*Note: This post includes content from an online interview between Dr. Maria Liston and UWaterloo AnthSoc VP Events, Camila Font Pescod. The full video interview can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tq_fkIFUFY
"Maria Liston received her BA in Classics from King College in Bristol, Tennessee and her MA in Classics from Indiana University. She then completed a BA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of Tennessee. She pursues research as a skeletal biologist and archaeologist, focusing on the excavation and analysis of human remains and their mortuary contexts. She recently co-authored The Agora Bone Well, a study of a deposit containing 449 infant and fetal skeletons, probably deposited by midwives working in Hellenistic Athens, Greece. This deposit included the oldest case of battered child syndrome known from the archaeological record. Recently she has begun work on a well from the Swiss excavations at Eretria, Greece that also has a large number of infant skeletons in the fill and promises to provide an important comparison to the Agora well. She also is currently documenting skeletons from an early Christian cemetery found in in the Sanctuary of Ismenion Apollo in Thebes. This cemetery was associated with an early hospice or hospital; many of the individuals buried there suffered from leprosy. She welcomes inquiries from graduate students who would like to carry out research in these areas."
Image and Biography:
"People Profiles: Maria Liston.” University of Waterloo Anthropology Department website. https://uwaterloo.ca/anthropology/people-profiles/maria-liston
[INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT]
Hannah Clark (Co-VP Communications UW AnthSoc)
Hello everyone, my name is Hannah Clark, and I'm one of the Co-VP’s of communications along with Keanna Dittmar-McCallum for the Anthropology Society here at UW. I am so excited to introduce to you today's guest for our Live Life Stories series Associate Professor Dr. Maria Liston. Dr.Liston specializes in Greek and Roman bioarchaology with most of her prominent research being on infant and fetal well disposals in the Agora of Athens. The wonderful creator of this event series, Camilla Font Pescod has prepared a wonderful discussion of Dr. Liston’s journey into academia, all about her research, and her life as a bio archeologist. I'll never forget Dr. Liston’s guest lecture in my ANTH 100 class. I had Dr. Hayes and she came to do a guest lecture for us, and it was just such a beautiful lecture, so interesting, and she was very excited. I'm really excited to hear about what she has for us today. Enjoy!
Camila Font Pescod (VP Events UW AnthSoc)
Thank you so much, Hannah, for that introduction and thank you so much, Dr. Liston for joining us today. We ran into some tech troubles earlier, but nothing that we couldn't solve we're here, we're happy. So just getting started, you had a really eventful summer, when were talking a couple months ago, when you first told me that you would be willing to do this interview, you told me that you might be able to fly to Greece, or you might not be able. And then a couple of weeks ago, you swore that you wouldn't be able to be there, but now you're there in Greece! It's been an entire travesty. Can you tell me more of how that came to be? How have your plans for the summer changed, has had to be rearranged, tell me about that.
Dr. Maria Liston (Guest Speaker)
Well, it, as you know, the world changed on a moment to moment basis all summer long, but eventually the EU was allowing even American citizens into the EU, as long as we had a residence permit. I have a Greek residence permit because I was here on a sabbatical. I was, I mean, when I checked in at the airport, I wasn't sure they were going to let me on the plane. At every stage, I wasn't sure they'd let me on the next plane, but they finally, I got to Greece. So here I am.
CFP
Where were you before? Were you in Waterloo?
ML
Yes, for the most part, I was at my home in Elmira, just outside of Waterloo. I spent the first couple of weeks after I came home from Greece, with my sister's family. Before I flew out, I went back to see them and my father, and dump my cats on my sister's family. So I could leave. Little bit of both, in the US and Canada.
CFP
Oh, of course. Well I mean, it's wonderful that you did manage to get to Greece. I know that your research is so important. How long are you planning on staying there for this time?
ML
I'm leaving August 26th, so staying as late as I can and still come back in time for classes to start and make sure some of the technology is working better than it did this evening.
CFP
Of course, it's quite a learning curve to learn how to work with all these new techs, every week. If you are in your lab in Greece and people that have had the honor to take courses with you, we know that you talk about your lab in Greece all the time. Do you think that through the honor of giving us a little tour around the lab, showing us your favorite pens?
ML
Yes, I will do that. Now this would have been easier with my phone. I'm going to just turn the tablet around it's the back camera has not been very reliable so we're going to stick with this one. So let's see. This is the bone strewing room in the laboratory. It's formally the Malcolm H Wiener Laboratory of Archeological Sciences at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. That's its full name and it's a big, three story building that we've been in for about four years. Initially we were in what was the garage of the American school for about 15 years. Then, we got this nice new, enormous building built. Flint Dibble, who was the other person working here, just fled. He's gone away, but he's always working on the other side of the room from me. He a zooarchaeologist, I think you can see some of the bones here. He's working on animal bones from a big site called Fallaron and another one called Azoria in Crete. Here in the middle, there's another biological anthropologist, but she's gone for the evening since it's after seven. My work table is over here and let's see, sorry, there. I'm working on, an early Christian and Byzantine site that has a bunch of people who have leprosy, sorry, this it's so hard to aim this from behind, but so I've got foot bones here of individuals who have leprosy and I can find my own hand. This is good. And there's a bad lag. Well, yes, it's very difficult, but anyhow, this is why I wanted to do this on the phone, but we'll go with the technology that works. I think now I will go upstairs. So I won't disturb Flint, who's trying to get some work done. He's leaving to go in the field tomorrow. I'm going to grab my power cord because, of course, my phone power cord is upstairs. I didn't think I was using the computer.
