*Note: This post includes content from an online interview between Dr. Russell Adams and UWaterloo AnthSoc VP Events, Camila Font Pescod. The transcript is posted on the AnthSoc website and the full video interview can be found on YouTube.
On the evening of July second, following Liverpool's epic loss in the Premier League, VP Events Camila Font Pescod was joined by University of Waterloo (UW) Anthropology Adjunct Assistant Professor Dr. Russell Adams to discuss his journey into academia, the direction of his research, and the moments of his life that led to him being the excellent archaeologist and exceptional professor that we are so honoured to guide our studies.
Dr. Adams started his journey in academia here in Waterloo at Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) where he completed his bachelor's degree as an interdepartmental major in archaeology with classes in archaeology, religion and culture, and classics. He later completed his master's degree, also at WLU. Adams fondly remembers his classes as a young student with his summer excavations being "open air classrooms" in which he could apply his classroom learning and gain practical experience. Israel, Jordan, Greece, and Cyprus replaced lecture halls as he excavated, partly under Professor Larry Toombs who studied Syro-Palestinian archaeology. It was at this time that Adams somewhat stumbled upon the site that, unknown to him, would occupy the next 30 years of his life. Over a cup of tea with archaeologist Burton MacDonald in the gardens of the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, Adams decided to take the place of a member of MacDonald's survey team who had dropped out.
"I'd been to Jordan previously in 1982, working on another project," Adams explained, "so I was kind of interested. The survey was in a previously largely unexplored part of Southern Jordan, because it was extremely hard to get to. At that time, there were no direct roads which connected the Southern Gore with other parts of Jordan except through Aqaba, which is the extreme south of the country. And so, it was really just by chance that I got to go to Jordan to work with Burton [MacDonald] on his...survey. And one of the interesting things is the very last group of sites that we looked at, because we were working from north to south, was in a place called Faynan. And nobody had done any research there at all. There were a group of German archaeo-metallurgists who are poking around the ancient mines, but there really hadn't been any, what we could call normative types of archaeology taking place there. And so it was really just by chance that I ended up seeing Faynan in 1986."
With a heart full of Faynan fantasies, Adams travelled back to Canada to complete his master's degree (1987).
It is said that every person's path to academia is individual to their peers’, and Dr. Adams' track to his honourific is no exception. Having gained a UK visa through his family ancestry, he was able to carry out his PhD. studies at Sheffield University. He started as a part-time student as his family visa allowed him to work and learn without having to prove sufficient funds prior to accepting his studies. However, with his exemplary academics and pioneering research, he was soon able to gain grants to work on his studies full-time.
After teaching at universities in the UK and the USA, the University of Waterloo and McMaster University were lucky enough to have Dr. Adams join their teaching faculties, McMaster as a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow. In his interview, Dr. Adams spoke of his love of teaching and joy in seeing remarkable students pursue their own paths in academia. However, Adams also presented his concerns, having worked in academia for so long.
"I'm a little bit worried about the state of higher education in general," Adams says. "Not least the disparity in opportunities to those trying to get into university teaching. If someone as experienced as I am, with a solid teaching research background, with multiple publications, can't get a tenure track job, it seems the system is a little bit broken in some respects. So do not take this in the wrong way. This is not a "poor me" moan. But there are so many academics like me with UW, broadly in Canada, and even more so in US, that I'm not very hopeful about academia or university teaching as a career choice."
In his interview, Dr. Adams discussed with Camila Font Pescod the history and dangers of commercializing the world of higher education. They noted the role of the business model of universities in perpetuating existing discrimination in so many parts of the world. Font Pescod extended this to the student visa requirements for UK studies, regarding proof of all necessary funds prior to the commencement of studies.
"Really it only speaks to the type of immigrant that they deem as acceptable and welcome into their country," She said, "And so, it ends up just being a manifestation of classism and racism through immigration policies. Because really, you can't talk about having access to wealth without talking about racial disparities within the system."
For Adams, working with a diverse group is a given. His digs are a gathering place of people from across the globe all working together to unearth the secrets at Faynan. He spoke of international matchmaking and the high chances of falling in love while on his digs. He notes one of the wonders of going on a dig as being able to meet people "outside of your own world experience." Adams often hears from past students, now married with children and living in various parts of the world, who had met on a dig in Faynan with him. He recalled one particular story with a Canadian connection very fondly.
"We had a British undergraduate on our project, who claimed to be an expert in martial arts. And he bragged and he bragged, and he bragged, and finally, one of our female students from my colleague, Jim Anderson's college on Vancouver Island, said, okay, I've heard enough. She said, I'm challenging you to a fight. And so, they had a match. And he got his butt kicked! Now, she took him apart. He lost, but oddly enough, he won because they fell in love and they now live in the UK with their two children. So, you never know what's going to happen, even from a rocky start, sort of a cage match fight, to romance into the future. So it always is interesting to see how these things develop. But there are there are lots of other examples...archaeology has romance on lots of levels. And I encourage anyone studying archaeology to go on a dig, at some point in your academic career, it will change your life."
Adams had met his own wife on the staircase of his TA office building at Bricker and King, both as young graduate students at Laurier. Having “several colleagues who met their spouses on staircases”, Adams says that staircases are “apparently are quite notorious” and “kind of magical” as “you just never know where you're going to meet that special person.”
Dr. Adams began his research in Faynan in 1988. For over 30 years, Adams has led a team in excavating in Faynan, Jordan at sites such as Khirbat Hamra Ifdan each summer. He often says that Faynan is the Silicon Valley of the Bronze Age because it is here that we see the first signs of industrialization and the largescale production of metals. From 3500 -1900 BC, humans in the Faynan region were mining, smelting, and producing metals along a production chain. All of the metal dependent technologies that much of our existence as humans is contingent upon has a root in the Early Bronze Age metal production in Faynan.
“It's as revolutionary, at that time, as modern developments in computing and in information technology are today,” Adams explained, “Think about it just for a second. Where would human societies be without the introduction and the use of metal on a large scale in human societies? The Bronze Age, at least the earliest phases of it, it's really the beginning of what we could describe as the modern world because it's at this point, the technology comes to the fore and technology really is something that humans have excelled at over the millennia. And so, in a sense, it's such a significant transformation from human life before the use of metal, when, of course, you had humans using stone and bone and wooden tools. And they've been using these items for literally hundreds of thousands of years as emerging human populations. So, it really is a wonderful technological advancement taking place in the earliest phases of the Bronze Age in Faynan. And that's really what draws us in to have a look at what these changes meant in terms of technology, but also in terms of human societies.”
A crown jewel of the excavations, and Dr. Adams’ all-time favourite artifact, is the cupcake which is on show at the Jordan Museum in Amman (Virtual tour available! Jordan Museum Tour). The cupcake (pictured to the right) is a beautifully preserved first example of the recycling of metal. It is composed of an “only partially melted amalgamation of roughly smelted copper, and several tiny little ingots which were put on top of that smelt, which were going to be re-melted down for liquid copper to form more objects”. Though the cupcake is remarkable in its preserved state after all these years, its specialized ceramic crucible has disintegrated. This is truly a reminder of the amount of history that is lost to us and how much archaeologists must seek to understand the dots in order to connect them. And further than this, archaeologists must look beyond the artifact, ecofacts, and features at their visual value and fully develop a picture of the lives of humans in the past. Dr. Adams embraces this in his work and with expertise of Dr. Alexis Dolphin, they are discovering the immense environmental pollution that has resulted from years of metal work in the region. Analysing environmental pollution, looking at the landscapes and the geography, and mapping out the pollution from the metal production, and analysing the bones from the Early Bronze Age burials has produced a slew of data to suggest that the metallurgy that took place in Faynan was detrimental to the health of the environment and of the community.
Despite this amazing, exciting, and truly ground-breaking research taking place, this year looked different for Dr. Adams as he is spending time digging in his own vegetable garden and not in Jordan. For him, “it's made life easier because the most complex decisions [he has] had to make are, [is he] watering my tomato plants too much or too little.” Adams has found it interesting to see the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. With his anthropological nature shining through, Adams has been watching the impact of illness and insecurity on our human populations. He notes that adding in the political challenges many countries are tackling head on, “it's really been a gigantic anthropological experiment.”