 Boom, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sackian. Really excited to still be at American Anthropological Associations annual meeting. We are now sitting down with Dr. Alex Barker. Thank you for coming out of the show. My pleasure. Really appreciate it. And I'm very happy because we have a lot to talk about. This is the first time we're sitting down with someone that is actually curating archaeology and anthropology at museums and art. So this is going to be, I'm really excited. So your background's awesome. I want to teach everyone about your background. You're currently the president of the executive board at AAA. Also got the PhD in Anthropological Archaeology at University of Michigan. And he was former curator of archaeology and anthropology at the Milwaukee Public Museum for about six years or so. And then now is the director of the Museum of Art and Archaeology and also the director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. And that's been for the last 12 years and three years, respectively. So, wow. Okay, cool. Before we get into what it's like to even curate archaeology, artifacts, as well as anthropological art and whatnot, how did you as a kid get involved in anthropology? When I was about 14, I started volunteering at the Milwaukee Public Museum. And I volunteered in the anthropology section with a woman named Nancy Lurie who went on to become the president of the American Anthropological Association. And shortly after I started volunteering, some folks came in and did a program about archaeology in southern Illinois. And they were with the old Northwestern program. And they allowed high school students to come in and do field projects. And I snuck in before I was actually in high school and did my first series of excavations in the middle 1970s. But while I was still, before I even got to undergraduate, and I'd done three years of excavations before I started college. Three years of excavations pre-college? Yep. Whoa! So by the time I got to college, I pretty much knew what I wanted to do. Yeah. Okay, whoa. Okay, so this is crucial because this is starting to really continue this, this really dire need that we have for youth, for children, for kids to have some sort of mentorship within their, the equality of opportunity for them to find what they love and then to have that mentorship. You were 14 when you started being able to have this access to archaeology as something that you cared about. Now where did you go for three years to dig? Well, the first two years was in a little town called Campsville, Illinois, which is a tiny little river town. There's not much there besides the ferry. But the Old Northwestern program under Stuart Striever had developed a whole series of excavations at major sites, ranging from Archaic sites through Lake Woodland into Mississippian sites in the Illinois River Valley and mainly in McCoopan, Calhoun counties. And so there were different projects going on with different crews. But there was this odd period there in the late 1970s in particular when it seemed like everybody who was doing American archaeology was working at Coster or at McCoopan or at Worthy American or one of the other sites based out of Campsville at one time or another. So it was a very magical time. Why? Where I can go back and look at colleagues years afterwards and we compare when we cross paths. And why in the late 1970s was there a lot of archaeologists in that area? But it was a heyday of what's been called the New Archaeology. So it was a period when people were moving from more normative approaches to culture history to looking at more scientific issues of process. And we've moved a little bit beyond that since then, but at the time they were really heady days where there was a sense that we were transforming the discipline and the way we were approaching ancient cultures was fundamentally different than the way we'd done things before. There were some problems with that approach and it's been revisited since. But at the time it seemed like a revolution and revolutionaries have a lot of zeal and energy and Stu Striever was one of the leaders of that movement. And what was Stu's kind of big thesis around the movement? Well, there were a whole series of folks who founded the New Archaeology and I'm not going to get into all their names, but their approach was really that if you looked at questions of culture process and culture history, you could treat it as any other science and ask broader, more nomathetic questions about why something happens. You might be able to develop predictive models that say that under these conditions this is a way of culture as a series of processes would respond. Looking at systems theory and feedback loops, mainly in terms of environmental issues because they're easier for us to capture with archaeology. It's harder to capture etiology. We can talk about it, but it's tougher to measure and tougher to assess. There are responses to environmental changes. That's something we can get to pretty easily. And this is especially through assessing artifacts for carbon dating, things like that? Or is that way better? Partly for dating, but some of the techniques that were really important during that period, it's the period when we first started doing something called flotation on a large scale, which is when you take samples of soil from an archaeological site, you float them using either water or different chemicals, and it allows you to capture the light fraction of material, charcoal, plant residues, things like that, and analyze them separately, and you capture not just what you were able to see and collect by hand, but everything that was there in that sample of soil and a heavy fraction that includes our archaeological material, bones from animals, microflakes, things like that. It was always there, but in periods before that, it was more common that you just collect the things you could easily see. And this was really looking at