratigraphic layers where you have different things at the bottom of the pit. We assume they’re earlier than the ones that are at the top of the pit because of when someone put it in, and then something goes on top of it. But so, looking at the change in time over the pottery so, for example, the forms that you have, the different shapes that you have, can tell you things about the ways people are eating and using pottery. So looking at, for example, if people are predominantly in early time periods using large jars or oils for cooking food, but that later on, you have things that are more like flat comales is for making tortillas. You can start charting changes in people’s diet over time, and so that would be like an example of looking at how things change over time. But then if you look sort of synchronically looking at people who we think are living at the same time and see differences also in the kinds of pottery that they’re using, then we can say something or attempt to interpret differences in how people are interacting in a single moment of time. And so, you know, seeing perhaps that one house in the site has a lot of pottery that has a special decoration on it, or is of a chemical composition that would suggest it’s coming from somewhere far away, that you can try to connect those patterns to people’s social class, for example.
Jennifer Berglund 20:35
Would someone have a higher social class, would they have had pottery that comes from further away?
Jenny Carballo 20:44
So it seems in earlier time periods, before you have sort of marketplaces where people can go and buy any pottery that they want within their means, that people who have long distance connections with farther away places seem to have other features about them that would suggest they’re of a higher status than other people.
Jennifer Berglund 21:04
It’s just fascinating how you use that evidence together to piece this larger picture together. It’s just fascinating. Both you and your husband are archaeologists, and he’s an archaeologist at BU.
Jenny Carballo 21:20
We both met at Copan in Honduras on this field school experience, and both were really interested in continuing studying in Central America and Mexico. And we sort of differentiated though in the time periods that we’re focused on. I’ve always been more interested in this very early villages, and he’s more interested in later urbanism. And so, you know, we’ve both worked in class Scala at the site of Tlaxcala and nearby and sort of our little bit of differentiation in time period, and he started being a specialist in obsidian lithic technology, and I have focused more on ceramics. This is this very classic gender divide. Man, stone tool; women, ceramics. You know, interested in a lot of the same issues and helped each other appreciate what these different lines of evidence can tell us about the past.
Jennifer Berglund 22:18
So you have two children, do you think your jobs as archaeologists have it all influenced the ways in which you raise your kids?
Jenny Carballo 22:26
Yeah, I think so. They’ve really had to just sort of be part of the team and come along to Mexico, as we’ve been doing our work in a way that they recognize a lot of their friends have not been able to do or been forced to do.
Jennifer Berglund 22:40
Did they appreciate that?
Jenny Carballo 22:42
Yeah, they really appreciate it. I want to put them out of their comfort zone, and experience what life is like in different parts of the world. And really, they’ve only done it in Mexico for a longer time period. You know, I think it helps make them more global citizens and sort of see that there are lots of different ways of living and experiencing the world than this little bubble that they live in here in the suburbs of Boston.
Jennifer Berglund 23:11
Do they get to participate in the archaeological work that you do? Or is it more just being there while you all do the work?
Jenny Carballo 23:17
They’re able to be in the background, and see the process of work happening. And we often create fake work for them to do where they’re mimicking what’s happening. So, you know, as you’re excavating at a site, you’re getting back dirt. So all the dirt that’s covering things gets scooped out, it gets screened, like it goes through a screen so that you can pick out the smaller artifacts, and then that dirt is put off to the side until you use it to cover back over something. And so we would set up like actual pits, but in this part where there’s nothing there because we’ve already taken everything out of it and they would excavate that. But most of the time, they’re just sort of hanging out and playing soccer with kids who live nearby, or, you know, just sitting under a tree and being bored. But I think it’s good to just have them hang out, sort of see their parents and others at work. Where we stay when we’re working at Teotihuacan, we’re very close, just a couple of blocks away from this part of the town where a market comes every couple of days. This is a moving market that goes to different towns and on certain days of the week, it comes there, and it’s just their favorite thing to go out there and see, “all right, who’s got the good quesadillas today and who’s the fruit guy and who’s the person selling these kinds of vegetables?” You know, it’s very different than our sterile grocery store experience here. And even the farmers markets where we live near Boston, they’re just not… it’s not the same. So it’s expanded their palates, and I think that’s the thing that they miss the most other than the people that I get to hang out with.
Jennifer Berglund 25:08
You all have been working on a refresh of what has been called our Encounters gallery. Why the refresh? And how are you thinking about the content differently from the way it was before?