CFP
While you…oh, do you have it already?
ML
Yes. I've got the cord. So I will head to the elevator, if it works like the tech did, well, you'll lose me for a minute, but then we'll be back.
CFP
Perfect. We'll be able tour the rest of the lab. A very interesting elevator.
ML
Yes yes. Looks like an elevator pretty much every where.
CFP
How many people work at the lab on a regular basis?
ML
Well, this summer of course is really light because we have to restrict the number of people. There are three staff who work here and then today there may have been as many as seven or eight researchers. [momentary loss of connection] We're back. Yes. I said today, there may have been six or eight people here working besides the staff. In a regular summer there are often 20 or 30.
CFP
Wow.
ML
Now we're up in the library where I have a desk and I just, because the way this is going to power, no doubt would run out on us. I think it's important to plug it in. All right. We're settled.
CFP
There we go. Beautiful. Yeah, I can imagine that if the same number of people were working at the lab before you upgraded to this beautiful new facility, it might've gotten crowded with living people.
ML
Oh, we couldn’t. If there were four people working in the old facility, it was, we were running into each other all the time. So we love our new building.
CFP
I can't imagine. You said that you were returning to Canada late August to make it into four classes. I was wondering, I know that you will be teaching human osteology, which is a fabulous course. It's been one of my favorite courses that I've ever taken ever. You are you going to be teaching it this fall term online. So how is that gonna work out? I feel like I'm speaking on behalf of many concerned students who want to know how that's gonna work out. How will technology come into play?
ML
Well, it's challenging. One of the, probably the most important thing we're adding to it, and I have to give Alexis Dolphin credit for suggesting this. It was a brilliant suggestion. She found an inexpensive, but very detailed plastic skeleton that we could order from a Canadian company. Every student in the class, instead of buying a textbook is buying a complete plastic skeleton.
CFP
Wow.
ML
Also people will have the bones. I mean, this isn't a thousand or $5,000 one. It's not super high quality, but it's got all the little details we need. I was really impressed with what a good skeleton it is. I found some free resources that we can use as textbooks. The textbook I would have ordered was $140 and the skeleton is $129. People will be able to then compare photographs and videos and things to the skeleton they have at home. For part of the quizzes, I'm going to have, some questions, you identify the photograph, but then others, you have to send me a photograph of yourself pointing on the skeleton on the bone where that fragment comes from. I'm thinking about having, instead of written exams, doing short, cause the osteology class usually has weekly quizzes and a big final, we're not doing a giant final, but doing live things where we Skype or Microsoft Team or whatever. I have a series of questions that I ask people and they pick up the correct bone and show me what I'm talking about. That's how we're going to do it. I mean, I'm making lectures and narrated PowerPoints for the basic material, but we're gonna use those plastic skeletons that everybody will have.
CFP
Yeah. I'm sure, I know because the way my little anthropology chat is going crazy over here, they're like, “oh that sounds awesome!” It sounds so relieving because were worried. I know that, I mean, you're an amazing professor, so I know that, this path you're taking, it's going to be very successful and it's very innovative. It's that how you pronounce it. Yes. It's very innovative. So it's really, all in all, it's really cool to see the boundaries we can push past. But talking about your human osteology course. One of the highlights for this course for me was that, and the first week of the course of classes, you told us that the person that got the highest grade for each of the mini quizzes would get a bone pen. So here I have my prized possessions. I value these, as my most important material possessions ever. I wanted to know, is there anything similar, that's going to be going on this term on one side, and on another side, I want to know what was your motivation behind starting giving out these little prizes as incentives?
ML
It started, my brother-in-law is the director of a state historic museum in North Carolina and years and years ago, they did a big exhibit on piracy in North Carolina. Of course in the museum shop, they had little things to sell to children as well as books and stuff on piracy because of this exhibit. When it ended, they had a whole box of glass rings, just sort of big fat glass rings that had skulls and crossbones on them. They weren't selling once piracy exhibit was over, nobody was buying them. So I made them an offer for the whole box and gave them out at osteology that year as prizes and people seemed to like it, but I wasn't sure whether you might think this was a little juvenile or silly. They were gone, I, I didn't think about doing it again until I think it was even before class started, someone said, well, what are the prices this year for the quizzes? I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess I better find something.” So the bone pens were great. I've never found those again, but I often have pencils with skulls and crossbones on them and skull shaped, eracers that go on the end, that kind of thing. But it's a challenge every year. Perhaps I need to come up with something and mail them out to people because it seems to have become an important part of osteology.
CFP
I feel like it's also somewhat of a status and amongst anthropology students when you pull up what your prize is from Dr. Liston’s course and everyone's like, “ooh.”
ML
Well, I need to go on Amazon and eBay and see if I can find some more, really good ones. That's where I ended up getting them now.
CFP
Oh, of course. So continuing talking about the things that I've learned in some of your courses and just across anthropology as a whole, we've learned as a discipline in anthropology, that race really has no biological basis. Right? Instead, we know that there are social boxes that are interpreted differently by different cultures. I wanted to know why is it in the syllabus or is that in the syllabus of certain courses, particularly forensic anthropology, why is it that we still learn about race?
