Welcome Sara Polk, our new Curator of Archaeology!
Sara with her hiking buddy Talos
The Archaeology Department recently had the pleasure of welcoming Sara Polk as our new Curator of Archaeology.
Sara received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Cincinnati and her Master of Arts degree in Applied Archaeology and a Graduate Certification in Museum Studies from the Indiana University, Indianapolis. The skills she learned through these programs will be a great asset to our team!
In order to get to know her better, we presented her with some questions. We hope you enjoy learning about her as much as we have!
- What drew you to archaeology?
- I grew up in Indiana and I spent a lot of my childhood wondering about what had happened in my backyard, in my hometown, and other places I was familiar with before I was born. There were so few places to learn about and engage with the deep history of my home. I was extremely lucky to visit England when I was 16, where I saw how communities knew about and cared for the remains of the past in every neighborhood, village, and city. Because of their pride and dedication, the layers of history were easy to see and understand. I realized that I wanted to find a career to contribute to similar love, understanding, and respect for the past where I grew up. I landed in archaeology and haven’t looked back.
- Can you tell us about any exciting projects or excavations you’ve been part of?
- While all of the projects I’ve been a part of have been exciting, the most out-there excavation I’ve participated in was fieldwork at a 4000-year-old Valdivia village site in rural Ecuador. It was for my field school, or first real training in archaeology, and completely different from anything I’d done before or since. People who lived at the village site during the Valdivia period crafted gorgeous pottery, figurines, and obsidian tools, and were among the first to domesticate plants in the foothills of the Andes mountains while growing crops and fishing in the sea. The project contributed to the understanding of the Valdivia culture, and also involved dodging the occasional tarantula, working around leaf-cutter ant colonies, and listening to howler monkeys in the forest while we worked.
- What’s the best part of archaeology?
- How you can connect with people in the past through the stuff they threw away. People are people, no matter what. Every fragment of broken pottery represents family meals, community gatherings, artistry, and the essence of daily life. Someone’s family member crafted and decorated that jar. That pot was part of someone’s childhood; someone raised their kids through meals made or served in that bowl. Their stories are forever part of that piece of the past.
- What’s the hardest part about archaeology?
- The history of archaeology is the hardest part. In the Americas, archaeology is based on generations of injustice against American Indian nations, Ancestors, sacred spaces, and belongings. There is no escaping that fact. There is no undoing the damage the profession has done.
- Is there anything you think is underappreciated or needs more attention in archaeology?
- Honestly, this will sound biased, but Ohio Valley archaeology is amazing. Every time someone asks me if I would rather work in Egypt or England or Mexico, I tell them that the folks who lived in the Ohio Valley were some of the most incredible engineers and artists in history. Their stories need more attention in the common perception of archaeology.
- What is the coolest thing you’ve learned about archaeology, or an object, or a site?
- The standard measurements and alignments that people engineered into the Hopewell-era earthworks in the Ohio River Valley are mind-blowing! Brad Lepper wrote an article about this in the Columbus Dispatch.
- What’s your silliest, weird or most exciting archaeology story?
- We use these big machines called flot-techs to process samples of dirt from archaeology sites to extract really small and fragile artifacts like tiny bits of burned seeds. The flot-tech has two big metal tanks that fill with water to dissolve the dirt from the samples. These tanks are around four feet tall and two feet wide. There are trays at the top of the tanks to catch artifacts, but sometimes, interns and volunteers at one of my previous jobs would drop artifacts past the trays and they would end up at the bottom of the tanks. I was the only one who could fit into the tanks and crouch down to reach the artifacts at the bottom. As you can imagine, I was the designated artifact retriever. Every time an artifact was dropped into these tanks, I would remove my shoes to avoid contaminating the tanks with modern botanical material, and my colleagues would help me clamber in and out of the tank to get the artifact off the bottom. It was quite a spectacle.
- Do you have an archaeology pet-peeve?
- Archaeological units that aren’t ‘clean’! This sounds counterintuitive for a square of dirt, but I am very picky about making sure units I dig are very square with straight-sided walls (it’s easy for walls to curve inward toward the base of the unit, which we call bathtubbing). I’m also really picky about making sure the base of the unit has a really smooth surface and isn’t smudged, smeared, uneven, or covered in dirt ‘crumblies’ or bits of loose dirt.
- If you had a magic wand, what would you change about the profession?
- If I had a magic wand, I would make it so that archaeology wasn’t a destructive science.
- What’s your favorite time period?
- Late Precontact, about 1000 years ago to around 400 years ago
- Do you have a favorite archaeology tool?
- A good spiral-bound waterproof notebook, followed closely by my flat trowel because trowels are wonderful, multi-purpose tools.
- What other jobs have you had?
- My first “real archaeology” position was as a public archaeologist at a nonprofit organization in Indiana, where I was able to connect local community members with the history of the landscape through the stuff people had left in the ground hundreds of years ago. I have also worked as an archaeologist at a national park and on field school projects through Indiana University. Before that, I interned and volunteered in museums and state agencies responsible for caring for archaeological sites and objects. I also worked in coffee shops and a library in my college days!
We ended our conversation with some more general questions.
- Favorite food?
- I have an odd obsession with deviled eggs.
- Favorite color?
- Salty or sweet?
- Cat or dog?
- Siblings?
- I have a younger brother who begrudgingly endures my ramblings about archaeology.
- Beach or Mountains?
- Coffee or tea?
- Coffee (my espresso machine is my best friend)
- If you won the lottery, what would you do?
- I would go on a trip or several trips to see places like Peru, Scotland, Tanzania, France, the Philippines, and as many other places as I could. But I would keep working, because I love my profession!
- Is there anything else you’d like to add?
- I’m so excited to be a part of this team!
Thank you, Sara, for sharing your story, we’re just as excited to have you!
