 Welcome everybody to the Archaeological Research Facility's bag lunch for Wednesday the 13th of October and a lovely autumn to all of you. I wanted to start before I introduce our wonderful speaker today. I want to give a land acknowledgement for here where we are on Berkeley land. We are the Archaeological Research Facility from where I'm speaking is located in the Wichin, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chechenyo speaking Alone people, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Alone people and that the art community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Alone ancestors and erased living Alone people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in the support of Alone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American native and indigenous peoples. And we are grateful to be here on this lovely land today. But I would like to now turn to our guest speaker today Dr. Citaridi who is a wonderful colleague of mine and I'm just so grateful for her coming to speak with us today. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin while lecturing at the University of San Diego UC San Diego. She began working in cultural resource management as a paleoethnobotanist which she got her training in in her dissertation fieldwork. And she's continued as an archaeologist and as a specialist in archaeobotany throughout her career as a principal investigator and project manager in many venues throughout California including a major project in the Volona Marsh of LA County. She is currently president of Reedy Anthropology Consulting incorporated a micro business that offers consulting services for ethnography archaeology and paleoethnobotany where she brings over 30 years of experience in anthropology in two countries the United States and India India I say Canada of course not her anthropological interests include research of subsistence systems settlement patterns human behavior environmental management Spanish colonialism in California racial equality and tribal engagement her archaeological work has included early urbanism in South Asia research in hunters and gatherers and colonialism in California as a paleoethnobotanist she has worked on materials from South India Northwest India Jordan and throughout California North and South she has been doing ethnographic research since 1988 first in India and then in California so well steeped in that tradition and India Dr. Reedy has worked with traditional farming communities migratory pastoral populations and hunter gatherer populations on land use settlement and subsistence related issues her ethnographic research in California has included conducting interviews with Native American tribes and individuals and reporting findings related to traditional cultural land use and ethnographic significance of archaeological sites of course including all the regulations of California and federal requirements she has regularly published in journals and edited volumes like I'm just going to mention three very briefly one feeding family and ancestors persistence of traditional Native American life ways during the mission period in coastal Southern California that's from the Journal of American archaeology another article is from the Journal of California Great Nation archaeology called plant use by complex hunter gatherers paleoethnobotanical studies in California and the third one I want to mention is agrarian transitions in Iron Age Southern India social and environmental implications so she has published a broad range of work she's she's a hard hard working scholar and we are so fortunate that she's willing to take some time to share with us some of her key experiences in her in her her life's work but I want to finally before I pass this over to Dr. Rudy I want to mention two very important things that she's recently engaged with and one is she's the founder of Women in California Archaeology Committee which is part of the Society for California Archaeology where she has served as the president for five years and vice chair for one so she's passing the baton to other women which is a good thing for her to do she's also the founder of the recently unveiled coalition diversity in California Archaeology focused on providing support advocacy and mentorship for unrepresented professionals in California so there those are two really important aspects of her very diverse and deep career that I want to bring to your attention so now I will let her speak to you today on her talk that is titled shaping an anthropological research path in diverse settings a personal perspective so thank you very much Sita and I'm clapping for everybody well thank you Christine for that wonderful introduction and it'll be remiss if I didn't mention that I first met Christine many years ago I want to say 89 or so while we were both in the Midwest and she is one of my earliest mentors so I do want to you know mention that and let me share my screen does that come through okay that's cool well good afternoon everyone as Christine mentioned I'm going to talk about my journey starting as a graduate student doing archaeology and ethnorechaeology in South Asia to working as an anthropologist in California within a CRM context and then more recently an applied anthropology my goal is to show you that over the years there are going to be novel opportunities for you to use the training and the skills you have gained and or gaining as an anthropology student so first starting off my foundations I obtained my bachelor and doctorate degrees in US universities however prior to my doctoral fieldwork I worked in India in all types of archaeology my research in graduate school was centered in South Asia and on South Asian archaeology and my doctoral research was on urbanism associated with the Indus Valley civilization as it was manifest in northwest India specifically I was interested in understanding the subsistence economies centered around pastoralism and agriculture during the early part of the second millennium BC so toward this I designed a multidisciplinary research approach that included archaeology, ethnography, ethnorechaeology, paleotnobotany and bone chemistry and it was aimed to understand the role of particular plants of millet crops specifically as both human food and or animal fodder so I used data from archaeological context so that included macro botanical remains and bone chemistry of domesticated cattle bone and also ethnorechaeological data of crop processing so I worked with an international team of archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania and also in India and we excavated two archaeological sites in northwest rural India in the modern state of Gujarat which is on the slide where a pointer is right in that area so one site had a firmural occupation with very minimal architecture while the second site had considerable architecture as shown in the slide here in these slides out here the deposits in the occupation of the occupation were very deep in the site with the substantial architecture it had distinct rooms, trash pits, huts and related human behavior features and all these contexts were sampled for macro botanical remains so the soil samples were processed through flotation to recover the macro botanical remains and you can see a very young me in those pictures doing the flotation and the slide also shows a couple of millet crops the panacea and panacea and my goal was to understand how and why macro botanical remains entered the archaeological context and to get insights on whether the crops were being grown by the occupants themselves or obtained through trade and exchange and also what the crop grain and byproduct themselves were being used for were they used for food for humans or fodder for animals or a combination so therefore it was critical for me to study how crops were processed and I focused specifically on millet crops which I mentioned before and these millet crops are drought resistance summer crops and as I said this shows this two different types of millets and even though there are many other millets included in this corpus of plants now while I was working at the two sites I built relationships with the local farmers because it was really important for me to build it ahead build the relationships ahead of time and then go back there to work with them in subsequent years now for the ethno archaeology I worked with non-mechanized farmers and specifically farmers with small land holdings in both northwest India around the sites where the excavations were done but also in south India so my study of modern crop processing but in a traditional non-mechanized setting of course interviewed in included in interviews like I've shown you in a couple of sites and in this slide they also I've shown the processing pathways that a millet crop could potentially go through so my study in really included rigorous study to understand to document and also sample the processing pathway from all the way to harvest like here and here in these slides through threshing and that's the product after harvest of one type of millet threshing of winnowing and a sieving and this is a second type of winnowing that's specific to south asia and parts of east asia and followed by grinding or pounding depending on what kind of product you want whether you want just the the seeds without the husks on them or if you want to have a flower and then the final of course is is the food itself on how it's being consumed and this photograph shows it as a bread but it also can prepare them as you know a cruel like a cruel kind of like porridge or like rice etc so through the macro botanical study you know of these ethnographic samples that I've collected from each processing stage I identify the signature of byproducts and products from each for each of these stages with the goal that it can be used to identify such events of processing of plants in the archaeological context and then using the ethnoarcheological data I developed these crop processing models depend based on the type of plant the morphology of the plant involved and ultimately this resulted in the use of the archaeological you know archibotomy data and these models to you know identify what was happening at the sites themselves in terms of crop use and disposal and the use of millets you know as human food and animal fodder now the design of the study required me to work as a team but also independently as this was you know later proved to be a great training that served me really well later on and even today another important thing that was really a byproduct of the this whole experience of doing fieldwork in India was learning how to study my own culture and that gave me perspective and tools for ethnography in general and specifically also as I am doing ethnography today so once I finished my doctoral degree I was keen on joining the academic world who isn't right and I pursued a search for a position for three years and during this time I entered the cultural resource management or CRM world in California and really my first steps into this world was as a temporary solution for financial reasons you know start being self-sufficient a little bit financially now what most people do not know is that the majority of archaeology that's conducted in the US and definitely so in the state of California is done under the CRM umbrella it's driven by compliance so agencies and companies are having to meet the requirements of the laws and the regulations and address cultural resources the inventory the protection and preservation so although it is compliance driven I decided to define a role for myself where research is going to be an important part of what I did on a daily basis so one of the things you know that I had to come to face with right away is time and culture right um I was trained in urban early urbanism in South Asia the agriculture pastoralism centralized controlled um to California where it was mainly hunter gather economies with no domesticates animal or plants um widely ranging adaptations based on where you were um within the geotopography of this large state so there was definitely a learning curve you know but I had to pretty much jump into the deep end immediately and kind of learn as I you know was experiencing these different projects and studies so in my goal to kind of make it to what I wanted to be um of course you know I I looked at look towards two things it's like palliative botany what is the status of palliative botany in california what I realized it was to date at that point so this was like you know in um 93 94 um there were very limited studies done and it was palliative botany as a field was quite in its infancy throughout california and the standard response I got when I was um inquiring about it was oh there are no plant remains you know um there's no preservation it's so bad that we don't recover anything but you got a lot of funnel remains so what I realized isn't there wasn't going there wasn't anything standardized being done um and also adequate sampling um so the first step was convincing project managers about the potential of potential and strength of macro botanical data what kind of questions can be answered and why it's important to include these data and why plant data is just as important as um funnel remains and uh lithic studies etc and a lot of the discussions also included cost value you know how can you make this you know competitive you know so it it really ended up being like in the beginning I had to make make a lot of choices of you know I'm going to do this real real cheap for you so you can you know so I can demonstrate to you about the value of doing it so then the next thing was um experimental archaeology coming fresh from you know the crop processing ethno archaeology in India um I started looking at well why aren't people just trying to study shellfish and trying to figure out how they're processed so one of the most common shellfish in southern coastal sandy beach uh california adornax gold or also called uh bean clam so um I designed and conducted a study on um collection and preparation to understand the dietary role of the shellfish and conducted that in the lovely sandy beaches of San Diego Cal San Diego county and it really ended up being an interesting study that opened up a lot of doors for me because really it was like you know providing these new insights about plants about you know small shellfish and processing it kind of concepts and ideas that people hadn't really explored in any great detail um I'm going to give you a few examples of my involvement in long-term research which resulted in peer reviewed articles chapters and books of course technical reports and professional talks the first one is um research along the San Diego coast um the focus of my work was on subsistence and self-settlements of pre-contact people in this area and this is from about let's say like 8000 BP to Spanish contact which is like you know 1542 AD now during this time period um with the hunter-gatherer adaptations the primary for food resources were shellfish there was schooling fish um land mammals wild plants um including wild grasses um few to rare nut foods and right from the beginning starting in 94 I started working closely with Native Americans and this has been a theme since then and increasingly so over the years in a collaborative manner um so my research over like you know 10 years or so in um San Diego um contributed to several new insights the first was a dominant theme of prior research was that the coast abandoned around 10,000 BP now our research showed just the opposite instead we found evidence of sedentary villages with seasonal camps short-term limited activity locales as I defined it and hand in hand with this um prior to our work there was an implicit bias about small food packages packages like small sized shellfish and small seeds and our research dispelled these views and instead illustrated how small shellfish and small seeded plant foods were really important along the course through time and these insights really were gained through two things detailed samplings you know and intensive samplings and the recognition of the role of intensification of these food resources um moving on another um large long-term successful CRM driven project is what Christine mentioned before in the Los Angeles basin in the in the Bayona and it was for a private uh development for the Playa Vista development project and I was one of the four principal investigators and one of the two project managers for it it was a super large project over many years and um this whole area involved uh 8,000 year occupation starting like about 8,000 years ago all the way through the American period majority of the sites and the occupations dated to the mission period and during the mission period um in the Los Angeles basin they were they existed a village a domestic habitation context there was associated feasting associated mourning ceremonies and ritual and ceremonialism and also also mortuary context we encountered and excavated a large cemetery of Native Americans primarily dating to the mission period but also going back all the way to 8,000 years ago so there was a continuity of occupation and this area was a persistent place that Native Americans continued to come and live in so um of course this project involved working very closely with Native Americans the Gabrolania tribe of the Los Angeles basin and it was an enormously it was one of the most exciting projects that I have participated um so far and we got a lot of insights but like a very quick summary of what I felt were the more interesting insights for for me was persistence of Native culture despite a colonial context so Native Americans continued living in their villages in their Ancherias during you know missionization all the way to about 1814 AD so majority of the foods that they ate were wild animals including marine, estuarine, terrestrial animals and plants including wild grasses and many small seeded plants and interestingly contrary to what a lot of historic plant geographers have said wild plants did not disappear you know with the start of the mission period instead they were being intensively collected by the Native Americans in the Bayona and introduced colonial foods and also material cultures such as glass beads like you see on this slide copper pots and other metal items were being selectively being accepted into the ceremonial practices um the research also showed that there was clear distinction and social status based on mortuary analysis and um again kind of dispelling this view that you know there was very little food available for Native Americans in the mission period they was feasting related to annual mourning and ceremony ceremonialism that continued into and well into the middle a part of the mission period till about 1814 AD so I um kind of continuing on with this mission period archaeology I've been recently been involved in a large-scale excavation project at Mission Santa Clara very close to Berkeley and again this project is development related and in the map right here this is a map showing the university is right here Santa Clara University this map here shows all the red polygons which are features that are dating to the mission period these features have been identified through different projects over the years um you know by different companies working there now this the last project that I've been involved in a lot in has identified Native American renteria you know right in this area up here in the northern part and um these are like renterias are residential spaces where Native people were housed by the missionaries and they include adobe row houses you know right here in the slide here with hearts inside and also shared spaces between the rows so we excavated we encountered some of these adobe buildings but also interestingly we seem to have caught the edge of the rancheria we encountered features related to agriculture how perfect is that for me this slide here shows in cross section of feature that was spread over a very large area and it was a very distinct feature that you see here which is a crop processing feature and this is like a close-up of a piece of that and this is where they were actually threshing and winnowing crops that were being grown these are like wheat and barley domesticated crops that were brought in by the Spanish will be grown and processed by the Native Americans and also here is another close to this crop processing there's a feature that we feel is an animal corral showing hoof prints also so we kind of caught the you know edge of the rancheria and into the agricultural landscape a couple of important insights that that I am merging from this is the persistence of native ceremonialism again just like in Bayona but here within private spaces so between the adobe row houses the Native Americans kind of were persisting to practice their ceremonial activities away from the prying eyes of the Spanish priests and then another thing is that the wild plants continue to exist despite you know competition with domesticated plants you know and animals and introduced weeds specifically so this is sorry an example of one of the features between the two row houses of a feature that we feel is has to do with annual morning right here in yellow is an artifact that's typically associated with ceremonialism and this is a photograph of wild seeds all carbonized and were being offered in baskets as part of the annual morning ceremony now throughout as I mentioned I was engaged in with Native Americans and this has opened the last decade also opened doors conducting ethnography and Native American consultation but in a compliance context this involves doing archival research and working with tribes to identify a new set of cultural resources which are which are called tribal resources these are place names villages landscapes like sacred landscapes gathering lengths landscapes ceremonial landscapes and also talking about natural resources like clams and also you know different kinds of elements as cultural resources and all of this to help identify these tribal resources figure out ways to help in their protection and preservation you know so this work as I continued working with Native American American communities kind of led to a couple of projects that I kind of fell in my lap in the last two years that really are kind of taking me into what I feel is applied anthropology and these are first one is what is called CalTrans project it's a California Transportation Department it's a state planning department that I'm working with where they really want to understand the tribal planning needs for the 109 federally recognized tribes so I'm working with the tribes kind of it's like it's it's kind of like ethnography but not about cultural issues but it's about you know the capabilities and capacities of tribes as it pertains to them planning you know transportation within their tribal lands and the end results will will provide data for CalTrans to responsibly and responsibly engage with the tribe and provide you know the assistance they need. The second project that I'm immensely enjoying right now is has to do with working with the California Housing and Community Development and working with working for COVID relief and emergency relief where I am helping the HCD staff to evaluate projects that help tribes for economic development housing meals emergency housing homelessness shelters etc and also to provide training for these folks at HCD on best practices on how to engage with tribes how to engage with different cultures you know that's non-euro-american a big part of it is assessing homelessness among California tribes you know for funding so helping the HCD folks understand tribal culture and also how to navigate through inter-tribal equity so would be like understanding cultural behaviors you know what is homelessness actually mean in different cultural spheres what is overcrowding in home homes mean in different cultural contexts so these are some of the ongoing applied anthropology work so I do wear different hats you know depending on the needs so right now I'm wearing for these projects applied