Latest / The Groundswell Effect / What shells reveal: archaeology, Indigenous knowledge & coastal stewardship with Dr. Meghan Burchell
Transcript
- Meghan Burchell: And when we don't recognize that people living thousands of years ago, when we don't recognize that indigenous people had management practices, you're really imposing a colonial, a very Western perspective on how people from different cultures, people from non-Western societies and people of the past manage their day-to-day lives. And people of the past are just as complex as people as today. Ruth Silver: I'd like to introduce an esteemed guest today on the Groundswell Effect. I'm so, so pleased to have Dr. Megan Burchell with us. Megan, you're an associate professor of archaeology at Memorial University, and you're recognized as the first researcher to integrate biology. And chemistry shells into archaeological interpretation. So, what I know about you and I've seen develop over the years is you have built tools that are precise enough to reconstruct not just what coastal communities ate, but how often, when, with what degree of care over thousands and thousands of years. And so your methods make legible for the first time in. material science terms, something that Indigenous communities already knew, that these coastlines were actively designed, managed, and tended. And this is a show about world building, and there are two kinds of worlds that appear in your work. There's a new world of seeing the world in a different way. So you've built Meghan Burchell: Mm-hmm. Ruth Silver: the tools that enable us to do that. And then there's a new world in which Indigenous knowledge and Western material science can coexist and inform one another. And I want to talk today about I want to hear your story of the Meghan Burchell: Okay. Ruth Silver: work, and then I'd love to kind of talk about what this makes possible and the conditions that were needed for you to be able to do this work. Meghan Burchell: I'll start with a very brief overview of what I do and how I get into it. Over periods of sometimes thousands of years, coastal communities would harvest shellfish and then deposit them near their homes or their campsites, in villages, sometimes in smaller specialized places just for harvesting shellfish. And these places are used Year after year, season after season, and you end up with these huge piles of shells called shell middens. And some shell middens around the world can be tens of meters deep. Some of them in British Columbia are actually multiple kilometers long. There's over ten thousand identified archaeological shell midden sites in the coast of British Columbia. And The rest of Canada as well also has shell middens, freshwater middens in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island. there's no shell middens in Newfoundland and Labrador, where I am right now, but we do have mussel shells from archaeological sites. Ruth Silver: Can I can I just say wow? Cause this is something that I'm sure no listener has ever thought about or realized that all of this Meghan Burchell: It's it's pretty weird. Ruth Silver: knowledge is right here and all this, you know, archaeological timestamp is probably near Meghan Burchell: Yep. Ruth Silver: where they live. Meghan Burchell: So the really cool part, I'll get into this, but first I have to correct you, I'm not the very first person to do this. This technique was actually first introduced in the 1970s. So that's the first time chemists were able to unlock the secrets inside shells to read ocean temperature. I'm the only one in Canada that does this and I'm one of the very few people in the world that does it at a very large scale. So, what's really interesting about these shell midden sites is you have this record of what people were doing over time. But once you actually look into a shell, it's like peering through a stained glass window into the past. So when you cut open a seashell, you're gonna see lines and spaces in between the lines, and sometimes they're brown, sometimes they're white. But when you put it underneath a microscope, you can magnify everything and you can see how the shell grows. And every day when the tide goes out, The shell secretes a little bit of its material, calcium carbonate. It's like chalk. And there's this tiny little lip that goes out and comes back in and leaves this microscopic ring. So the technique is called sclerochronology. It's just like dendrochronology, how you can read the rings in a tree year after year. I can actually read the lines in the shell day after day for thousands and thousands and thousands of years into the past. What we do next to even better understand what's going on in these past shell lives is we use lasers and micro drills to get inside and analyze the chemicals of the shell. Because every time a shell grows, it takes a little bit of the seawater's memory with it and locks it into the shell. So it's going to record the temperature of the water, the salinity of the water, and other elements like how high the shell is and in the intertidal zone. Sometimes we can even see when a shell was attacked. By a predator. Thousands of years ago. Yeah. Ruth Silver: This is amazing. sclerochronology. It's it's like totally understanding the context of that that shell's life within the ocean. This is so amazing. Meghan Burchell: And then it's connected to an individual that picked it up, put it in a basket, put it in a bag, held it in their hand, walked back to the beach, took the meat out, maybe dried the meat, cooked the meat, ate it raw, preserved the meat in oils, and then left that shell behind. And then perhaps a