Jenny Carballo 25:25
This gallery was installed, it opened in 1993, and the theme of it was encounters with the Americas. And it was designed to mark the 500 year anniversary of Columbus, quote, unquote, “arriving,” “discovering” the Americas in 1492. And the gallery is divided into two sections where you have it says before 1492 on one side, and after 1492 on the other. And we want to shift the focus away from thinking of that one encounter as being the defining moment for all of indigenous Americas. And so this is just part of a longer planning process to change the stories that are being told in the galleries at the Peabody Museum. And so, for now, we have a longer term plan to make changes to the objects that are on display. But for now, it’s a refresh in the framing of the way that the story is being told in that space, and no longer putting a harsh separation between pre 1492 and post 1492, to emphasize the continuity, and resilience of indigenous cultures in the Americas. The new text is going to be bilingual, and so we’re hoping to make it a more welcoming space for a wider audience visiting the gallery. And over time, as we think about how to change the exhibits, we’ll be looking to incorporate descendant communities in the telling of those stories.
Jennifer Berglund 27:09
I think one great example of this is there are these things called molas that have been around for a long time. So can you describe what a mola is?
Jenny Carballo 27:17
Molas are textiles that are made by an indigenous group in Panama, who are called the Guna, and they’re made with a technique that’s called reverse applique that is where you have multiple layers of cloth that are sewn together, and that as you sort of cut out the upper layers of the cloth by creating designs, that then you’re using multiple colors, and sort of stitching to create designs so it’s not a woven textile. The multiple layers of cloth are sort of peeled back, cut out to reveal patterns and designs and that those different layers are sewed together in intricate ways to create patterns and designs.
Jennifer Berglund 28:04
This just serves as an example of how through material culture you’re talking a little bit more about how the past is a part of the present. We have this image of a mola that was made recently, and one of the reasons you know it was made recently is because the image on the mola is of Spider-Man. That, I think, is a really beautiful example of something that is undeniably modern that has made its way into this practice that’s been around for hundreds of years, that’s likely based in a practice that was around long before that. This was kind of one of the ways in which you are making an effort to show how the past sort of factors into the future, and this is sort of an example of how you’re rethinking the way in which you talk about history and its interplay in the present. What larger issues are you all beginning to tackle in this refresh, and what kind of work remains to be done in the future?
Jenny Carballo 29:07
The refresh is just starting to think about how this space can be transformed into something that is more inclusive and welcoming than it has been previously, and to think about the different relationships that the museum needs to build with various communities around the United States and the world to change the way that the museum is caring for these collections.
Jennifer Berglund 29:34
And for the records of the past these historical records of the cultures of the world.
Jenny Carballo 29:40
The refresh to the gallery is part of a bigger mission that the museum has to change its practices and approach to the collections that they care for. Museums all over the world are rethinking how they care for different collections, and the Peabody recognizes that it has a lot of work to d, and it is doing a lot of work towards rethinking that relationship. And so this is just part of a first step that we’re taking to think more broadly about,who are these spaces for, and how do we connect people to those spaces. Part of my job is working on helping people throughout the world know what is housed at the museum, like, I am a ceramic specialist for the Peabody, and I spend most of my time organizing the collections and updating the online database so that people, for example, from different parts of Mexico can look online and see, “oh, there are collections from 1953 from this place near my home at the museum,” and then can start having a new dialogue with these communities about what’s at the museum and how they want to interact with those collections. And so the gallery is sort of part of that new dialogue that museums working towards having.
Jennifer Berglund 31:00
All of these efforts are part of this kind of larger dialogue and this larger learning process that museums are going through, as you say, to be more inclusive, and to invite people in to not be this place where you tell people what to think about what they’re seeing. It’s a way to make people see themselves in the gallery.
Jenny Carballo 31:23
We’ve talked about patterning and archaeological data and how people are different. Something I don’t think I did talk about is that, you know, different archeologists approach the same data in different ways and tell different stories about it. And so, telling a different story about the items that are currently on display in the gallery highlights, you know, the many stories that archaeology can sort of help connect people to. And so the story that we’re reframing and telling now with this small refresh is not the only story and that there are going to be many different stories that we try to tell but with the help of others in the coming years.
Jennifer Berglund 32:04
Well, I am so excited to see what stories come with this in the future. And I’m really excited to see this refresh and how people interact with it. I think it’s just going to be wonderful. Jenny Carballo, thank you so much for being here. This has been wonderful.
Jenny Carballo 32:26
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed chatting with you today.
Jennifer Berglund 32:36
Today’s HMSC Connects! Podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and to Jenny Carballo, for her wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks.