Land of Stecći 2024 Excavation Season Poster
Background
Some of the most influential experiences of my Stanford career were the archaeological field schools I had the opportunity to go on, one in Mauritius in 2022 and the other in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2024. This poster was created for a presentation at the Symposium of Undergraduate Research and Public Service (SURPS) that took place in the fall following the Bosnia and Herzegovina field season. Before going on these field schools, I had never left North America, so living abroad for a month in each place was an unprecedented change of pace.
Both of these experiences had an innate element of constant science communication, as we lived in the communities that we worked in, and we would have curious passerby and media days where we spoke about the work that we were doing. Here, I showcase both the formal research poster that we created for SURPS as well as the public Instagram of the project that I helped to run during my time in Bosnia, along with one of my colleagues, Lina, who I split the duty with.
Reflection
At both of these field schools, I gained a mass of hands-on experience in science communication, integrated into our lessons on how to conduct archaeological field work. Prior to my first field school, all of my scientific experiences had been in lab settings, not in constant engagement with the community that I was working with, so I had to learn a whole new dimension of science communication. As a bioarchaeologist excavating and analyzing human remains, it was also a lesson in how to respectfully communicate about the people whose remains I was excavating, not simply regarding them as "data" or "materials" as some of these people are often reduced to within the scientific literature, but as human beings who have passed away. That lesson came fast, as the osteological analysis that I helped to conduct showed that some of the people whose skeletons we had unearthed had been young children. Being conscious of the ways in which we speak about our work is an important lesson for all bioarchaeologists to learn, and this project helped me to think about how to do that.
Working on the Instagram and Facebook pages for the project was another challenge in understanding how to curate the work that we did on site each day, choosing pictures and writing a brief caption that shows interesting finds and happenings of the day. Once we began to excavate human remains, I had to learn how to reframe the posts to acknowledge that work while still respecting the remains by not sharing their pictures on the internet and not detailing the exactitude of their burials. On the accounts, we had a lot of great engagement from community members and fellow archaeologists. In many ways, social media is a way of modernizing the field diaries that archaeologists keep track of while also promoting the principle of community-based research that I find integral to practicing archaeology.