ML
Well, I mean, race doesn't exist biologically because people don't have discrete categories, they fit in, but there are clusters of features that tend to be shared among people of different geographic ancestries and those are very real. Of course we see them, I mean the whole black lives matter movement is because people with a certain geographic ancestry can be identified and discriminated against. While race, which, technically means that, these discrete boxes, doesn’t exist, ranges of variation do in skin color, and face shape, and hair type. I mean, these things exist. Particularly within forensics, if the police need to identify someone, I mean, you've got unknown remains that have been in Northern Ontario for, who knows how many decades, you've got to narrow down the population of potential missing people. We do that with sex, and we do it with age, and we do it with this thing we call race in part because that translates well to the police. They know to go looking for someone whose family, resembled this geographic group. We need to change the vocabulary. There is variation in human beings and we can see it in the skeleton, particularly the skull, and at times that's important. Even as an archaeologist. I'm in Greece, it's not that far from Africa. There certainly were people of African ancestry here. I mean, one time I was looking for a particular skeleton in the Agora and I pulled out a drawer and picked up the skull. I was rather startled when I realized I was looking at someone of African ancestry. I wasn't expecting that, and nobody had ever noted it before. So, the variation exists, the problem is in the terminology we use to describe it, but it's real just as much, as stature, and age, and sex, which isn't the same as gender. Are diff-, you know vary. So we have to deal with it.
CFP
Of course. What you were saying about changing the terminology. I also feel like it's so important because words such as race that are so charged in a cultural context, if people from the wrong groups, from white supremacist groups or eugenic groups, they see that in a scientific context, we are still continuing to use words such as race. I feel like that gives fuel to their arguments and that shouldn't be the case. You are very right in that sense.
ML
I try to use ancestry, is usually the term I use to substitute for it. Unfortunately I was educated in a time period where race was the common term and I will slip up and use it sometimes, but I try to be consistent in using ancestry. I mean that, it's not a good term either. It really doesn't make a lot of sense, cause we're not talking about families or things like that. At the moment, that seems to be the most neutral generic term we've got.
CFP
Yeah. Well it's going to be a process. I know that as a- what I was talking to Dr. Park a couple of weeks ago about, is that we have to see the pattern in anthropology that we've taken, to where it's being pioneers in everything that is social justice related and equity related. I'm confident that as new generations of anthropologists emerge, we're going to find the correct terminology and we're going to be able to find the best use for knowledge. Again, talking about, from a bioarchaeological perspective, we know that we can only really understand disease, illness, trauma, just general pathology as it is manifests on bone in an archeological perspective. Right? I wanted to know, in your experience, what would you say is the most interesting pathology to study in osteological plastics?
ML
To some extent it's the one I'm studying right now. It's whatever I'm focused on finding and such, but I am very interested infectious disease and the work I'm doing with these people who have leprosy, I've learned a tremendous amount about it. Now, leprosy once was an epidemic, certainly across all of Europe and the Mediterranean. The recent pandemic has made that more poignant in a way. I'm interested in the effects of differing infectious diseases and trying to figure out what they are. I'm also very interested in trauma. Even though the violence that usually goes along with physical trauma is difficult, it's physical trauma as opposed to things like burns or frostbite or things like that, which are also trauma, but it's the place where we mostly can recognize an event from the past. This happened at this moment. Sometimes it's accidental trauma, often it is violence and warfare, but I do find that fascinating to be able to reconstruct an event that happened to an individual.
CFP
Speaking of reconstructing events, a story that stuck with me from your paleopathology class that I think you, and you would be surprised at how often I actually think about this story, about two Greek women who’s bones were found intermingled in the same well. They’re thought to be victims of the Heruli warriors. I think they were eagled as a 13 and a 14. I checked my notes, but I couldn't really be sure. Do you could describe their various injuries and pathologies they were found with, and what their mode of death ended up being?
ML
Oh, yes. They were very interesting. As you say they were found together in a well. They were found mixed in with debris from the cleanup after the Herulian Sack. That's how we associate with this attack. It was one of the early Gothic tribes attacking the Roman Empire and so it's moving into that period. Two women, they were about the same height, they were about the same age so it took a while to reasonably confidently sort them out. Things like fingers and toes there's just no way to do, but anyway, it was interesting; one of them had bone cancer and it was a metastatic cancer, as a woman in her mid to late thirties. It could very well have been a breast cancer that was the primary tumor, but it could have been anything else, any two. With metastatic cancer, you can't really distinguish what tissue it started at, you just know it's now metastasized to the bones. So, she was in poor health and she had lesions on her skull. Of course, breast cancer does metastasize to the brain as well frequently. She was in very poor health when she died, but both of these women had died violently. That woman has a series of chop marks on her head where her head was hit with some sort of pretty heavy blade, but it was dull enough that it didn't really slice into the bone. It just kind of chipped away at it. They're kind of long cuts, but multiple cuts that would've definitely knocked her out and the resulting concussion, hematoma, and such might've killed her. I don't know what her immediate cause of death is. The other woman had some broken facial bones, so she was hit in the face. She has a cut right on the corner of her mandible right here [points along the underside of her lower right jaw].That is fairly classic from someone who has had their throat slit, where if an assailant is standing behind you and cutting across, the blade tends to come up and will catch the mandible. It's a pretty classic in the forensic literature. I'm pretty sure her throat was slit. I don't know precisely how the other woman died, but it was presumably from this trauma.
CFP
As I was telling you, I think of this story so often and how it really just captures the importance in prior archeology of understanding your context and one side, and then on revising your work and making sure that you're not missing anything because you might've thought that she died from the lift towards fractures and injuries related to that. When it was actually most likely this tiny little cut over here in the mandible, I think it's fascinating really. They died a really sad death of course, but, I feel like it teaches a very valuable story for our discipline. Talking about that, how do you think that this case informs us, in a forensic context, that how jumping to flashy conclusions can sometimes blind our research?
ML
Well, I mean, it's true. Although in this case, these women, what I think is the right answer is the more flashy, or certainly the more violent one, but yes, it's always tempting to do the thing that is going to excite, interest, and make a good publication or get you on TV or whatever, and that's not always the most appropriate. I think it's always important to back up and make sure that you're not jumping to that conclusion just because it's exciting, because sometimes it is, but other times it is a more prosaic, ordinary explanation that is the most correct.
CPF
Yeah. On that same line, more or less, how should we go about making sure that research that was conducted in the past, maybe by people that came a couple of generations before us, how can we ensure that research is still accurate and relevant in the present? What is the best practice surrounding incorporating new learnings into older research?
ML
Well, I think, and that is something that we have to constantly think about and the work I do in the
Agoras with skeletons, some of which were dug in the 1930s, in fact, a lot of them were. One of the things I think is important, I think I suspect in classes, sometimes the students get frustrated with the fact that I spent a lot of time on the history of the science and I make them learn the names of some of the important people who came before and such. One of the ways we can interpret the earlier research is to understand what they could know given the state of the science at that point. In some cases, the science, whether it was in the 1930s or the 1830s or the 1730s, the science might have been good enough to come to those conclusions, but we do have to understand how the discipline has developed. That's why, whether it's paleopathology or, not so much in osteology, but in other classes, I try to give you a little bit of the framework of how we got here so that people can evaluate what the people who made these earlier decisions and conclusions could know based on the science that we use today, if that makes sense.
CFP
Yes, no, that's actually an excellent piece of advice because it's something that I feel anxious about often. How can I just go on and hypothetically conduct research that is based off of someone else's work if I don't know what I should check about their work or what I shouldn't. I think it's a very valuable piece of advice to stop and think, “okay, based on the current science, what could I possibly know that might not yet be reflected in this other piece of work.”
ML
Right, right.
CFP
That’s how I ended up interpreting your advice and I think it's very good. I feel like it mellows me out of it. I feel that for many undergraduate students, when you talk about research, I feel like we haven't really fully quite grasped how long research takes and how slow, very slow the research process is. Do you think you could walk me through what a research day in the lab would look like for you? What you managed to get done in a day and what your general timeline of studies would look like?
ML
Well, when I'm here in Athens and have access to the skeletal material, much of the research course I'm doing is on the bones so I'm doing a lot of data collecting. I usually try to get here, to the lab, by nine o'clock in the morning. As you may know, I like cats and I foster cats for a group called Nine Lives Greece. I've gotta clean litter boxes, and feed cats, and I've got a kitten right now who's only about 10 weeks old, so she needs a little play and attention, but if I can get here by nine, I'm doing well. I usually start in the morning working with the bones. Most of the time I will have arranged things the evening before with a problem, or here's what I want to look at, or I'm just doing inventory, here's what I do next. I will do that for two or three or four hours. The American school serves lunch at one. If I've signed up for lunch, which means they aren't serving eggplant, I don't like eggplant, but if it's not eggplant, which is a big thing in Greece, I usually will go eat at one o'clock. It's just up the hill on a lovely terrace outdoors. Now, it's very nice and I get to talk to some of my colleagues and see what they're doing and things like that, and then get back at about two, and sometimes at that point, I need a break. I come up here to the library and we'll look up things, questions yesterday afternoon, I needed to go review the anatomy of the space between the Achilles tendon and the posterior side of the tibia, what's going on the calcaneus in that space. I dragged down five or six anatomy books and looked at all of them and just reviewed that. Other times I've got stacks of print outs here of articles. It used to be that Wi-Fi in Greece was slow that you couldn't look up something quickly in an online journal. When you finally got it to download, we print them out and then keep these things in collections. Now it's not really necessary, but when I first started working on leprosy, I printed a whole bunch of articles. I'll come up here and page through them and find things like, “yeah, I am seeing that. Okay. That makes sense.” I often will do that for an hour or so after lunch and then go back and work. Sometimes I'll leave about five or six, on Mondays and Fridays. Now, even though there's a lot less going on, the dormitories are closed, that sort of thing, but we have Ouzo hour, when we get together and have a drink before dinner, and now we're doing it on the roof of the library. There's a terrace and there's a wonderful breeze in the evening. Lots of air circulation, so it's good and safe. The very first night went up there, I've been making masks all spring, for a group in Elmira that was giving them to frontline workers and such, and I've just kept making them. So I took party favors the first night and I took enough mass for everybody to have a cloth mask. And people are wearing them! They're showing up at lunch and Ouzo hour with them. Now obviously we have to take them off so I joke about Ouzo hour being the way the American school tells us it's time to stop working now. Usually about seven, and in a normal summer, there would be an Ouzo hour every night at seven. Right now it's just Mondays and Fridays. So that's kind of the day. I go home and feed kittens, and clean out litter boxes, and work on my email, and read the news. It's early in the day in Canada so I'll catch up on everything and often collapse in bed before 10 and get up at about 6:30 the next morning and do it all over again!
CFP
Just for a frame of reference, how many years have you been working on research over in Greece?
ML
Well, I'm laughing because I came to Greece in 1987 for the first time and started working at an excavation that I ended up doing my dissertation on. I began that project in 1987. This winter, just before COVID hit and the world came apart, we submitted the two volumes of publication on those cemeteries. So, 1987 to 2020. That was an absolutely long project. I was laughing a couple of days ago; I was at the stage with this Byzantine cemetery of going back and reworking on things. I didn't know there was leprosy in every single grave when I started. I didn't know what leprosy looked like except the really extreme cases. I'm going back to the early graves and revisiting the bones and discovering way more evidence than I captured the first time. I pulled out the data sheets from grave four. Very early on, it was the summer I started working on the bones and realized the date I had written on the top of the sheet was 2010 so I've been working on this project, which I think of as my new project that I just got started on, for 10 years. So yeah, it's a pretty lengthy process. They finished digging, I believe in 2014. There were several study seasons there on site, working with the whole team. For the last two years at, I'm sorry to say that I, and the woman doing the ethnobotany are the only people they're waiting for to finish, but it turned into a huge complex cemetery. So it’s taking a while.
CFP
I feel like a recurring theme that I've heard across these interviews is that the number one skill that you need to have as an academic, it's not necessarily, well, I mean, it's obviously expertise in your field, but it's most of all patience.
ML
Patience, absolutely.
CFP
Results are not going to come overnight. You have to hem and haw over what you've learnt for a long period of time. I read someplace that research is just really erroring in your mind. I can't remember that well, but it's something that kind of stuck with me. I feel like how long your research has been taking place for is really a testament to that. We still always find new things to do. It really never ends.
ML
If you need instant gratification, this type of research is not the field for you.
CFP
To anyone listening, you have to be patient.
ML
Well, those books that I started on it in 1987 and submitted in 2020. If they are in print for the classical archeology meetings in January of 2022, it'll be a miracle. I suspect what will have at those meetings is a proof copy so people could see what it's going to look like, but they won't be bound and printed then.
CFP
What I wanted to ask you now is, we know that you've dedicated most of your career to studying human remains in Greece, particularly the Athenian Agora, and out of your different studies, the one that I personally find the most interesting is your work surrounding perinatal infant mortality, and the disposal of infants in wells. What I wanted to know is what have you discovered to be the circumstances surrounding their high mortality and their disposal?
ML
Okay. Yeah. The well you're referring to is the one that had about 450 fetal and infant remains in it. Boy, that was one where not jumping to the exciting, sensational conclusion was really important. A lot of people had said, “Oh, it's infanticide. It’s evidence of feticide.” I won't put all the pieces together, but ultimately what we put together was a lot of the infants are preterm or very early miscarriages, or obviously their skeletal remains so they're not that early. There are a lot around full term birth, but it's stops very abruptly except for four older infants. All of these babies die shortly after a full term pregnancy or they're the size of an infant at the end of a full term pregnancy. We found a lot of evidence for pathology, particularly infections. Infants are very prone to bacterial infections from cutting the umbilical cord. There were some birth defects and things. We think there may have been some children who were exposed or abandoned, but for the most part, we think these are natural infant deaths. There was a ceremony called the Amphidromia in which it was a rite of passage. It incorporated the infant into the family, the head of the household, which wasn't necessarily the father, but the head of the household would accept the infant as a family member. This took place normally at the seventh or eighth day, sometimes as late as the 10th day. It was a family ceremony and I gave some measurement data to Lyle Koenigsberg who is a anthropological demographer. Some of you may have stumbled across his work. Lyle deals with numbers in a way that most of us don't want to think about. He was on modeling natural infant mortality and so it was looking for collections of infant bones. I gave them to him, he got back to me and said, “this is really interesting. I think this is natural infant mortality. It looks just like that, but what's bizarre is they are all dead by about the eighth day after 40 weeks, which is full term pregnancy.” I said, “well, that's interesting Lyle, let me tell you about the Amphidromia that was on day seven or eight.” Surprisingly the data really came back to support that these are all babies who died before that. The reason we think they're all in a well is that if they weren't yet part of the family, they wouldn't have been buried formally in the cemeteries. We know that midwives were very much involved in births at this point, midwifery was one of the few professions open to women. It was something women were very proud of, they put it on their tombstones. It's an important part of medical care. We know that midwives took care of the mother and infant up to the Amphidromia. In fact, the midwife participated in the ceremony. You've got midwives where with any birth, when it's over, they're going to have a couple of pounds of wet, slimy placenta that somebody's got to get rid of. We know that it was their job to clean up afterwards and take the placenta away. If the infant is stillborn or dies before that Amphidromia, they may also be being asked to dispose of the bodies. We don't know that for sure. We know they cleaned up the afterbirth and we know that participate in the Amphidromia. It would not be illogical for the head of household to say, “well, it's not really part of the family yet. It's not even really human yet. Why don't you take this away?” This well had been abandoned, it was in a former industrial area that had been cleaned up and we think the midwives were using it probably to dispose of the placentas and then the babies that didn't survive were going into it. The pottery associated with them is about a 25 year period. Honestly, 450 babies is not that many for ancient city over 25 years. This wasn't all the babies dying and Athens and that period, but it's probably a midwife who lived in the neighborhood, or maybe a couple of them were using it. That's what we think is going on with that.
CFP
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like it goes into my next question. I was rewatching the play Antigone the other day, and it really highlights how important death rates are within Greek culture to the extent that Antigone was willing to do this whole debacle to be able to properly burry her brother. Would you say, now that you tell me about the Amphidromia, would you say that they were being disposed in the well due to their lack of having gone through that ceremony and then being considered like family members or human beings either? Or why do you think otherwise that these midwives or these families might've been able to dispose the babies without fear of retribution from the deities?