a much finer scale of information. The soil compositions. Right, the tiny things that are left behind. So instead of just thinking in terms of larger artifacts or objects like a deer scapula, you look at all the fish scales, and you get a much finer grained idea of how people were actually living. And fine scale changes as you move up and down the stratigraphic column over time. Whoa. And what we're, you know, before we keep going, I'm just so interesting now because you're the first person now that's taught me about how you can analyze things like soil composition or some of the things that are not larger artifacts. So what were some of the profound realizations from doing so? Oh, just a complete change in our understanding of the economics of some of those prehistoric societies. We focused on them in terms of gross indicators that were easy to observe. When you actually looked at things in detail, it was very clear that a lot of smaller kinds of organisms were being used. It wasn't all deer, it was small animals and fish. Things that are harder to see. It was also going from imagining that a lot of prehistoric societies were using a single crop like maize to understanding how complex their diet really was. And moving from wild resources were being collected from domesticated crops and back and forth over time. There was a much more complex mosaic of how people were living than we'd imagined originally. That was in the 70s. And since then, instead of just looking at fine things, we're also looking at the chemical composition. So you're able to say, all right, people are changing their diet. We're not just finding artifacts or eco-facts. We're looking at the actual bones of people. Or sometimes not even the bones of people, but maybe the bones of the animals they ate and getting a better sense for the environment from that. By looking at levels of strontium or carbon isotope levels, we get a much clearer idea of what the environment looked like. And all of that's just in terms of the environment. You can still look at all sorts of other questions archeologically, but our ability to trace some of those patterns over time has gotten steadily better with time. I've really enjoyed the way that you illustrated it as a mosaic, a complicated mosaic of anthropology and archeology, of how they lived. That's a great way to put it. And I think we're too often thinking in large artifacts and too infrequently looking at those other complicated nuances that are sometimes so small as you do flotation in order to figure the composition out. Whoa. Another area that really took off during that period was archeometry. So you might have a piece of stone. You can do the chemical composition of that piece of stone or a piece of pottery and get an idea for exactly where it might have come from. Then you can start tracing trade patterns over time. That's still within archeology. Within the broader field of anthropology, the other thing that's really changed is 25, 30 years ago, we would have thought in terms of, well, we can analyze human bones and learn these things. Now there's much greater sensitivity than there was a quarter of a century ago to the idea that before we do that, we really have to talk to descendant communities and find out if these are questions that they're comfortable with us asking, whether these remains are appropriate for that kind of testing. Oh, yeah. Oh, interesting. So you need to get permission to test the remains. In most free sciences. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And it's not simply a matter of getting permission. It's recognizing that there are multiple constituencies and multiple stakeholders involved in the things we study. And we have to work with those stakeholders and be sensitive to their concerns. Yes, yes. Whoa. Okay, that's a great way to kick us off now. Now, what is it like to go through a... Okay, so now you figure it out. You're like, okay, I'm going to enter into school with a passion for archeology and anthropology. And then how did it look like to figure out what you wanted to do for your thesis along that journey? There's so much to learn. Right. How do you pick? Well, that was a problem. I think, like most people, I went through a series of different ideas. And in some ways what ended up happening was I had an idea, I started pursuing it, and then I discovered there were certain things I couldn't do. And so I had to adapt what I was studying to the material I was collecting. My original idea was that sometime around 0700, 800 AD in the lower Mississippi Valley, you get the emergence of societies that look more complex. They're building large mound sites. They've got much larger settlements scattered across the river valleys. But they're taking off before we get the advent of maize. So corn agriculture doesn't seem to have come in yet. We're not seeing the full development of what later becomes known as Mississippian society. But there are very large settlements, large mound-building communities. And it wasn't altogether clear what they were, how they developed, and why they don't develop into something even larger and more complex over time. So it looked like they were developing and then collapsing and developing and collapsing. And I was interested in trying to understand that cycle of development and collapsing. And then what were some of the findings? Was it about some of the powered dynamics that caused them to rise and collapse? Well, at least in my analysis, there's a very gross analysis compared to what we do today. That was 27 years ago. But at the time, it was looking at factories of the scale of settlement and trying to measure by modeling how much wealth was flowing back and forth between communities. So if you imagine that these are hierarchical societies, there are some communities that are producing more wealth than it's flowing up the hierarchy. And there are ways to mathematically model how much wealth is flowing from one community to