week later somebody else came, perhaps that person came back, perhaps it was with their grandma or their aunties or their kids. But you can see in these deposits created by humans all of these layers and activities. So you can see when people are harvesting shells really frequently, and you can see when they switch species. So for example, if there's going to be a really big feast with mussels, when you cut down the side of shellmidden, you see these bright purple. streaks of crushed mussel You can see it with urchin too. It comes at neon purple sometimes. And these are these very short-term events that might have happened over the course of a few days, but it was a few days a thousand years ago. And you read these patterns over and over and over again, and you connect all the different places in the landscape, and then you can understand how people used. not just one place, but all of the places and how they're connected to maintain and build and grow subsistence systems for managing food resources. Ruth Silver: This is so cool. It's so imaginative and at the same time definitive and brings you back to a world of possibility that we could never enter without these clues. Meghan Burchell: One of the things I do when I'm I'm start teaching my students about this is when I when I started my my education in this, which feels like a really long time ago because of how much theory has changed, how much archaeologists and their relationships with Canada's indigenous people has also changed. How we work with truth and reconciliation and good relations in mind has fundamentally changed how we ask questions. A lot of these theories about how landscapes were used and they're called settlement subsistence strategies. Some people think it's only about economics. But humans are so much more complicated than just economics. And when I'm teaching this to my students, I can ask them questions about so, like, what did you eat for breakfast today? And everybody in the room ate something different. Some people didn't eat it all, and some people will have a big lunch. And there's all of this variation. And so if you start by asking the question that you can't assume everything in the past is the same or everything in the past is different, you're looking for these patterns over time with an open mind, it changes how you superimpose your own bias on Ruth Silver: Right. Meghan Burchell: how you understand past societies. But there's a logic in things. If you go to the grocery store and everybody goes to a grocery store every day and they only buy Apples and no other fruit, you're gonna run out of apples first. But it also doesn't make sense to buy apples when they're not in season. So there's systems in our modern society that maybe aren't great for managing food. But we call them management strategies. And when we don't recognize that people living thousands of years ago, when we don't recognize that indigenous people had management practices, you're really imposing a colonial, a very Western perspective on how people from different cultures, people from non-Western societies and people of the past manage their day-to-day lives. And people of the past are just as complex as people as today. Ruth Silver: Is there something, maybe I want to go back to when you were studying and when you first set out on this path? Is there some kind of insight or experience that you had that lit you up and helped to to solidify this was going to be your direction, that you wanted to do this kind of work? How did that happen? Meghan Burchell: I think there's a few things that happen along the way. So part of it is I think because I had to go into the field in remote locations and working with communities to get the materials I needed to analyze. And then I needed to work in very specialized labs to get inside of the shells. And I could see over time how the resolution and precision increased. So when I started working with shells, I could tell if a shell was older or I could tell a shell was younger. I could look at age distributions of the shells from archaeological sites and say, these ones are older, these ones are younger. And then you can look at harvesting and population demographics and how intensively people were harvesting the shells. And as I got more Practiced in sclerochronology and I had more exposure to some really incredible technology, I started to be able to see inside the shell. So I think one of the first really big wow moments was the first time we realized that the daily lunar growth increments aligned perfectly with tidal cycles. And so we had a collection of shells that were collected in 1984 by a master's student at Simon Fraser University. And he very generously let me use this collection. So it was a collection of Of shells collected once a month. So we could see the seasonal variation at the very end growth, the end growth of life of shell when it's capturing that moment it died. And after analyzing this collection, you could see that the shells are precisely growing 365 days a year. And the shells are growing at the same rate as the lunar calendar. And I could Go back in time Ruth Silver: Mm. Meghan Burchell: to 1984 and see a full moon, I could see a winter storm, I could see heavy fresh water. That was really cool. And then I added the chemistry into it. And that means that you can go back and you can reconstruct ancient sea surface temperatures. But then when you combine that chemistry with the growth. You can see these very short-term eruptions. So, for example, you can see when there's really heavy rain flow in a time of year when you wouldn't expect it. Now, you have to look at hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of samples to see these, and it's really not easy at Ruth Silver: Ha ha ha. Meghan Burchell: all. But then when you compare that shell with a precise radiocarbon date, and now you can lock in. The year within a few hundred years, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen thousand years ago with a day. And then you remember a person collected. Once all that fit together, I think that was that was really incredible. But also, I think there was something really special about some of the field work I did because it was all of the samples I collected in the field were collected with teams of women. And we were working in Ruth Silver: my gosh, I love this. Meghan Burchell: Like PhD students working in very remote places. they were my PhD colleagues. And it was amazing because you had this really intense experience where your colleagues are helping you collect samples for your research, you're helping collect them like them their samples. you're in the middle of wilderness, there's very few. Yeah. Ruth Silver: Yeah, give us give us a day in the life of collecting shells, collecting samples. Meghan Burchell: I well, nowadays, in in my more seasoned years, I watch my students do it from the beach, Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: but actually I I've moved more into urban and contemporary. archaeology. So I must say that field work is a lot easier because I can do it downtown Vancouver in a hotel room. My last project was actually a cave site in Croatia, which was pretty spectacular. But I don't do the intense excavations anymore. But I've had some incredible experiences in northern British Columbia camping in the Dundas Islands group. And that was remarkable when you wake up with the sun, You have breakfast, you pack the boats and you go out until the sky is dark or the weather sends you home. But a lot of it is just making a lot of observations about where you are in space and time and then collecting Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: as many shells as you can and killing them as quickly as you can on the beach and and just Ruth Silver: Yeah. I mean what you keep talking about is seeing with new eyes and different Meghan Burchell: Hmm. Ruth Silver: tools that allow you to see with new eyes, different mindsets, different a a certain kind of focus. tell me more about that. Meghan Burchell: So I actually I'll give you an example of that and I'll I'll use my my student because I I think it's a really interesting example of how working with indigenous groups, negotiating with Western science, but also training people. So our current project right now is working with Tsleil-Waututh Nation in Burrard Inlet, British Columbia. and we've been working with them for about four years and this project was designed with the community wants in mind and so they asked me what I could do and I came up with a science and have an amazing PhD student and a postdoc that was working on this and we put it together. And so our project is trying to understand the long-term history of shellfish harvesting, the season of shellfish harvesting, past changes in the local ocean environment, and how we can record modern pollution in shells today. And so when I'm working with my student, every once in a while she will insist on adding a few samples from a really small site. Statistically, we don't need any more samples. Methodologically, it's going to take us a lot more time to do it. And from a Western scientific perspective, you already know the answer, right? But we're not asking these questions only for us, we're also asking them for the community. So even though sometimes we are doing what we would think would be replicating something too much or an unnecessary species to analyze, that's what Tsleil-Waututh is asking us to analyze. And so we're doing that as well. And it's interesting because my student is very grounded in that. And so even if I'll say, well, you've collected enough samples, I think you need to move on. And she'll say, Well, we should be looking at this species as well. But you don't have to because and she'll say Yeah, we have to. And it's it sounds really simple, but I think a lot of times in academic science, my mind is thinking about the end of my students funding. You know, you have four years to do a PhD, finish Ruth Silver: Mm. Right. Meghan Burchell: it as quickly as possible. and my student is thinking to do this with integrity, that her timeline Ruth Silver: Mm. Meghan Burchell: isn't the the biggest priority, Ruth Silver: Mm. Meghan Burchell: which is incredibly mature for a student. Ruth Silver: What is that combination of relationships and technology? how does that inspire a future? Meghan Burchell: my academic grounding was in anthropology, studying cultures. And my master's research, I did archival research. I looked at gender and burial patterns. I did not do science. This came, this came afterwards when I got a job as a lab technician, and then I I dove into it. I didn't take my first chemistry courses until I was in the second year of my PhD. And one of the things I found really exciting was that science made a lot more sense when I had to apply it directly. But I also found that an anthropologist has different cultures in the academic sphere than an earth scientist and a material scientist. And I found that there were certain ways that you can fit into other spaces. Being yourself, but respecting the people around you as you are moving into new spaces, but then also being able to reflect on how much you're changing yourself and you're changing how you think about things. And I didn't quite realize really how reflective I've been on all of this until I think the pandemic when a lot of us just had a lot more time to think and think about what's important. Ruth Silver: I love how you describe doing the work to get in the door, to know Meghan Burchell: Mm. Ruth Silver: that you can sit around that table. You might not be a hundred percent confident, but you've done the work to be in a situation where you feel you can contribute and well you're learning. And then where does a confidence come from to be yourself, to know that actually I have a different way of looking at this that is gonna invite other people to think about this differently. And as a collective, we can get somewhere we couldn't have gone without me being in the room. Meghan Burchell: I think it happens in a few different ways So there were some ways where you think some of these things are weakness. So for example, being a a woman in academia and in the world Ruth Silver: Being a woman! Meghan Burchell: being a woman and you find that there's there's some spaces that are really uncomfortable. there's some spaces that you also enjoy the discomfort of being in. It takes a lot of practice. I enjoyed it a little bit when I was younger. now I like being a little bit more solid, a little bit more calm. But I found that choosing the people you work with is it's a luxury. Like it's an absolute luxury. there's something really cool about solving very strange problems and the kind of friendships and relationships you build with these people. And being in a space where you value somebody so scientifically for what they can do, but then they value you because you understand, for example, working with students. I have a lot of teaching experience. before I became a professor, I was an instructional assistant. So I did a lot of development with teaching for undergraduate students. And there's a lot of distance between a full professor and a first-year undergraduate student. And so sometimes being able to see the places in between. It's like finding that little missing piece of the puzzle. Ruth Silver: I keep hearing you talk about humanity, like bringing your full self and finding ways to incorporate your passions, your interests, to help to light other people up through what lights you up and develop Meghan Burchell: Hmm. Ruth Silver: relationships and remember that we have to relate to each other first before we can do the work. and what also strikes me, I mean I guess I kind of knew this about scientists in general, but your profession is full of curious people. That might be, Meghan Burchell: Yeah. Ruth Silver: you know, if if everybody had three words to describe themselves, curious might be in most people's description. Well, you'd you'd hope. You'd hope. Meghan Burchell: Yeah. Yeah. Well yeah. Super nerd, super geek, big time nerd. Like those are Ruth Silver: Ha ha Meghan Burchell: and there's there is kind of a a pride and endless curiosity about it. you can ask these very weird questions and then figure out ways to solve them. Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: And I think one of the things that you hear a lot too is you know, STEM, science, technology, engineering, math. But all of a sudden STEAM comes along, you know, and it has science, technology, ST, engineering, arts and math. And it's like it has Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: to squeak in there. But I think a lot of times when we think about science and art. they're so easy to enjoy together without even realizing that you're enjoying it together. And that's one of the things that I've started to really love more recently is thinking about the scientific images we produce and the emotions that it evokes in people. Ruth Silver: Yeah. Yeah. Meghan Burchell: the process of actually making those samples is incredibly technically creative. So when you're you're cutting a shell, you have to cut it on a very specific angle. And in order to mount the shell in the saw, you have to build the right mounts for it. Ruth Silver: Mm. Meghan Burchell: And I think partly I was incredibly lucky to have some very creative friends, but also the amount of time I spent in art studios in high school and working with ceramics and being able to build things and shape things really made me confident in bringing some of those skills into the lab. But it's Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: also the other thing, too, that I thought was really cool when I started working with the scientists was that they love whiteboards. And ideas are so much easier expressed through art. And you don't even realize that it's art, but it becomes art. I'm very lucky. I love what I do. And I I also recognize like how privileged I am at this point in my career to be able to ask really weird questions like this and Ruth Silver: I'm wondering, you know what it is about Megan, about your drive and your desire to do something different and to see yourself outside a as a person who can who can innovate, who can seek new ideas. Meghan Burchell: I think part of it is I like the I like the challenge of solving these kinds of puzzles. it's a very weird career to use clams to put together the past to predict the future. And I when I was growing up, I loved dinosaurs. I didn't think that I'd be an archaeologist. Paleontologists work with dinosaurs, but now I get to live my best life because I can look at as many fossils as I want. but I think I think part of it was I saw I saw the freedom. That a career in academics could give you, I have the freedom Ruth Silver: Mm-hmm. Meghan Burchell: to decide what I want to do every single day. And it sounds great, but my gosh, if I don't do what I need to do on a single day. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it feels bad, but I can work anywhere in the world, I can go anywhere I want. and I think being able to have that through a career that always keeps you curious. and the work is really hard sometimes. And I have I've slept in labs, I I have slept in caves, I have arthritis in my hands from such small detailed sample work. But there Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: wasn't one second of that where I wasn't having an incredible time. And I think part of it is Knowing that in this tiny little vial of powder, you're holding this environmental and cultural history. you have not the whole world in your hands, but this part of something that nobody else in the universe is ever gonna touch. And I think that really that drives you. And there's adrenaline in it. It's exciting. I it is it is exciting being out on the ocean and hunt back whales breaching by your boat. It's Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: scary, but it's really cool. And you're sitting there and you're like, I can't believe this is my job. Like, I don't study whales, but here they are. Yeah. And Ruth Silver: Yes, sign sign me up. Sign me up for the next one. Meghan Burchell: you know, and so I think I think there's that challenge, but and I and I like that, but it's also the satisfaction. Of seeing something get resolved. So I'll go back to my current PhD student really quickly. part of her thesis, is an experiment that I started during my thesis. So I started this about 20 years ago and it was all done manually. And now the technology is there, so we don't we don't have to do any of these steps, but the foundations were there, and I couldn't get the I couldn't get the experiment to work. And she got it to work. I waited 20 years for this. It's the coolest Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: thing. First thing I do, I'm emailing everybody from my thesis committee. Hey, guess what happened? Here's the results. And holy cow, they are so excited. And it's like, I can't believe you did this. Ha ha ha. We Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: did this. And it's actually it's five generations of people, you know, and you you connect this and so it and it's these Ruth Silver: Yeah. Yeah. Meghan Burchell: moments, these I don't know, they're just they're just really cool. It's It's like what it's my personal Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: sunrise. Ruth Silver: Well, first you describe this incredible amount of freedom that you feel as a person who lives their life chasing ideas and finding ways to discover more things. and then I love that you ended up with this, you know, sense of belonging and sense of legacy and feeling yourself Not only within like the human story, but you even talked about like I'm the only person who's holding this thing in the universe. And I'm gonna see it in this way. And it's like you belong to the stars again. this is really beautiful. Meghan Burchell: add a student into there. Add a first generation student. Add then, add their grandparents Ruth Silver: Yeah. Meghan Burchell: at their graduation. And I think the other thing, I was very lucky to work at a lot of really like fancy research intensive schools. And Memorial has an emphasis on the people of the province. And so many of my students are first generation. They're from remote communities. and being able to be a part of that and then share what I see as magic and I mean and then they see the same things and that's like I don't know if it's a gift that I'm giving them or it's a gift that they give me but I've held so many Nan's hands at convocation and that's all my grandpa wanted for me and I think Ruth Silver: Yeah, yeah. Meghan Burchell: you know like he was from a generation where education was so easily denied to people and being able to be part of something that helps you know, solve questions about the past and the environment and predict models for the future, but then really see the impact it has on people and how it changes people, it is it it's it's pretty intense. Ruth Silver: Dr. Megan Burchell, thank you so much for this conversation. I'm blown away by your work. I'm blown away by your passion and your integrity and how you approach science and your students and your contributions to the world. And it was so interesting to hear about your personal history and your motivations, behaviors, desires. The characteristics that it takes to be a world builder to decide that you're gonna do something new that nobody else has done before. And If people wanted to find out more about your work. Where should they go? Meghan Burchell: Google Scholar, or even if you just type into Google Megan with an H and Clam, I pop up. There's not a lot of sclerochronologists in the world. There's probably under 250 of us. And I'm definitely the only one in Canada doing it. So I think you can find me obviously through Memorial University on my homepage, Google Scholar. But just Meghan and Clam, and I usually pop right up. Ruth Silver: And if we have some listeners out there who are mega clam fans, would you be open to hearing from them? Meghan Burchell: Yes, if they're open clam fans, absolutely, if they have questions about clams, and better yet, if they have any connections to collecting clams, snails, oysters, or mussels. Ruth Silver: All right. Well, thank you again for being on the show. We're so lucky to have had this time with you and looking forward to the next conversation. Meghan Burchell: Me too. Thanks so much, Ruth.