Vol. 12 Presenter: Mollie Toll
Presenting
Artifacts: Critical Information for Archaeologists
Summary
Artifacts, or material culture, are the pieces of information that lend interpretation to human behavior, in the absence of, or as counterpoint to, written history. We'll take a look at the many different forms of artifacts that can appear in the archaeological record, and what we can learn from them. While the great bulk of archaeological artifacts are by necessity made of materials resistant to the ravages of time, such as rock, metal, and pottery, there are marvelous accidents of preservation that allow us to admire artifacts of perishable, organic materials, such as bone, feather, and plant fibers. In addition to revealing resource utilization and technology over broad sweeps of time and space, artifacts keep us humbly aware of inventiveness, and ancient technical and artistic skills.
Bio
Mollie Toll worked for several decades as an archaeobotanist, identifying plant remains from archaeological sites, first at the Castetter Lab for Ethnobotanical Studies, UNM, and then at the Office of Archaeological Studies, Museum of New Mexico. Her academic background is a pair of matching bookends: Anthropology/ Archaeology (University of Chicago, Loyola U) and Plant Ecology (UNM). She spent another decade in the public schools as a science coach and a classroom teacher. Now she is back at OAS/MNM as an outreach educator, training teachers and providing archaeology and ethnobotany content in classrooms. Although it was very satisfying working with all those archaeobotanical ARTIFACTS, it’s a lot more fun telling stories about them, and listening to curious observations and inferences from kids and adults alike.