Episode 133 - Catherine Kearns: "Soak up your time in college."

Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics Catherine (Katie) Kearns is on The Course to talk about her study in Mediterranean archaeology and how her work crosses to reconstructing and studying ancient environments. Growing up, Professor Kearns was an athlete, loved doodling, and also picked up Latin. When she was introduced to history and, later, archaeology, she knew that's the path she wanted to continue. Tune in to hear Professor Kearns' career story!

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Catherine Kearns of the Department of Classics. Professor Kearns is co-editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and a National Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America. 

Her first book, The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus, an Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change, was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2023., She's here today to talk about her archaeological work in Cyprus, how people in her field are able to reconstruct and study ancient environments, and how she became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Kearns, thank you so much for joining us on The Course. How are you this morning? 

Katie Kearns 00:39
I'm doing really well. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Stephen 00:42
Yeah, absolutely. For starters, could you please tell us what your position is at the university and, just a little bit in layman's terms, like what, you know, what that really means that you focus on? 

Katie 00:53
Gotcha. So I am an assistant professor in the Department of Classics, which typically studies as it's remit the entire ancient Mediterranean, and I'm an archaeologist within the department So I study the material culture and the history of the ancient Mediterranean I focus particularly on the island of Cyprus or the eastern Mediterranean. And then I tend to study what are called the Bronze and Iron Age period so roughly 3000 to about 2,000 years ago

Stephen 01:27
When you were a kid, maybe like middle or high school age, what did you think you were going to end up doing?

Katie 01:33
Yeah. I was really into drawing. I thought I was going to be a cartoonist or an artist. I spent just like hours doodling or sketching and getting really into it and really enjoyed it. And then in high school, I went to a public high school outside of Philadelphia and they happened to have a pretty strong Latin program.

So I started taking Latin maybe at like 13 or 14 and just really liked it. I kind of almost like problem solving a different language. And I also had a teacher who started incorporating Roman history into the class, which I just found really cool, especially the physical stuff. So she would show a map and we would read something about a particular building.

And as I took more history and more Latin, I realized, wow, you could actually kind of like do this, like you could study ancient history, which was new to me. And that's how I started to get interested in maybe in ancient Mediterranean history through Latin and through courses like, you know, European history, American history. I just ate it all up. 

Stephen 02:41
Cool. So by the time that you were starting college, did you, were you sure you were going down that road or was there a particular moment or anything in particular that convinced you? 

Katie Kearns 02:52
Yeah. I think I was in high school. I had started to understand what archeology was and was getting more and more interested in it. I think because I had these great teachers who would bring in stuff into the classroom, like, or take us to museums. We lived, you know, right down, the street from something like the Penn Museum, and so that introduction to archaeology was really cool, and I started to realize, well, maybe I could do this, and there weren't many colleges or universities that had that, let's say, as a major, archaeology as a major. 

But George Washington, where I ended up, did have that as a major. And so I think I did know by the time I left high school that this was at least something I wanted to pursue in college. I also was an athlete, so I was also looking at like, where could I play sports? And GW happened to fit that bill, and it ended up being wonderful.

They had a BA in archaeology, which meant I could take a huge range of courses in African prehistory, Mesoamerican archaeology, anthropological theory, and it was just a really wonderful introduction to the field. Yeah. Yeah!

Stephen 04:07
You said something like what is archaeology, what really archaeology is. What really is it? I mean, I feel like it's probably something that a lot of people have an idea of, but how would you actually define it? 

Katie Kearns 04:15
Yeah. it's one of those cool fields where a lot of people have a certain image of what it is and there is some truth to that. I mean, we do a lot of field work, but it boils down to the study of human culture and human society and humans, through the material culture that we use, that we make, that we share with each other, the traditions of that culture, how we dispose of it.

So what archaeologists do is we look through the material culture to try to understand human practices, how we relate to one another, historical changes. And to do that, we often do field work where we're excavating new materials. And we have people who specialize in how to date materials or how to categorize them based on style.

We also have specialists to study them from a more scientific perspectives. Like what are materials made of? how are they made? Can we tell when they were made? Can we tell anything about technological processes? And so it's a way to think about human interactions with the world around us. 

Stephen 05:25
Cool. Yeah, I like how you said, through looking at human culture through, those materials, not the end goal is not just like the shards of pottery or whatever it may be. 

Katie Kearns 05:37
I mean, this is something you end up teaching a lot, the history of archaeology as a field and how it developed, because you're absolutely right, it developed, particularly as a colonialist exercise of acquiring objects of other cultures and putting them in museums. And we've kind of come a long way from that, but we're still really confronting that as a discipline.

But at its heart, it's really understanding who we are through the way that we interact with objects, with materials, with physical surroundings.

Stephen 06:08
So, you say that, you know, focus now on Cyprus. Is that something that started in college or like how did that kind of specific focus originate? 

Katie Kearns 06:17
Yeah, that's one of those quirks of grad school, actually. I did a BA in archaeology, which was really great at GW, and then sort of not really knowing what the next steps were, just thought I would apply to grad school, and in classical archaeology, you do need language training, so I ended up doing a master's, just to get maybe some more Greek and Latin under my belt and a little bit more study. 

And then I did my PhD at Cornell in a classics department, so you're specializing in Mediterranean archaeology. And I happened to be surrounded by some really interesting interdisciplinary archaeologists, including my advisor who worked on Cyprus.

And so when I got to Cornell, I thought I would be doing one subject, which was more, Roman architecture, but he invited me to Cyprus and it was awesome and I had a really great field experience and realized that a lot of the things that I was starting to become interested in, some of those research questions I could ask on Cyprus through that field work and that, and so it was really one of those opportunities that arise in grad school that put me on that path, rather than like heading directly into it. Yeah.

Stephen 07:37
What were some of those research questions? Like what made a good fit?

Katie Kearns 07:40
When I got to grad school, I had become interested in human interactions with what we could call the natural environment or the landscape physical environments. So things like resource management, but also how they would design or engage with quote nature, whether that was artificial constructions of nature through gardens or understanding something like environmental shifts. Changes in forestry, changes in water, accessibility. And I started to become more interested in environmental history. 

So how could environmental history help archaeology or integrate with archaeology to think about how humans relate to environmental change, landscape change, how they make and produce landscapes.

And Cyprus was interesting because it's a semi-arid island, so it tends to be pretty dry in the summers and cooler and wetter in the winters, and it's an island. It's a very large island in the Mediterranean. And so it had a certain amount of kind of like ecological conditions that were interesting to me to think about how people in the past might have experienced something like drought or interacted with the coastline resource management, things like that.

Stephen 09:09
That's very cool. Before, before we get into the kind of more of your recent research, yeah, I just wanted to ask, and I think you probably already have mentioned one or two of them, but who were some of the people who you feel were like, whose support was most important to you either just in making the decision to get into the field or during grad school or even since?

Katie 09:27
Yeah, that's a great question.  I think some of those decisions to pursue grad school, I got support from a, you know, a bunch of different directions. Some of that was just family support. No one in my family is an academic, and so the world sort of seemed a little strange, but people were very supportive. Like my parents, like, oh, this is, this is clearly what you're really interested in. You should pursue it. 

I mean, I really think back to some of those high school teachers who introduced me to this material and made it seem like something that could be a future. Even if it didn't look like, oh, that's a job that will pay you, you know, it was at least, it was really, it was inspiring. and then definitely, you know, when you get to grad school, my advisors were really helpful for, helping me understand the field a little better, where to fit, what research questions have a lot of latitude and space to pursue, and which ones don't, what resources there are.

Like, when you come into grad school, a lot of this stuff isn't clear, and so I think having really good advisors, and I was lucky, who help you understand the landscape of academia and grad school was really helpful and that keep that like made me feel confident that what I was doing could continue or turn into a career.

Stephen10:55
I just curious, you mentioned, you know, which questions have like more latitudes to explore something along those lines. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Katie 11:06
I think about this sometimes now when I'm advising students, In our field, let's say for archaeology, you can specialize in things like let's say the typology of a certain style of ceramics, and you can produce really great work in that, but it's a pretty small field, right? Something like typological studies. 

Or a field where there hasn't been a lot of new data uncovered, and so the questions are going to keep getting stuck at, well, where, what, how can we answer these questions with the very limited material that we have.

So there are certain research questions that, that end up being kind of narrowly constrained to the empirical side, like what evidence do we have to ask those questions? And then there are others that kind of open you up into these more interdisciplinary routes. where you can collaborate with people in maybe other fields to ask new questions of material.

And this is where I think environmental history is going, where we can start to bring in new data, new research questions from, let's say, the environmental history side. And that opens up just a lot more spaces for thinking about the sort of structures or the empirical evidence that we already have. Whether you want to get more data, this is the question in archaeology, whether you want to like excavate more, whether you want to go back to material that's already been excavated. 

Stephen 12:39
I mean, I was just going to follow up on that further ‘cause I'm curious what you're working with, you know, looking at this like environmental history, like again, you know, I'm sure everyone has like a kind of idea of what like a stereotypical like archeological dig looks like or whatever, but like, what are your sources and how are you interacting with them?

Katie Kearns 13:00
So I in the field, I am interested in what's called landscape archaeology, which attempts to situate archaeological remains and evidence in a number of different spatial scales. And there are a couple different methods that we can use to do this. One is called Pedestrian Survey or Archaeological Survey, where you're walking across the surface and you're mapping artifacts in place.

And this gets us into a kind of medium or large-scale analysis of where people are in the landscape. And from there you can start to ask questions like, are they settling close to water sources? Are they potentially settling in places with agricultural potential? And you could maybe do a geomorphological study of the soils or the water, the hydrology, the forest resources, the vegetation.

So landscape scale analysis can bring in lots of different kinds of data to understand where people are in place and how those processes developed. So how people settled in a particular place? Did that change over time? Can we tell anything about how dense those populations were? And from there build on to questions of resource management, questions of longevity in a place, like are they staying in a place over multiple generations? 

And from there, some of the questions you can ask relate to experiences with shifting environments. Again, in a place like Cypress, for example, where access to water can shift depending on climate patterns. It's interesting to know if people are settling in the same place over long periods of time, right? Like multiple, multiple generations, which would suggest that they have developed water management strategies for supporting everyday life and practices and agricultural production in an area. 

We can also use paleo environmental data, and this is becoming much more accessible over the last couple decades, and so this is the actual study and reconstruction of ancient environments using a number of different methods drawn from biology geomorphology, geology, and climatology. So climate science. 

To reconstruct ancient environments, there are a number of different natural archives that we can study and use as proxies. Proxies almost like, indirect records and indices of certain conditions at a given time and place. So, for example, a lake sediment core could hold lots of different data on the animals, the vegetation, the pollen, the various shifting levels of the lake, and that's all stored in a sediment core.

And from there we can do various tests and analysis to try to date various patterns and reconstruct what ancient environments around a site would have been. 

Stephen 16:14
Okay. You really weren't kidding when you said interdisciplinary. 

Katie 16:18
 There's, and it's becoming really exciting because a lot of these methods especially for the reconstruction of something like ancient climate, which uses a number of different proxies like ice cores understanding sea level rises, pollen remains, all of these different kinds of natural archives.

Archaeologists can now use to help reconstruct and understand environmental shifts, usually over a pretty coarse period. So like over 500 years, maybe we can start to understand some of the shifts.

Stephen 16:52
 So could you just describe for our listeners, how your role breaks down, like what your different kind of responsibilities are. I'm so we're talking in the summer right now. I'm assuming that you are not teaching normal as you might be during the school year. But yeah, like how does your role break down?

What are your different responsibilities and, uh, how do you like them? Are there things that you prefer to spend your time on? Things that you find less preferable? 

Katie 17:19
So archaeology, often, but doesn't have to require that fieldwork component. And depending on where you work, you can work at different times of the year. 

In the Mediterranean, we tend to work during the summer and fieldwork can be, I mean, it's can be really fun. It's physical, it can be manual labor, but you're discovering things, you're categorizing and recording, and even just the act of finding, you know, dusty, brown, broken pieces of pottery can be really interesting. But fieldwork often is only like one small part of what we do. 

As an academic, of course, a lot of my work is teaching and service to the university, and that roughly happens during the academic year. And at Chicago, we teach, you know, four courses a year. And in my department, I've been really lucky in that I can teach both courses that cater to minors and majors in Mediterranean civilization.

I can also teach at the core level, sort of Introductions to Mediterranean history. And then I can also branch out and co teach or teach for other departments in related topics or themes. So, for example, something like ancient landscape history, and that can attract students from other departments, and I can work with archaeologists or even other environmental historians across the university. So that takes up teaching, and that can happen across the year. And then service can change depending on the year. 