anthropology I work as an archaeologist a paleotinobotanist ethnographer depending on what the needs are so I want to end by a quick few notes on lessons learned for me that I hope will help you the students I really work to get as wide an experience as possible but within reason of course you know and it took time to get the experience I work really hard also not to label myself not to tag myself and you know to be a specific subdiscipline so I didn't I tried really hard not to pigeonhole myself as being you know just an archaeologist just a pre-contact archaeologist or just a paleotinobotanist so that way you know opportunities were wide and this kind of brought to the next thing which I think is very important is being flexible being flexible about the types of projects and the types of roles you know everyone wants to be the PI right but you know there's a lot to say about you know offering your services in support of someone who's the PI gets you to work with different people gets you kind of looking at the human condition in different ways and different angles and affords more opportunity and the last thing is I cannot emphasize the importance of actively seeking mentors and seeking mentors at all stages of the profession even today I need mentors I seek mentors you know and it's really important that you start early and continue throughout so towards this like Christina mentioned I bring your attention to the women in California archaeology a great place to seek support and mentorship and advocacy and they recently formed Coalition for Diversity in California Archaeology the chair for that we have a great group of leaders in that in the coalition and both are on Facebook so if you guys are interested please go on Facebook and ask to join it and the last thing I'm going to end on is that we have upcoming this Friday at 5pm a virtual event that is being put together by CDCA the Coalition for Diversity in California Archaeology in honor of the California archaeology month of October so I really hope that you will join you do have to register there are two topics I think any one of us can you know participate in the discussion where is California archaeology now and where it should be then the second one is education pathways and mentoring for archaeology archaeological carry on CRM academia and museum it is not for just for BIPOC people it's open regardless of your ethnic background or any background we welcome everybody so that's about all I got for now thank you so much for spending your lunch hour with me thanks and thank you Cita that was that was wonderful a wonderful race really jogged through your your very complex career and highlighting the many many important points that I know people in our community and beyond hopefully this is going to go on YouTube so people will be looking at this going forward not just today so I'm just really grateful for you to come I want to highlight those who are are watching it live you can add your comments or your questions to the chat in the YouTube session on that I'm I'm actually on the the zoom session here and well these comments come in um so we're saying thank you Kent like foot is saying really great talk there is a greater acceptance of ethnobotanical research oh here's a question sorry I'm reading it wrong Kent like foot asks is there a greater acceptance of ethnobotanical research in California CRM today and I would imagine then when you started great question Kent and thank you so much for that I say yes definitely I definitely get asked more about conducting paid ethnobotanical work it is still not where I personally would like to see it I really would like to have plants being considered on the on the same level of intensity as you know lithic studies and faunal but I think like publications help but I've also done as both Christine Kent know sessions at the California meetings those really have helped kind of spread the word etc so I think definitely compared to 93 94 I think we are in a definitely much better place great that's good to know how we're all supportive I'm going to ask a few questions if I might um and of course it's your your work is always very rich and informative to me so I have some specifics and some general ones I hope that's all right the first one is my old friend kina podium you talked about wild grasses and you gave us pictures of two wonderful california seeds that are really pretty ubiquitous up and down grassland areas and in our work in South America kina podium watching an indigenous tax on ultimately becoming domestic it in fact several domestic it's besides tracking the size of the seed and the seed test and the usual sort of archivitanical ingredients I was wondering if your if your grasses show other other aspects not necessarily that the traditional ones but shift in processing intensification evidence I know you you haven't I mean there's always more work to be done but from what you know in California is there evidence can you see evidence of shifting levels of intensification of use in these wild grasses um thanks Christine yes actually that's a great great question because the bio the work I did in the Bayona kind of gave me the types of sample sizes I needed to talk about you know intensification or targeted exploitation and of course you know I did do the standard you know increase changes in seed size etc like Charlie Mitch check had done also for the same grasses and did see a change over time it wasn't just like exponential growth it was you know up and down and that's expected you know in general what I ended up really feeling about what was happening in the Bayona was that they were intensively collecting these grasses because what was happening is they were dominating enormously over any other small seeds you know like yeah there was kinopodium they were like tarweeds etc they were other ones but really when you're talking but not only were they ubiquitous but they occurred in like significantly higher you know percentages and any kind of racus remains etc were only off these two grasses not others