another, at least theoretically, based on how rich the environmental zone, a given site, is in and how big it is. So if you imagine that everybody's just eating what they consume, over time the size of a settlement will grow and not exceed the size of the catchment area, the amount of food it can produce. And yet we see again and again what appear to be communities that are larger than they should be given that measure. And the suggestion was made many years ago that this is because they're gaining food from other communities. They're gaining resources from other communities. And so I simply modeled that for this period. And what you see is a series of growth and collapse curves in what's called the Coles Creek period. And in trying to understand that, I also measured what would happen if you assume that the reason that's happening is that these early leaders who are forming multi-community polities, if you assume that one of the things they're doing is that in bad times they provide relief, they move food back and forth. And if that's happening, what's the effect? At the same time, there are models that have been in existence since the 1930s for how a given household decides how much food they should grow. And when you put those two models together, you get a weird effect, which is that everybody's better off if you move food around and help people in hard times. But the more you do that, the more problems of surplus that are being produced by each household go down. And so over time the system, which is a very good system, collapses. You just can't sustain that because you're depending on producing a surplus and that surplus is actually being reduced over time. Okay, whoa. And it's even more boring in the original than it is when I try to describe it. So let's see if I can... I guess synthesizer further unpack this in a way that you say is right. Now, a society can be positioned in a resource-rich area, or they may not be positioned in a resource-rich area. And that is one of the variables to calculate of how wealthy they may end up being is how much abundance they may have, how much surplus they may get. They may be positioned near a water, like a river. And that gives them easier access to travel, to transit to the other areas for trade. And so then the way that that group evolves or that society evolves is different than one that was in a resource... not as resource-rich of an area. And then you were also mentioning the dynamic of certain people producing some surplus and then that surplus decreasing so that they can help people in need in their society. Well, you can imagine that visually. If you imagine a graph that has one axis, that's how productive the area of a site is, and the other is how big the site is, you would expect to see a more or less linear relationship. Okay, yeah, yeah. You have smaller sites in areas that aren't very productive and larger sites in areas that are more productive. When you actually graph that out for these societies, you get a series of lines, one above the other. And the explanation that we believed at the time at least was that it's because you have some villages that are producing food, some villages have people who are being supported by everyone else. And they're larger than you'd expect those villages to be based on how productive they are. And you're able to model how much wealth of whatever kind is flowing from one set of communities to another set of communities. And in these cases, you'd have two or even three tiers in that line. Okay, so then a society that has more people that are needing assistance of those that are making the surplus, their productivity line, is a little bit lower. It doesn't rock it up as much. They take up more societal space, they're a larger society, but they're not as productive as other people relying on the surplus. I wouldn't put it that way. I'd say instead that you've got some communities, some individual settlements, have people who aren't producing their own food that's being contributed by other folks. So the settlement gets bigger than you'd expect based on how productive it is. Okay, so then they're consuming more. They're a settlement that is receiving trade from another location, and they're not producing themselves, they're consuming from their relying. So they're in a non-resource or less resource rich area, which is maybe one of the reasons why. You're able to model why there are more people. That's so complicated. One of my colleagues, a guy named Vin Stepanitis, had observed that he'd observed these patterns from earlier research, and he was able to come up with mathematical models that let you calculate how much wealth was flowing between the different levels that you were able to see those different lines. Oh, okay. And so that's what I use. Yeah. On the flip side, since the 1930s, a theory advanced by a guy named A.V. Chinov that said that if you're a household in a non-cash economy, you can't always convert the surplus you produce into more wealth. There's a limit to what you can do if you can't convert it to cash. Yeah, because you could just sit on that resource without being able to distribute it to anybody. Yeah, yeah. And so there's the utility of the amount you're producing at some point intersects with the drudgery of producing it. That's right. And like even here, there's like extra food from some of the engagements and the extra food is not being brought to those in need. And it's an extra, it's a big issue with extra food production and homelessness that we see in San Francisco and all these other places because it becomes more of a drudgery to go and move the extra food to the location where the homeless are so then you just toss it. The utility is God's diminished. Well, if you can't convert it into something else, you just may not produce it. But those two systems are in conflict because a system where you're extracting food from one level of society to support another level of society and that's