ML
Well it may be that there was some fear there. There is some pottery with the babies, and pottery was a common grave gift, most of it is so large that it's basins and things that we actually think the babies were being carried in. It's not like pretty pottery put in a grave, but what's interesting is that mixed in with these babies were the bones of at least 250 dogs and they don't look like so-called urban die off, city street dogs, if they just die off that's been pretty well documented. The zooarcheologists can say, “yeah, that looks like natural dog mortality.” These are either puppies or young adults, although there are a few old adults too. There doesn't seem to be anything special about these dogs. Dogs weren't very often sacrificed in the ancient world, but the one thing they did was take away ritual pollution that my asthma, that dangerous quality that you can get when things are done wrong or you're exposed to something inappropriate. We suspect the midwives were sacrificing these dogs to protect themselves, but as a way of calming the spirits of the babies or whatever. The ancient Greeks didn't really believe in ghosts, they're not like the Romans who were kind of big on ghosts. There was a concern about improper death and improper burial. There were a few things, for example, there were six or eight, maybe even 10, it's been a while since I've looked at the pottery, but there are these long tubes that have a bulge in the middle that were perfume flasks, very commonly found in graves. Some of those were found in mixed in with the bones. There seemed to have been a few typical grave offerings, not many at all, but a few and all of these dogs. We think the midwives were concerned about this and were doing something to propitiate the spirits, the pollution, whatever.
CFP
That's actually very interesting. It was just something that I kept on thinking about it as I saw the play and I was like, “huh.” There's a huge disconnect there so there must be something that Dr. Liston must know, I will ask her.
ML
Well, until we invent a time machine and go back and watch, we don't know for sure, but the pieces fit together pretty nicely on the evidence for this.
CFP
That's one of the most fun, if I can say fun, most fun things about the archeological sciences, I feel, because you get to just build this entire puzzle of everything that happened and it's just cool. It's a wonderful field. I'm very proud to play a small role in it.
ML
It's one of the reasons that I think archeology is important for undergraduates. If I can, you know, jump in. With it, we look at impartial, damaged, fragmentary datasets, and learn how to draw robust, repeatable conclusions. That's one of the so-called transferable skills that the humanities and social sciences are supposed to be providing to undergraduates. You know, that's what we do. We happen to make it fun and interesting instead of tedious and boring, but that's what you're learning, is how to draw together multiple lines of evidence with badly fragmented data and come up with good answers. There you go, everybody take archeology!
CFP
I'm definitely biased, but I always say, and I always think, that anthropologists are the best professionals and that everyone should have anthropologist around. So, thank you for agreeing. As for people that specifically want to go into some sort of archeological field, whether it's like archeology or bioarchaeology, how do you continue finding relevant areas of study in a researcher saturated field that is to an extent, experiencing a shortage in research subjects that remain buried. I know that it is a common preoccupation amongst my peers, where some of them want to go and study in a Greek or Roman context. They're saying things like, “they're going to discover it all, I'm going to have nothing else left to research when my time comes up.” You've been at this for so long so I wanted to know, how do we, as researchers, become relevant and how do we stay relevant? How do we continue finding things to study?
ML
Well, the first thing I'll do in terms of studying skeletal remains is the ancient Romans had it right. The ancient Romans referred to the dead as the majority, and they recognize that more people have died in all of the past than are alive now there are a whole lot more skeletons out there to study. Within Greece and Italy, or the Roman world, or the Greco Roman world, you've got laws that protect ancient heritage, and they require that any remains be properly excavated and properly found if any development is going to take place and developments are taking place all the time. Roads are being built and rebuilt, cities are expanding, and populations grow, and you bought more housing, and stores and malls and all of that, unless it's all replaced by the internet post COVID. In fact, the problem in Greece certainly is there is way more material that needs to be studied than there are people who can possibly get it done. Every museum has storerooms, they call them Apothekis, and these Apothekis are just crammed with material that nobody has studied that was excavated as part of a road expansion, or somebody's adding a wing onto their house and lo and behold, discover they're sitting on top of a early iron age cemetery or whatever. In fact, there's a tremendous amount that needs to be studied, and we're just beginning to get enough data to put together a nice big picture, but there's a whole lot left to do.
CFP
I think that's also very encouraging, that idea that the majority, or on non-majority, but for the people that want to go into bioarcheology there will always be something else to research. You can always like model your research in a different way. Even as you’ve proven with your career, you can start with like this one project and that one project flourishes into seven more. Your new project of the last decade.
ML
Yes, yes. Every project for me has led to another project. You do good work and you treat people nicely and you try to be a polite guest on their project or a real team member and you do all those things, and you get a reputation of being that person. Then you get invited to the next one. So it's just been sequential for me, one after another.
CFP
Of course. We have some audience questions from our crowd. There's someone that's asking, “What made you interested in the area of the world that you study?” What led you originally there?