so those were all like indications that there was intensive cultivation now there's debate about whether there was you know domestication or agriculture but at this point I don't feel comfortable going there but it's more um they were targeted cultivations you know so like cultivars and in fact that's always the problem do you have to the tradition in archaeobotany for those who aren't archaeobotanists is we look for morphological changes but the point is there's other data like what you're describing with real evidence of focused intensive production or collection and processing so that leads me to my next question if I might and that's about processing you showed a lot of wonderful pictures of processing and the stages of processing in your millets or early ethnographic ethnorearchological milletwork and I'm wondering how that is informed and helped you try and get a sense on these same very grasses because they're all grasses they're all poaceae how that the processing knowledge you had has able to inform your engagement with these wild grasses meaning you're going to find grinding stones and processing evidence and can you just say something about how that's influenced your ability to see these taxa in California? Absolutely so in California you know pre-contact and you know native context itself a lot of the processing of these seeds and nuts is through groundstone whether it's bedrock milling or the you know the milling stone itself the portable I say portable because I wouldn't be able to move those around but it my work in South Asia on understanding you know what types of processing is needed to come to the ultimate product really helped a lot in understanding this you know in terms of what is needed to process you know wild barley what is needed to process kinepodium so therefore where would you find those kinds of byproducts what would you see in the site where you know at the site within the site's deposits versus elsewhere and most importantly it really got me a better perspective into like processing of acorn because knowing understanding the location of where the processing occurs and the type of processing is going to increase the representation and archaeological records right simple archaeobotany you need you know carbonization of some point to it to enter into the archaeological record if you don't have any kind of processing that involves you know fire or you know some kind of carbonization you're not going to find much of it right so in a in a context like acorn processing and I have to admit I did like one of my you know processing diagrams for wild grasses and acorn processing is much of it occurs off site you know and there are very few acorns that you can eat without you know leaching right so whether you know so the processing is really important and it happens off site away from hearts or any kind of roasting activities so that really kind of contributed a lot you know and kind of made me made it easier for me at least as whereas plant foods go to kind of step into california archaeology you know compared to some of the other you know data sets and to fill in to fill in the gaps where people might just not even see it that's that's great thank you I have to say there's a couple of things I have to read to you now okay because this is how we're doing it on zoom first William White one of my colleagues writes great talk see that I know he's actually in the field or doing research away so he's participating which is wonderful the next one is from Jordan Brown and he says thanks for a great talk have you also worked with federally unrecognized tribes in california if so does this change your approach to the work in particular ways actually that's I love that question because I work both with tribes that have federal recognition and those that don't and just putting it out there it has made me much more sensitive and aware of challenges that tribes without federal recognition face in terms of not I'm not even talking about just the culture and the archaeology working in the transportation world and the applied anthropology I've been trying to educate HCD on why it's important to kind of open up funding to you know tribes that don't have the infrastructure you know like a lot of not all federally recognized tribes have but more of them have you know tribal capabilities so definitely you know I think it has affected me changed me you know in thinking about tribes very differently you know based of course on culture that's you know obvious but also in terms of their recognition and what that means to them personally of course in terms of just historic trauma etc but also in terms of you know what services they have you know etc and one thing that's great about california sequel law is you know it doesn't differentiate them like you know when it comes to sequel consultation it includes everybody you know federally recognized without recognition individuals etc so that's wonderful but if it's like you know federal projects you're working with navy for example I'm working with on a couple of projects where the ethnography or the consultation is you know mainly federally recognized I mean I'd agree with it but that's that's the way it is thank you so you're making a case that at least in california there's some ability to to help on federally unrecognized tribes which is great a great thing to point out so I'm afraid it's our time is up so I just want there's one more thank you from Matt Sayer who is a colleague former student watching an archaeobotanist so I want to thank you very much again Dr. Reedy for coming to us through zoom so making it easier than normal and and giving us a really rich history of your research and and how you're so so productive and so three-dimensional in your scholarship because of your your sensitive and and rich rich research that you've been doing in important places so thank you very very much thank you very much and if people want to reach out to me about anything I've spoken about today please you know you can get my email from Christine too thank you