I'm actually going to be Director of Undergraduate Studies this coming year. So that'll be a new role for me with a lot of, interaction with minors and majors. And so the service can involve everything from helping plan lectures for your department, to helping with graduate studies, to running workshops that help graduate students learn more about the profession and about how to get a job, what academia looks like from the other side, as you transition from student to professor. 

I mean, I really enjoy teaching and UChicago is a great place to teach. I find the students are really eager to learn more and I tend to teach courses that fit both within the sort of electives category for majors or minors, as well as those who are becoming more interested, let's say, in archaeology and want to get classes, not just from anthropology or Near Eastern studies or art history, but also from classics.

And I find teaching wonderful, partly because it really motivates me to read and to learn, and I'm constantly figuring out new ways to ask questions of the material. I like using teaching as an opportunity to try new things or to explore maybe certain areas of literature that I'm not as familiar with students, and that can be really fun.

So just one example off the top of my head. One trend in archaeology is the use of ancient DNA or genetic testing on individuals from the past to try to understand a whole range of questions from sort of like ancestry or ethnicity, and these get into really difficult questions of how you determine that in the past, but also diet.

We can learn a lot from some of these analyses. However, it's, it's also confronting a lot of how the discipline has thought about Ancestry and ethnicity and migration. And so a colleague and I, James Osborne, in the NELC department co taught a course that sort of confronted a lot of this really new literature, like what is the science, how is it changing, how archaeologists think about some of these questions, what are some of the problems that are arising when we turn to scientific data.

As this new kind of open frontier for telling us about ancient patterns of mobility or something like, scare quotes, ethnicity. That was a really interesting course because I got to read some of this for the first time and really think about it as an archaeologist and anthropologist. 

And so, yeah, I would say that I really enjoy lots of the elements of teaching. I'm trying to think, I mean, in terms of issues that are not as fun. I mean, or, you know, one of the things that comes with professionalization for students when they're thinking about academia is becoming an employee of an institution. And some of this is going to change, you know, how you think about the institution as an entity, as well as what some of the service it's going for, but I would say that, you know, I've been lucky. A lot of what I've been doing so far has really been contributing to the life of the department or the community. And so actually this year I'll be joining the college council for the first time. So that'll be one introduction to more of like how the university itself works. 

Stephen 22:57
 Can you quickly just explain what that actually is? 

Katie 23:00
I will be joining the part of the college council that focuses on undergraduate education. And my understanding, I, I'm yet to join it, but a lot of what that focuses on is curriculum and decisions about the core and about the missions of undergraduate education at UChicago. There is also a part of the council that focuses on the university, and this is where you're getting into graduate education.

Lots of topics there, for example, like graduate student unionization and how that's affecting something like the missions of the university.

Stephen
What advice do you think you would share with someone, you know, maybe like high school age or undergraduate who's considering going down a similar path? 

Katie Keans 23:47
My first piece of advice is to really soak up the time in college in taking as many courses that interest you as possible, because you never really know what's going to feed that curiosity. And I was lucky. I, again, I did a BA in archaeology, which meant that I was influenced by anthropology as well as something like the field of classics.

So I was taking a whole range of courses. You know, I went from something like the languages of North American Indigenous people to Mesoamerican archaeology to Latin in a day. And I really, yeah, and I really encourage students to have that kind of omnivorous approach to coursework because I think college is one of those amazing periods where you really can explore what interests you without the pressures of like employment yet or maybe I should say like, you know, you can, you can take time as well as learn from a whole range of different faculty about some of these interests.

And that really helped me. I think that openness to taking lots of different classes. And I think I try to tell this also to grad students, trying to be open, trying to take, like using that time to absorb and to learn different methods, different techniques, as well as how disciplines work.

I think this is really important, especially if you're considering a career in a particular discipline. It's really important to think about the history of that discipline, why it asks the questions that it does, and that can, to get back to some of our earlier question, that can sort of open up some of those directions.

That haven't yet been asked, or understand how various methods relate to one another, or different areas, or different specialties within the field. Yeah.

Stephen 26:00
Thank you, Professor Kearns, for your time today, and Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.