ML
Well before I was anthropologist, I was a classicist. In college I was a double major in English and Classics. I did a master's degree in classics and it took me six years. I'm somewhat slow. It took me six years to figure out I did not want to make a living translating Latin. I didn't really want to write a dissertation on Latin poetry like I thought I was going to. So I wanted to shift to archeology. At that point, anthropological archeology and classical archeology were very far apart, but anthropological archeology was starting to- graduate students were discovering it and irritating their professors with it. It was causing a lot of problems really, in classics. I pretty much wanted to see what this was about if it was making them so angry, or so nervous. I had planned to just take a few courses one summer at the university of Tennessee and see what this anthropology stuff was about. Three intro courses and a second year course in bio anth in a summer, and I was hooked and did another bachelor's degree. It only took a year because I could transfer everything, but the major. So I did another bachelor's degree in a year and then applied to PhD programs in classical archeology. The chair of the department at Tennessee, Bill Bass kept saying, you're anthropologist. You need to stay here and so I did. Classics got me into archeology and archeology got me into bones. So it wasn't planned. I have to say, it was following courses I loved.
CFP
I feel like that's one of the most important things that you have to be as an anthropologist. You have to really love what you do. You have to really be passionate about it because I feel otherwise it can scare mere mortals away.
ML
It was a long, I mean, I was 32 when I finished my PhD and I had a lot of my contemporaries from high school that owned houses and had careers and I was just finishing up. You did need to love it. On the other hand, I went to Greece every summer and I just had the best possible time doing it. I didn't spend a once in a lifetime, two week vacation in Greece or a week long cruise, I spent 10 to 12 weeks every summer in Greece so for me that was a trade off that was just fine.
CFP
Let's see, someone else is asking, “what's your favorite course to teach and why?”
ML
Oh, I love the osteology course. Because it's so hands on, I love the fact that it's in the lab and I'm right there, we've just got this circle of people around the table and I get to interact with you all so much. I love it when people get excited about learning these bones and when it clicks and, some people will struggle at the beginning with this different type of learning. Learning the shape of things. That's not something you've had to do since kindergarten, possibly. And it's exciting when it clicks. I like the fact that it's a pretty small class and there's lots of interaction and it's, for me is, that review is useful. I pick up little details and things. I learned something from it every time I teach it. But it's a lot of fun. I enjoy all my courses. I taught [ANTH] 204 for the first time last year. I can't believe I've been at Waterloo this long and never taught that course. That was great fun, covering all of this, that, at a beginning level, but getting back, looking at the big picture of the field of bioanth again and I loved it. Skeleton biology's just more of osteology. So it's fun. I love my field and I'm very fortunate about that.
CFP
Well, as I told you, one of my favorite courses of all time has been human osteology. It was so different from every other course that I've ever taken. I recommend that course to everyone that's in anthropology and beyond. It really is great and I'm really appreciative of the way that you help us learn this material that would otherwise be so dense. It could, if you're not particularly interested, it could become very tedious.
ML
Even I’m like that!
CFP
I walked in not being particularly keen on bones, and then I walk out of the course the whole new perspective on bioarchaeology. So thank you for that. We have, let's see, we have a couple more questions. “What piece of advice would you give to a similar students who are finishing up a major that they're not completely sure about?” I feel like it's regarding your switching.
ML
Yes. Well I certainly switched, I went to school planning to be a veterinarian and be a biology major. I'm a poster child for switching your major. You need to find something you love and that you love it because you're willing to work hard at it. Not that you love it because it's easy and you don't have to invest in it. If that's not the field you're in, you're not going to be a success in the career that field leads to, and you're going to spend 40 years doing something that bored you when you were an undergraduate. So how's it going to get any better if you thought it was dull at the beginning? You need to find what you love and what you're good at, but again, good at because you're willing to really work at it, not good at it because it takes zero effort. If you're not in that field, then you may need to rethink this, or you at least need to tweak it a little bit. I was really very blessed that my parents were quite supportive of my, “Oh, starting all over with another bachelor's degree after finishing a master's degree.” I think they were a little shocked, but they did cope and I was mostly paying my own way, but they helped a little bit and they kept me on their health insurance, for example, which is a big deal in the US. I was tweaking, I knew I liked studying the ancient past, but the literature wasn't the way for me, that was not what I really wanted to be doing. It took me a little while to find that. Your education is an investment in your future. If what you're putting your time and effort into is not something you want to do for the rest of your life, for the rest of your working life, then you may want to rethink that. So that would be my advice. Just because of a course of study is supposed to lead to a high paying job, if you're terrible at it cause you hate it, you're not going to have high paying job. You're not even going to accomplish that.
CFP
Just bringing it back, we only have this one life and then afterwards we move on to being the majority and we don't know what happens there. Might as well do something that we're willing to work hard on. I feel like I'm very like results oriented. I love like my good work. I love having something that I can be proud of. That's really good advice. How would I be able to be proud of something that I don't really enjoy doing? It's all a cycle. We have one more audience question and they say, “have you ever encountered trouble with developers or government in Greece because of your excavations?”
ML
No, not really. I'm fortunate that Greece is so committed to its past and to making sure that remains are properly excavated and preserved. Sometimes I wish they were a little less committed to that preservation. This winter, four years after applying to get some DNA analysis from this cemetery, I finally got the permit and literally this morning finally got permission to ship the bones. The problem was there's this great hesitance to do anything that damages anything, including crummy little ribs and not very interesting teeth that were loose in the grave, but so, the problems or frustration is with that, but this is Greece. The Greeks have a right to decide how their material is studied. It's important that we remember we're guests here. We work within the system and if it takes four years to get that permit, then that's what it took. Unfortunately, the other issue, and I'm surprised somebody hasn't asked this, dealing with human remains, I dig up graves or I study dug up graves. The North American view is that your grave is yours forever is very alien in Europe. Europe's too old. The majority would take up the entire, every square inch of Europe would be covered in graves if graves were kept forever and in Greece, because there's so little usable land, most people only stay buried about five to seven years. You attend your grandmother's funeral and then a few years later you attend the exhumation of your grandmother's body and, or skeleton, you hope it's skeletal now at that point. There's no discomfort with digging up graves of people who died 1500 or 2,500 years ago. We're not violating social mores. We're treating them the way people literally have treated their own relatives. It does make it an easier place to work because of that, because what we're doing is an acceptable part of culture.
