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Our guest today is Kelly Knudson. This episode is an edited version of an episode released during Season One of the podcast.
Kelly is a professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, and director of the Center for Bioarchaeological Research and the Archaeological Chemistry Laboratory.
In this full-length interview, Kelly talks about what led her to pursue archaeological chemistry and shares how chemistry data helped her team reconstruct what happened at a 2,000-year-old site in Peru. She talks about how isotopes and the periodicity of atomic radii make this work possible. She then gives some advice to high school students interested in science.
Resources:
Center for Bioarchaeological Research at ASU
Kelly’s paper in PNAS entitled “Feasting and the evolution of cooperative social organizations circa 2300 B.P. in Paracas culture, southern Peru
The Periodic Table on the NIST website
Highlights of the episode:
*Susan introduces Kelly [1:15];
*The field school in Chile that led Kelly to study archaeological chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and pursue archaeological chemistry as a career at Arizona State University [1:55];
*How a summer program can have such an impact on one’s trajectory [6:10];
*What Kelly’s job is like — directing the archaeological chemistry laboratory and teaching both undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars in the classroom and lab [6:50];
*How one learns to run a lab [9:20];
*Discussing Kelly’s paper in PNAS on feasting and social cooperation in Peru 2,000 years ago — how Strontium isotopes helped her team understand what happened at this archaeological site [10:40];
*What Kelly and her team found based on the archaeological and isotopic evidence [16:58];
*How to make strontium isotope maps of an area — in Peru, guinea pigs are an ideal way to do this [20:38];
*How the archaeological and chemical evidence complemented each other in this study [29:00];
*Why looting at archaeological sites is so problematic [31:14];
*What happens when the archaeological and chemical evidence are at odds with each other? [31:40];
*How archaeological chemistry as a field has changed during Kelly’s career [36:05];
*What excites Kelly the most about his work [37:08];
*Susan asks about the Arizona state high school chemistry standard that asks students to explain how the structure of atoms relates to patterns and properties seen in the periodic table [38:27];
*Kelly explains that since strontium has a similar atomic radius as calcium because they are both in the same column of the periodic table — periodic trends! — strontium can substitute for calcium in bones [39:03];
*Kelly’s advice for high school students interested in science, and especially something specific, like for example, archaeological chemistry [42:40]