Archaeology Students Find New Ground for Research With a Helping Hand From FP&M
Bellah, a third-year anthropology major with a focus on archaeology, and Figueroa, a fourth-year anthropology major also with a focus on archaeology, weren’t examining the remnants of an ancient civilization. Rather, they were sorting through the debris of students at Cal Poly Pomona: food containers, beverage cups and snack wrappers.
The 21 students in Assistant Professor Annie Danis’ Anthropology 4300: Archaeological Method and Theory class sifted through bags of trash from the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, College of Engineering and Campus Center. The trash that was collected and delivered to the class by Landscape Services, which is under Facilities Planning & Management (FP&M), is an example of cross-department cooperation that is common across campus.
“Typically, when you hear the word archaeology you think of the past and historical times. It’s definitely interesting to put it in a contemporary aspect,” Bellah said. “It’s also interesting to see how well we actually throw our trash away.”
Hands-On Learning
If students are to become archaeologists, they have to get their hands dirty. Not only did Bellah and Figueroa sort through trash, they also had to place unconsumed meal scraps, coffee, soda and other liquids into containers so that waste could be weighed and recorded to determine the amount of food that is typically thrown away. The exercise was not for those with queasy stomachs. This opportunity at hands-on learning drives CPP’s mission for student success.
This is the second year that Danis has utilized campus trash as a way to show students how archaeological methods are used at excavation sites but in a modern and relatable environment. Students washed Styrofoam containers, snack and food wrappers, plastic cups, straws and lids so they could be given an identification number and catalogued. These “artifacts” will be used to compare what is thrown away in the coming years.
“It’s different type of archaeology but at the same time it makes sense. It’s a contemporary way of looking at ‘artifacts,’” said Jesse Richert, second-year anthropology major, another member of the class who was examining the rubbish. “Essentially, a lot of archaeology is looking at people’s trash, it’s just old people’s trash. This is looking at current people’s trash.”
Forming a Collaboration
One day two years ago as Danis was combing through trash containers for specimens, Jesse Quiroz, the lead of the north campus crew in Landscape Services, walked over to her and asked why she was going through the garbage. Upon hearing that the trash was part of a class project, Quiroz volunteered to set aside and bring trash bags to her class, pending approval from his supervisor that was quickly granted.
To help give students context about trash collection on campus, Danis invited Quiroz and Landscape staff member Juan Chavez to speak to her class about issues they encounter on their daily rounds. The cross-department cooperation allowed Quiroz and Chavez to give insights to students and help them formulate their semester-closing capstone project.
“The garbage project is kind of a stepping-stone assignment to them coming up with their own research proposal,” Danis said. “They learn how to develop a good research question, how to do the appropriate kind of background research, to know what a good question is in that particular area and then connect that question to methods from archeology that will actually produce the right kind of data so that you don't ask a question and then collect a bunch of stuff and realize it doesn't match.”
Students asked Quiroz and Chavez questions that included how agricultural waste is disposed of (used to fertilize orchards), what is done with tree trimmings (grounded up then spread around campus as mulch) and if garbage generated by the campus community is sorted for recyclables (Burrtec Waste Services does this at its collection facility).
“Speaking to the class was fun and an opportunity to educate them on the challenges that we face. The students were very interested in what happens to the trash on campus,” Quiroz said. “It was an opportunity for them to get to know Facilities Management and it was an opportunity for us to educate the students on why we do what we do. We’re here to serve the students.”
Excavation Site Experiences
Danis has had her share of excavation work as an undergraduate and relates those experiences to her class. She performed field work in the arid plains of northern New Mexico and the Rio Grande, which gave her hands-on research experience and influenced her career path.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Barnard College in 2010, she taught classes while completing her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Danis has also taught at Stanford, Cal State East Bay and the University of Denver before landing at CPP.
Her class focuses on the techniques and methodology used by archaeologists and can be applied in settings as familiar as the University Quad to remote desert excavation sites. Students also learn that the sometimes-tedious archaeological detective work isn’t what is portrayed by the swashbuckling Indiana Jones on the movie screen.
“One of the things anthropologists like to say we do is we make the familiar strange. If you work on material from a really distant time period, it's already strange,” Danis said. “You may not know what an object was used for and archaeologists have developed lots of methods to overcome that and be able to gain information from the past. In order to understand those methods, it's actually easier to start with something that students are really familiar with: energy drink cans, Cheetos bags and Panda Express containers.”