CFP
Greece does have a really big, really strong chthonic. As long as you treat the bones with respect and just don't use them for anything that we would be considered humiliating, it makes sense that people, at large, support it. Now we are moving on to the, “This or That” segment where I give you two options of things. You tell me which one's your favorite or which one you're most interested in. You can give me a follow up if you want, but if not, we can just like move on to the next one. Okay, number one, tarsals or carpals?
ML
Ah, I think tarsals. That's the result of this project where, in fact, bodies have been partially exhumed and most of what I have is legs and feet. I spent all of my time working on legs and feet for the most part. So, yes, I really love tarsals now.
CFP
Okay. Lumbar, thoracic, or cervical vertebrae?
ML
Cervicals. I think they're interesting. I like the fact that the first and second are different. Yes, cervicals.
CFP
I personally like lumbar more because they look like little moose. I think that's cute. Okay, Bejel Pinta, or Yaws?
ML
None of the above please. Wow. Bejels. Probably the least severe. If I gotta have one of them, I'll take Bejels.
CFP
Or being interesting to study maybe?
ML
Oh, well, yaws shows up bones some but bejel and pinta, as far as we know, most of the time don’t. It's usually yaws and syphilis that appear on bones. Interesting, I've never found in archeological case though. I've it's one thing I've never seen.
CFP
Jane Buikstra or Vilhelm Møller-Christensen?
ML
I want to be Jane Buikstra when I grow up! I tell her this occasionally. I've seen her at a meeting, anthropologists sitting around. I've actually only told her that once, but it really made her laugh. I have great admiration for her work and I think she's been such an important influence on the field.
CFP
She really has been and I admire, what's the name of the field guide she put together?
ML
You mean the Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains?
CFP
The Standards!
ML
Yes, the standards. Okay, well here, this will make you happy. Let me pick up my computer and look over my head. You see that chair right there behind me? That's where Jane Buikstra was sitting in February and March. She's seeing the board of trustees of the American School as the lab representative. She's the director of this big Fallaron project. I sat with my back to Jane pretty much every afternoon for part of February and March.
CFP
I used Standards so much this past winter when I was taking forensics. I was just always like, “thank you, Jane Buikstra.”
ML
Well I have to tell you, I should've gotten better organized Tom Siek, who taught the skeletal biology and theoretic forensics in the Winter, is working here in the lab now. He arrived last weekend. He's working on the Fallaron project. I realized as he was leaving for the evening, that I should have made him stick around. If you want to interview him about what he's working on-
CFP
Tell him to reply to my emails. I've emailed him and he’s not getting back to me.
ML
All right. I'll give him a hard time. I'm not his advisor anymore, but I could pick on him.
CFP
Okay. Rickets or Scurvy?
ML
I think scurvy to study.
CFP
Yeah. I would have chosen scurvy as well. Let's see, trephination or trepanation?
ML
Oh, trepanation and I won't bore you with linguistic reasons for that, but yes, I think it's trepanation.
CFP
DISH or ankylosing spondylitis?
ML
I would love to see a case of DISH. That's on my life list of pathologies I want to find, I've never found DISH before. I have found some ankylosing spondylitis, but both of them are fascinating. Of course, hard to tell apart if you don't have the whole skeleton to look at.
CFP
It was a major point of contingency in your paleontology exams. “Which one is this? DISH? Or is this…” I still get PTSD from that but we’re good. Juvenile or adult bones?
ML
Right now, juvenile. In part, because I've invested so much effort in the last 10 or 15 years at really getting better at juvenile bones. I'm still excited when I see this, like, “Oh yeah, let's see. What's going on here.” On the other hand, they're sad, of course.
CFP
One final This or That question. The Anthropology Society at Waterloo or the Anthropology Society at Waterloo?
ML
The anthropology society at Waterloo absolutely is the best.
CFP
Wow. Thank you.
ML
I’m so impressed with this, what you're doing.
CFP
Well, on that note, I think it's time for us to say goodbye. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Liston. I know that this was a fairly awaited and expected interview, so I'm glad we got to do this. As always, we're going to be posting the interview to YouTube. We're gonna upload the transcript. We're gonna write an article about this. So, really thank you so much for your time.
ML
Well, thank you for the invitation. It has been so much fun. I'm sorry the technology failed us and we couldn't do quite as much of a lab tour as I'd hoped, but, we overcame the obstacles and it's been a lot of fun. Thank you.
CFP
That's, I feel like that's the moral of this pandemic story, overcoming obstacles, adjusting to new situations, and then rising above that. But thank you so much. Have a good rest of your evening/night.
ML
Yes, evening. I'm going to head home and feed that kitten and play with it. I actually have three foster cats right now, so I will have a nice evening and get up tomorrow morning and work on bones. So it's a good week!
CFP
Well thanks Dr. Liston. Have a good night and I'm just gonna unplug this from the live.
ML
Okay. Bye bye.
CFP
Bye.
Transribed by Fireflies.ai and edited by Nathan Homerski.
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