justified in part by the fact that by producing that extra food you can move it around in time of need so people don't starve. But if you're not going to produce it in the first place because it's not worth it and you can get the food from other sources then over time that surplus decreases. So you become more and more dependent on a resource it's becoming scarcer and scarcer then the system collapses and then reforms and does it all over again. Now, since then I would say there are some problems with that model but that's what I came up with at the time. Whoa. Okay. This is really cool Alex. Probably understanding how civilizations flourish and how they fall is probably one of the coolest things about anthropology. Okay, let's move into how... So was it the Milwaukee Public Museum that you first were injured when you were 14 as well? Yes. Okay, so then you ended up going back to do the curation of the archaeology. Okay, cool. So yeah, how did that happen? Well, before I finished my dissertation I was hired by the Dallas Museum of Natural History and I spent about seven years in Dallas. Toward the end of that period I started out as a curator then I became the chief curator and then I served as interim director for a while and at the end of that period the museum was going through a transition and they really wanted to focus more on dinosaurs. Anthropologists don't do dinosaurs. That's paleontology. That's paleontology and we do early humans. They may be fossil, but dinosaurs aren't what anthropologists do. So I was looking for other opportunities and at the same time my predecessor at Milwaukee, a woman named Anne McMullen, had moved on to the National Museum of the American Indian and Anne was a fantastic curator but she contacted me and said the position that Milwaukee was coming open and for me it was coming home. So I was very excited about it and I was lucky enough to be able to go to Milwaukee and I was very happy there. So what was it like because you gained seven years of experience in Dallas and then you brought that to Milwaukee, which was great. What were these first sort of experiences as a director and understanding which artifacts that I bring into which exhibits and how does that work? Well it's complicated in part because the director really doesn't decide those things. It's always a group that decides it and ideally it's a group that reflects not only the professional staff of the museum but the larger community and so it's a negotiation that goes on. It's always trying to balance the interests of the community what you've done recently so you're not just repeating yourself. If there are hot topics and issues you'd like to address you want to bring in exhibitions that can do that and at the same time you've got this background going on of processing objects that are coming in from the field or that are being brought in through donations and they may not match up with the exhibitions you're trying to do so you've got to do all of those things. Plus there are always opportunities that come up. We have a project going on right now at the Museum of Art and Archaeology that has to do with the trafficking of culture especially antiquities that oftentimes enter the illegal market. So sourced countries like Italy, Egypt, Greece are always facing a problem with looting and objects being transferred out of the country illegally. At the same time they've got this huge backlog of antiquities that have never been studied. So over time we were able to develop a relationship with the Capital Line Museum in Rome when Rome became the federal capital of Italy in 1871 they cleared large parts of the city to build new buildings for the national capital and they encountered all these antiquities from ancient Rome that have never been studied. They've been in a warehouse called the Antiquarium in downtown Rome ever since and they've never been analyzed. So we're now in a series of loans where they'll send us antiquities that haven't previously been studied. We analyze them, we do archiometric research to figure out where they came from. We do high-resolution scanning of them in three-dimensional imaging. We studied them formally to figure out based on our historical information when they were produced, where they were produced to compare that with the analytical results and then we send them back to Rome and they send us another group of objects and we do the same thing over again. And over time the idea is to remove that backlog of unspecified antiquities. Wow. Okay, so there's a couple things there. The first thing you said that was cool was that it's not even just a group of curators at the museum with the community's interests as well. So you guys have a back and forth about what you want to feature in Mass Exhibits. And then that was really interesting that you bring up this backlog of artifacts that need archiometrically analyzed. Or just to be documented so that we know it's there. Antiquities trafficking is a huge problem. At different times, and this is a controversial statement because it's hard to really get a firm figure on it, but at one point Interpol said that antiquities trafficking is the third or fourth most lucrative form of crime worldwide. That it lags behind drug trafficking and arms trafficking and God knows what to do with human trafficking. But beyond that antiquities trafficking and art theft is a huge business. In some cases the markup between the amount that's paid for an object that's looted, what the looter himself would get or herself would get and the amount that it sells for on the market can be in the millions of percent. And it's exploitative, it destroys the culture history of an area, it robs people of their heritage and by doing that part of their identity. But at the same time it's hard to combat when there's that much money involved. So there are a series of different initiatives all around the globe trying to stem the trafficking of antiquities. Part of it involves enforcement of regulations and laws prohibiting that kind of looting and the movement of those objects. Part of it is increasing the flow of antiquities in the illicit market, not necessarily for sale, but at the capital line for example all those objects we're documenting can now be used and loaned to museums around the world that can be used in programs. They become available for broader use now that they've been documented. Until then nobody knows what they are and so they can't be used. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for bringing antiquities trafficking to our spotlight here because that's huge and I don't think we talked about that on the show yet, that's a huge one. Wow. But it's also become huge in recent years. Up until maybe a decade ago there were very few prosecutions for antiquities trafficking because it was felt to be white-collar crime or there were very few real victims. In the past few years there's been an understanding that looting and the destruction of heritage is also involved with trying to control people's identity. And so it's become much more of a big deal even for the US government. The destruction of antiquities by ISIS or ISIL or Daesh, whatever you want to call it brought to the fore the fact that you can manipulate people's understanding of who they are by changing their heritage or taking their heritage away. So it's become a broad and very complex issue because on the one hand the US government now views this as geopolitical and a security concern. That's not our concern as anthropologists our concern is much more immediate that the heritage itself should be preserved. But there's an overlap. There is, yes. When you successfully wipe out artifacts of a population you can make it look like that population didn't exist and then that can alter the way we perceive history and then that it's really important to document. Now can you tell us the teachers about these processes that you were talking about when you receive one of the backlogged artifacts from around the world which is it's so interesting that there is a backlog that needs to be documented like you were saying. Are archaeologists then to process this and document this backlog. So you'll get like a shipment in of artifacts and then now you were saying like 3D scanning and archaeometrics this is very interesting. What does that process look like? Well the objects come in we may get a couple hundred objects at a time we document the music art historical techniques styles and makers marks and other things that have been documented through several centuries of research now and we're able to get an idea of what the material is and when it dates to based on that art historical analysis so that's the first step. The next step is we're able to take chemical samples from those objects and then analyze them mainly using neutron activation analysis. Neutron activation analysis? Yeah we use a reactor by measuring the backscatter of elements and you're able to tell what the chemicals are that are actually present in that material and by doing that you can get the recipe for the clay. You're trying to find the neutron as in the atom in the what we're reusing yes but we're really measuring the elements that are present in the ceramics and then you're able to compare that recipe to the recipe of ceramics made from other places and by doing that we can trace where the ceramics were made. So for example in the most recent batch of artifacts we've been working with there are three distinct areas where Roman black gloss ceramics were being made or at least three different recipes for the clay and we're able to trace those in the next group we'll be looking to see if those same recipes are being used if they change over time or in different locations or if there are additional sources that are being used but at this point we don't know so that's the next step. After that we start doing three-dimensional scanning both very high resolution blue light fringe well a very high resolution scanning that's at a good enough scale that we can do things like look at the scratches on the bottom of a pot to figure out how it is being used. So one of my colleagues Marcello Margetta from the University of Missouri is leading a project looking at the use where at the bottom of the pots to figure out how they're being used. And what are the different ways that they can be used? Well some of them are simply included in burials so they may not be used very much at all. Others have been used on a daily basis and they've got heavy evidence of wear both on the outside of the vessel and on the inside from stirring or from cleaning or from all sorts of other things but he's able to actually document those which requires a fairly high resolution kind of scan we're also using something called reflectance transformation imaging which is a marvelous technique it's one of those innovative techniques that you really wish you'd thought of because it's so simple. You take an object, you put it in a hemispherical dome that has light scattered all around it then you take a series of digital photographs and each photograph has light from a different source. Then all you do is interpolate that using software and you're able to create using exactly the same technique you use in a movie like Shrek whereas Shrek moves through the film landscape the shadows change and it looks very realistic. This does the reverse. It says that if I'm seeing these shadows what's the surface look like and they're able to mathematically calculate what the surface looks like of the object from the shadows cast from all of those different sources of light. Not only does that give you what the surface looks like but it also means afterwards after it's gone back to Italy and it's back in a storehouse in Rome you can look on your computer and move that light source around and get raking light across that object from all different dimensions. And what's wonderful about that is many of