undergraduate research: the basics

Many institutions - with or without graduate programs - value undergraduate research opportunities. Faculty may be under pressure to provide such opportunities, or may wish to take advantage of funding for undergraduate research to further their own research agenda. My personal experience is that undergraduate research is usually more valuable to the student (as a means of deepening their education, preparing them for grad school, etc.) than it is to the professor (in terms of providing material aid in their research). In fact, providing research opportunities for undergraduates can take a great deal of a professor's time and energy, for very little "pay off" in terms of substantive contributions to the research.

I take it as a given that we all wish to improve our students' education by giving them opportunities for independent and/or supervised research. But how do we make these undergraduate research opportunities work for us, and not against us, when it comes to our research productivity? I don't pretend to have all the answers, but my current research involves several undergraduates, so I've planned a series of posts on how to approach the issue. This first post will focus on the different ways one can structure undergraduate research opportunities, and the pluses and pitfalls of each.

1) Have some class. One of my undergraduate minions is working on my research through an independent study. Essentially, we created a class where much of the work is hands-on research. Tiny U requires that all independent studies have a written contract, which spells out in detail what is required of the student. Because this is an academic class, the contract must include readings, tests/papers or other evaluation techniques, learning outcomes, etc. If your university doesn't require such a contract, I highly recommend you create one, just to avoid confusion and misunderstandings.

The pluses of this approach lie in the academic requirements of the class. My student is not only working with data, she will be required to read about the archaeology of the region, and basic zooarchaeology. She will have a much better understanding of what we are doing, and why, than students who come to the research through a different channel. Additionally, the class structure requires a research paper, and I have outlined a series of small research projects that are the right length and difficulty for a single-semester paper. My student may choose to do something else, but if she chooses one of the projects outlined, I will get part of my research project written up through her classwork. If she does a good job, I can co-author a paper with her. If she does a lousy job and I have to totally re-do the work, at least she's found some of the essential references for me and summarized the data.

The major pitfall of the independent study is that it takes some work on my part. I need to provide her with the readings, make sure she's making progress on her research paper, and generally spend some portion of the time I would have to spend were this a normal classroom course. It's easy to fall behind on discussions of the readings, or in evaluating outlines of the research project, with the result that the class is not as academically engaging as it should be.

2) Be Practical. Many universities, including Tiny U, offer credits of "research practicum". Other universities may use a different name, but basically the student signs up for 1-4 credits or practicum, and they spend that time doing whatever tasks you assign them, as long as it is related to your research. There is no expectation that this represents an academic class, so it is not required that the professor and student have a contract, required readings, or evaluation opportunities.

The pros of this approach: 1) It's easier and more approachable for the student; they don't have to commit to a major research paper or readings. 2) It's easier for the professor. Obviously, the more background and context you give your minions, the better job they can do, but the research practicum is less work to set up and maintain than an independent study. 3) It's a good way to "try out" a new minion, to see if he/she will make a good long-term part of your research team, and to ease him/her into a more active role. One of my students this semester is taking this route, and I hope to continue working with her in the future, perhaps moving her into a directed study.

The pitfalls of this approach: The only real pitfall is that you can't require your minions to do background reading, and whether or not they will engage in a semi-independent research project depends on individual negotiations with that student.

3) Work 'em hard. Federal or university work-study money can pay for undergraduate research assistants. At Tiny U, we can only use federal work study, since we have no money of our own. RAs are paid at a much higher rate than TAs here at Tiny U, but the total amount of money they are able to make over the course of the semester is the same. In other words, RAs who work the same number of hours as TAs during the week will not be able to work the whole semester.

The pros of this approach are similar to those of the research practicum, with the added benefit of supporting a student in need of extra income. