How an Archaeology Project Actually Begins

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. I’m Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with Dr. Ioana A. Dumitru, a digital landscape archaeologist and lecturer at the University of Sydney.

Ioana uses geographic information science and remote sensing tools like drones and LIDAR scanners to help her explore past communities.

Now Ioana and I have worked together in Oman, in Ethiopia for over a decade, and in this conversation we’re going to trace the unexpected beginnings of her newest archaeology project in Tanzania.

It all started with a postdoc in Denmark, and she begins our conversation with the unexpected moment that led to an entirely new research direction.

Ioana: I was sort of handed this mandate to start working on the Swahili coast.

I’d never really been south of Ethiopia. And I hadn’t really done any climate related work before this, but I was very interested to move in that direction. And they were like, great, so you’re the new climate person. And uh, I spent about four or five months trying to figure out what that meant.

So trying to figure out what the project was gonna be around. And what we noticed was that some of the earliest Swahili settlements that we see on the coast arrive relatively late in the sixth century CE.

And so that was an interesting question about the timing of the settlement. And it just happens to be around the same time where you have a cluster of volcanic eruptions that disrupt global climate cycles.

And so our question was always about in the beginning, “Is this just a coincidence or is this impacting migration towards the coast?

And for the first year, it was a lot of trying to put together the, regional climatic proxies that have been um, recorded by palaeoclimatologists in the region. That work is, is still developing, but I had yet to go into the field sort of 18 months into this project. and I eventually moved institutions. I moved to the University of Sydney. At Sydney, I started trying to figure out how to get myself to Tanzania particularly. And I became very interested in connecting with one of the academics at the University of Dar es Salaam, Dr. Elinaza Mjema, who is currently the chair of the Department of Archaeology there. And the reason I was interested in his work is he works and has published on disaster archaeology. There’s not a lot of work done on that. It’s sort of an up and coming subfield.

And I, got an internal grant. I emailed Dr. Mjema. I said, I will be in Dar es Salaam during these dates.

I’d love to meet with you. He was incredibly welcoming, which is, which is just so lucky. And I met some of his colleagues in the department as well. And we talked about research interests and synergies. And I, I never really thought that I would actually end up working in Pangani Bay, although that was sort of my interest from the beginning because, you know, this is his area and never sort of thought that, that that would be how this would end up.

And within a few weeks of meeting which is how a lot of this stuff happens, a grant comes along and you have until the end of the month to submit it. And you just kind of have to go with it.

And we connected with one of his colleagues Dr. Musa Mwitondi, so we just this in within having had or three meetings. I wrote it all in my hotel room. And we exchanged drafts over WhatsApp because that’s the easiest way to communicate when there’s iffy wifi. And we got it which was incredible piece of luck.

Ioana: And that allowed us to, then go into the field last year, 2024 and actually do a, full season.

Smiti: So there seems to have been a lot of preparation that went into going through the background research as well as a bit of luck when it came to interacting with potential local collaborators.

Finding grants, making it all work. Was there a moment where you almost didn’t go through with the project?

Ioana: I think I always sort of knew it would work out. I didn’t know if it was gonna work out quite this incredibly well. I think the plan when I first went out there to meet Dr. Mjema was to set up a collaboration that would build in time. I would go there, we would talk, and then I would come back to my university in Australia, put together a big grant that would take maybe a year or so to, to come through.

It might not come through on the first go. So I, there was this sort of longer term plan. And it was purely luck that that grant came about. When it did But I never, I never really considered it wouldn’t work to some extent. I think that I’ve had a lot of luck collaborating with people along the way, even when those collaborations may have originally been difficult which can happen in our field as we both know. Yeah.

Smiti: Yeah, absolutely. And what’s interesting when I hear you speak is that you had this kind of project management, you know, outlook that’s like, okay, this will likely take time to get going. We might need to plan for if we don’t get money the first time around. So you had this longer timeline as you mentioned, but then you know, things kind of materialized at least for I would say like a pilot season or a short season quite quickly.

So you got your grant and you’re ready to go in the field. What did you wanna do once you got there?

Ioana: So not all archaeologists just excavate for all sorts of reasons.

Excavation itself is, is by, by definition destructive. And so you really have to have a good reason, I think, to keep excavating. and there’s areas where they are very much amenable, the archaeology there for just survey. What survey allows you to do is, have this understanding at scale of how the landscape is used. So our main plan for field work was to do pedestrian survey in the Pangani Bay region, which is on the northern Tanzanian coast, and to do a drone lidar survey of the region.

Smiti: So by doing the pedestrian survey, which is essentially walking around and looking for things as well as the drone and lidar scanner, what were you hoping to find?

Ioana: So we were just trying to get an idea of the settlement pattern around the river and moving away from the river as well.

We wanted to bring out a drone with a, with a lidar instrument, and the way this works lidar, is it stands for light uh, detection and ranging, lidar actually sends out pulses of light. They reach the earth and they, they travel back if it’s on a drone, they travel back some 80 meters back into the sensor and the time it takes for those pulses of light to come back to the sensor is measured. And that’s a way to determine these precise distance measurements and actually get digital elevation models and bare earth models. But we were also surveying this region to understand how to do the drone survey itself, because you have to keep certain things in mind. when you’re piloting a drone, you have to know where you’re gonna take off from and where you’re gonna land, but you have to position yourself somewhere in the landscape where you can see where it is at all times. And a lot of our survey was around picking those positions.

Smiti: Gotcha. Well, thanks for that. What are some logistical things that you had to do before you even started field work?

Ioana: the first time I went out there, it was strictly to just to meet people. So I didn’t really need a permit but for the actual pilot season, which happened uh, last year, 2024 in June, July, there was a lot of work that went into it once we got the grant. There were three different permits that we had to get, but the drone permit was the one that took the longest to acquire because none of my collaborators had had needed a drone permit before so we were all going in blind to this. I didn’t have my, drone pilot license. I had to spend about a month getting that.

And we’d purchased a DJI M350 drone and a, a LIDAR uh, instrument that gets mounted onto, onto the drone So we, we purchased it it was just not arriving. These are bespoke made and there was a shortage globally at that time of this particular part that was needed in the instrument.

And eventually we, had to go into the field and sort of meet with collaborators and uh, every time you, you do something like this, particularly with something as invasive as drones, you have to go and talk to the community at sort of every level even if you have the permit we ended up going to police stations and municipal buildings and mayoral buildings in the region because we, we had lofty, lofty plans to cover a great amount of, of space with this drone flight. And some of the work we did was also very, very close to a military base. So even though you have a permit, you really wanna make sure that the military base actually knows you’re gonna be there. Because, you know, the worst thing to happen would be for me, with about 300,000 worth dollars, Australian dollars worth of kit to make a phone call back to my lab in Sydney and say, we had this shot down out of the sky because we didn’t check with the military base nearby. So there was a lot of that groundwork. And while I was doing it, we still didn’t have the instrument

I would send a message being like, where is it? And. Very much like in a terrible Hollywood movie. The drone pilot who worked with us Jacob Bongers, who’s at this institution as well, and also happens to be my partner, I should mention that. Um, he had not come with, with me in the beginning and we had to buy his plane ticket. And eventually the yellow scan crew lent us one of their own lidar scanners that is a few generations old, so it’s not ideal. But he had the handover and was just an absolute mad dash so halfway through the season, we didn’t even know if all the work we were doing was gonna pay off, but it did.

And it’s fun problems as they say.

Smiti: Yeah.

So were there moments during this time where you had to improvise or completely change plans?

Ioana: we were always thinking that if this doesn’t work, we’re just gonna have to make this be a uh, survey season more traditionally where we would do pedestrian survey. And so that was the plan. And I, I think I had at one point given up on the idea that we would be able to, to get the LIDAR because it wa was just, a factory problem at that point. And that’s what you always have to do with projects at the beginning. Just be comfortable that something will get done. It might not be the ideal something, but that’s just, that’s just kind of how it works.

And being comfortable with that and not being too stressed out that you’re not achieving all of your goals, I think is really important. And always for me, more than anything being mindful that the most important thing is to keep building a research relationship, keep building a relationship with the community who hadn’t ever met me or, or other people on the team that was equally important, if not more important than the actual data acquisition. So regardless of whether or not we spent two weeks talking to people, telling them about a drone that may or may not come into the country, it was, it was worth it because I got to meet people at different levels of the administration and, and community members and really understand that they are quite keen on climate change questions for this region.

Smiti: What was something that was harder than you expected?

Ioana: it’s a different landscape from what I was used to before because there’s so much alluvium, of course, it’s on a river that floods. But what happens for the archaeology is that you often don’t see it when you’re surveying. You might see one or two sherds make their way up to the surface, but if you go onto the riverbank which is what we did a few times, will see in the river cut intact pots sticking out of the river cut, which is not something you often see in road cuts or river cuts.

so that’s something that we recognized pretty early on as an interesting problem. That sort of indicated that this was challenging to just survey.

So we actually realized as we were doing this, that for future seasons, we would need to strategically figure out test excavation sites.

Smiti: So, what’s one moment from this project’s first season that has stayed with you so far?

Ioana: one of the best days in the field last year was going to this one village where the traditional leader was a woman. And we went into her back garden and we sat on this blanket on the ground and she fed us various things and, it was just incredible to see just how interested people are about questions related to climate because they’re feeling it. This village was dealing with drought that was affecting their banana crop. Of course you read about it. But then being on the ground and seeing how it impacts people and seeing how interested they are, it just made the project seem worthwhile in a different way. It’s not just some that university people in Dar es Salaam or you know, Sydney are interested in. It’s actually something that impacts communities and they’re interested in it. And not a single climate denier in Tanzania because it’s not politicized. Not that I know of at least.

Smiti: so you’ve mentioned a bit about your team and local collaborators, and you’ve also mentioned the fact that you had students, and that’s a huge responsibility, especially as a project leader. Were there any learnings or takeaways that you had after being in more of a project leadership role this time around?

Ioana: This team was so diligent. Nobody wanted to take a break. They just didn’t, everybody wanted to get into it. And whether that’s because of excitement or because of how they had been asked to perform on, projects beforehand. And I just kind of let it happen. I said, okay, this is your choice. You can then do what you want. But I think one of the things I’m gonna do from now on is, is sort of insist on that in a, not a heavy handed way, but build that more into the culture of, of the project and the team. that’s important, particularly when you have long projects. Over a month, long projects.

Smiti: What were some major learnings for you when it comes to running an archaeological project?

Ioana: I think that the biggest takeaway is to be very meticulous with note taking. This is something that is drilled into us, of course when we do field work early on in our careers, having the notebook available and sort of writing daily what happened and in as much detail as you possibly can think of because you then rely on that information, which might seem mundane, like where we went, who we met with, what their names were. I think I’m just going to have a induction class on how to write notes no matter who the team members are. I think that communication around those kinds of things is something that I learned that I need to be better at.

Smiti: So as we both know, there’s a lot that goes into running an archaeological project, a lot of things that people might not be aware of, and maybe they’ll be more aware of them from our conversation. But I was curious if there was something that we didn’t discuss that you hope that people would take away from this conversation.

Ioana: people are just endlessly curious about this field for really good reasons and oftentimes, when you’re sort of professionally in it, and especially as a early career person and, and especially as a graduate student, you often can think you know, am I doing something that’s important or interesting?

or does society need this or care about it? Especially if you’re interested in contributing something to society. And, that question is a answered for us. More and more people are so interested in the past and in archaeology. But it is a space that because of who is currently sort of central to those conversations publicly, it is a space that can descend into a conspiracy theory space. Conspiracy theories about control in academia and academics lying to the public and researchers being in this one big conspiracy against the rest of the world. And that is, partly because of how historically disengaged professional archaeologists or, or academic archaeologists have been from these public conversations. And, hopefully from this conversation about how difficult it is to coordinate four people in the field will indicate that, you know, we’re not talking to each other and conspiring.

I’m going to uh, start praising you here in a second. And I really hope you don’t cut this out. For context, if this hasn’t been mentioned before, Smiti and I go way, way back. We’ve been really close friends since graduate school. But I think that’s where I wanna see more engagement through platforms like, Smiti’s in these conversations, because people obviously care.

They care about the past for very good reason. They care about good work, good research. They care that we treat heritage well.

And I think that would be what I would want to say specifically to your listeners.

Smiti: One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that being grounded in your values helps you navigate the unexpected. This could range from shifting research directions, building new collaborations, or adjusting field work plans on the fly. It’s really about finding that balance between preparedness and flexibility.

Now the project we talked about in this conversation is the CALOR Project. This project gets started as a collaboration between Ioana, Dr. Elinaza Mjema, and Dr. Musa Mwitondi from the University of Dar es Salaam, and Dr. Wolfgang Alders from New York University.

If you wanna follow the project, check out their website and team Instagram. Now if you wanna keep up with Ioana, you can follow her on her individual Instagram.

You’ll find all those links in the show notes along with a link to a full transcript of this episode. And if you’re curious to dig a bit deeper and learn, which unexpected book inspired Ioana to become a better writer, especially given all her successful last minute grants, she shares that in a Patreon exclusive video.

Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content. Now, if you’re able to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Ioana Dumitru: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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Thank you to our paid Patreon members for supporting the creation of this episode:

Nancy Fulton, James D., Giancarlo Annese, Thomas Martin