these objects have maker's marks on them. Excuse me. A maker's mark is the maker has a signature a trade stamp. And over time if you look very carefully we're able to not only see what the maker's mark is but we can see it wear over time. So it's an early process of the stamp for all eighties. Whoa. Just imagining you receiving a batch of artifacts and going through all of this process and then the nice thing like you said is not only is it the nice thing that when it goes back it's all documented is that a decentralized documentation? Can anyone from around the world come and get that that light scan shadows? Yeah. Sure and in fact the project that Marcello it involves folks from four different countries already and the material is broadly available and the metadata for it is actually being stored not only by the Italians using their own system for storing metadata but it's also being served up from the University of South Florida if you're a colleague Rachel Opitz. On this like long-term civilizational evolution there's like a point of humanity realizing that oh crap we should document what has happened I'm not sure we're there yet Yeah, you're right you're right I'm not sure we're there yet either but it seems to be coming pressing even though there's so much of the digital age is distracting us towards what this the cycle of information is so it's just it's gravitating us towards what's happening every single day even though what has happened in the past has yet to be so thoroughly documented and understood we just keep living in the next day on this on this news feeds and dang It's a huge problem for anthropology in general because if you think of archaeology it's nothing but the anthropology of the past so all the questions we ask as anthropologists archaeologists just translate those into a thousand or two thousand years ago and ask the same things and it is incredibly complex to try to understand human behavior in the present when you add the fact that we're not able to observe it directly we have to infer it from other things when you get to archaeology it just adds not a layer of complexity How many artifacts before you to University Missouri Columbia what give us an idea of how many artifacts approximately across the world you think are still undocumented and which cultures have the most I couldn't even guess the number is is staggering it's like trillions I'm sure it is yes I mean every culture that ever existed on earth produced objects not all of them survive to the present but a lot of them do in some cases we don't even recognize them yet because we don't have the right tools but the number of sites that are unknown is unknown we know the rate of destruction to some degree and the rates of destruction have been skyrocketing so we have this resource of unknown scale and all we know is that it's being destroyed at an accelerating rate but how much is left we have no way to tell and which cultures would you say have the most undocumented artifacts we don't know you were saying that like there's a big backlog in Greece and Italy and what not so there is a big backlog in certain cultures and then yeah okay yeah here is where there's been a lot of archeological work done there may often have been more archeological excavation than there has been analysis and by the way that's true of the US as well we have a big curation crisis where there are huge collections in the sense we know they exist but they've never been adequately studied the problem in the other source countries isn't that they've got a problem that's fundamentally different than ours it's that there's not as much looting for international trade going on in those other countries there's a lot of it in some of those source countries and it's not just Greece, Italy, Egypt it's also places like Cambodia it's the Niger Delta there are a lot of places around the world where the scale of looting is incredible some estimates say that probably 90% of the sites in the Niger Delta have already been looted oh my god it's a guesstimate because we have no way to estimate sites that we haven't seen before but if there's a site and we know it exists it's almost certainly looted there may be sites we haven't found yet but for the sites that are known almost all of them have been looted now before I forget this question because I want to hear your opinion on it what are your do most of the antiquity thefts go to private collections and what do you think about private collections versus public collections it's a very difficult thing to answer a lot of them where it's obviously been looted are going to private collections or to unscrupulous museums there are still museums that acquire antiquities that have been looted the current guidelines and standards prohibit that and they usually require that museums find the provenance of an object back to at least 1970 which is the date that UNESCO passed a convention on the trade of antiquities and so the current guidelines say that it needs to have left its country of origin by 1970 and if it didn't leave before then the likelihood that it's generating more looting because it's coming from sites that are still being looted or that the circulation of that object buying and selling that object is likely to contribute to ongoing looting is much higher if something came out of the ground in 1800 it may be moving around it may be problematic and not clearly documented but if it came out of the ground in 1800 its acquisition isn't necessarily driving further looting it's a very complex and controversial topic but if it's after 1970 it's supposed to be prohibited but museums still acquire or they bend the rules or they accept flimsy evidence for provenance but mostly I'd say it's probably in private hands or moving to countries where they have different guidelines there's no international standard that everybody has to follow UNESCO is as close as we've gotten but all countries haven't ratified that treaty and they enforce it in unequal ways well ok by the way I should add we're pretty bad about it too it's not a condemnation of other countries US accepts looted artifacts sometimes it can happen but there are two parts to it first the UNESCO convention really only applies to museums it doesn't apply to individuals in the US they can do all sorts of things private collectors can do what they want with looted but don't we have global law though for taking a private for taking a looted artifacts for a private collection well it's getting into a very complex area very briefly up until the 1970s 1980s looted objects basically couldn't be prosecuted criminally in US courts because there was no one who had legal standing to bring a case there was a doctrine called the McLean Doctrine that developed after that that provided some standing for countries that have nationalized their antiquities so there's a patrimonial law that says all antiquities are owned by the government and we know it came from a given country then using the national stolen property act of 1934 as amended it was possible for those countries to bring a case in US court because we know who it belonged to it belonged to the government of that country but they have to have a very clear patrimonial law it has to be evenly enforced and it has to be well publicized so it only works for some countries in the same way the US never fully ratified the UNESCO convention they only ratified two parts of it so the only countries that have protection in the US under UNESCO that this is legal protection are the 18 countries that have signed a bilateral agreement with the US there's not a memorandum of understanding in place they're not protected the ethical guidelines from museums protect antiquities from everywhere based on the UNESCO convention but legally it's a much narrower standard now as we move into the current director of museum of art and archaeology and director of the museum of anthropology at the University of Missouri Columbia now I love that campus I've been there before I really like your campus a lot super nice and I haven't been to the museums yet so I should go check it out now question maybe one of the first questions then is how many of the artifacts are a permanent artifact versus what percentage would be just transitory they come in they stay in the exhibit and then they go to the next museum that kind of a thing we do a certain number of temporary exhibitions generally we consume fewer temporary exhibitions than we generate so right now we have two temporary exhibitions on the road one is an exhibition of work by the New York artist Simon Dinnigstein and the other is an exhibition of baskets from around the country it's the first big summary show of American basketry from Native America all the way up to contemporary fiber artists and both of those are traveling at the moment in the past two years the only temporary exhibition we've brought in is a show called Electrify which is an exhibition it's a juried exhibition of art by emerging young artists with disabilities and that's traveling nationally cool so do most museums have outbound traveling exhibitions more than inbound? no most museums actually consume more than they produce we do it because we're poor we don't have the budget to consume a lot of traveling exhibitions so we try to put our stuff on the road and we bring in traveling exhibitions when we can but most or temporary exhibitions are in-house using our own objects we have in the Museum of Art and Archaeology about 16,000 objects in our permanent collection and maybe 3% are on display at any one time 16,000 permanent objects in art and archaeology but only a small fraction are on display so the ability to bring on objects for a temporary exhibition is always there now how do you pick with the curators and the community how do you all pick objects from 10,000 years ago or 1,000 years ago how does that happen? you mean for acquisition or for an exhibition? let's do for you teach us well for an exhibition you work with different constituencies and figure out what the overall theme of the exhibition is going to be and once you've done that then the individual curator would give shape to the show like anything else when you do something by committee you get an awful lot of good ideas but ultimately you have to choose a single set of ideas if you write a paper by committee it's never quite as good as if the committee provides input and then one voice puts it together the obvious example is the Declaration of Independence everybody talks about what should be in it and then Thomas Jefferson writes it out so it's in one voice exhibitions are the same way and the voice of the exhibition is usually the voice of the curator but the topics and the themes are mixed in consultation with other folks okay and then so then the consultation is it like a what kind of a process is it to consult with everyone to figure out what artifacts are going to be involved and it varies completely by the exhibition sometimes you're dealing with multiple faculty members there may be different communities or groups within the community who have specific concerns or interests sometimes it's temporal so right now we're in the middle of the centennial the end of the first world war November 11, 1918 the guns fall silent more or less well that's a topical thing and so we reach out to different parts of the community and different institutions the state historical society the libraries veterans groups all sorts of different groups sometimes we have those conversations and it turns out we're not the right venue and so the exhibition goes somewhere else and we help another venue exhibit it or develop it sometimes we're the right place and we'll work with those other partners to develop an exhibition that involves their resources as well as our own and sometimes we just have the consultation and then we mount entirely with our own resources and so teach us about what is some of these sort of realizations that you've had over the last you know more than a decade now with the University of Missouri Columbia what have been some of the sort of like aha moments in terms of museums and curation probably the biggest one is that everything about culture everything about exhibiting culture is a moving target so what made sense a decade ago might not today and we can keep going back and talking about many of the same problems and projects time after time and they're always fresh because people are looking at them in new ways cultural appropriation is an example is it a bad thing? well it sort of depends if you look at Japanese woodblock prints from the 19th century they're hugely popular in Japan and yet they're a very informal commodity they were made in mass numbers they weren't necessarily valued or preserved in a particular way not because there wasn't an appreciation of them but because that's where they were in the economic system that they were mass produced and you replace them they were constantly being produced they became prized collector items in the United States, in Western Europe and influenced whole generations of artists so the the Japanese the idea of taking the Japanese really takes off not only in visual arts but in writing Oscar Wilde writes about at the end of the 19th century there was a fascination with it and it had a very pervasive and permanent influence on western art well is that cultural appropriation and if it is is it good or bad we generally think of cultural appropriation as a bad thing but those are topics we can keep revisiting we're in the midst of the Me Too movement right now and an obvious example there is you may have an artist who made a stunning work of art and yet they were very flawed human beings we have that discussion say about the films of Woody Allen whatever you think should allegations about a given film director influence how we view their work or should their work stand alone and I don't know the answer to the question or for any given filmmaker or artist if the allegations are even true it's an important question do you allow your understanding of who the artist was to influence the way the work is understood that's a huge question because a lot of the souls of the artists are torn in some way which makes the art very beautiful but then when you dig at how the soul was torn it can sometimes be a big turn off for people to enjoy the work that's a really important point so there are lots of topics we can keep talking about and revisiting and that was a real learning experience for me I kind of had the sense that if you've addressed a question it's hard to come back and address it again in another exhibition without audiences thinking well we've already seen that and it turns out that a lot of times you can address the same question in very different ways and the audience will respond in different ways our understanding of it has changed their understanding of it has changed and that's an interesting conversation in its own right yeah last question I'd like to hear your thoughts about the current state of humanity and where you think how you feel about things and how you feel things are going I alternate between being very depressed and very elated there are outrages everyday they fill the headlines, they fill our hearts we try to deal with them but they just seem to come faster and faster that can be very daunting because it feels like all the bad things in the world are happening faster and faster and we can't keep up with them there's hardly time to mourn for the things we've lost before we learn of another thing that we're losing at the same time we're at the American Anthropological Association meetings it's very heartening to see all the ways anthropology is trying to deal with those issues right now the Paradise Fire has already claimed more lives than any other fire in California history and there are more than a thousand people still missing all of those fire crews have anthropologists embedded with them trying to help with the recovery of human remains when Ebola was hitting parts of Africa the attempts to slow down the spread of Ebola really didn't succeed until we brought anthropologists on board because the problem wasn't a medical problem it was a cultural problem of certain practices that fostered the spread of Ebola and once we understood those we could address them most of the problems we face for better or worse are cultural problems global warming is another example we think about it as an environmental or ecological issue but ultimately it's a cultural issue if it was purely due to natural effects we wouldn't need to worry about that but it's anthropogenic climate change and if we don't understand it culturally we can't figure out how to address it so I'm heartened by the fact we have so many really smart colleagues here trying to address that huge range of issues across all of humanity I don't know if we can do it fast enough and I'm not sure everybody's always listening but if we're open to evidence based results I think anthropology has a lot to contribute to the answer that's so well said that where is it moving so fast that it makes it so difficult to keep up with even the current what's going on currently but I think you have the right you have the right way of teaching us about evidence based progress in society and I think that you're right this is a really beautiful place to explore the minds of so many people that are trying to follow a evidence based practice for the progress of society Alex this has been such a pleasure this has been super nice thank you for coming on to the show I've enjoyed it thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below check out Alex's work also in links in the bio triple A's links in the bio as well check them out go and build your dreams into the world go manifest the future that you want to live in much love everyone thank you for tuning in we'll see you soon peace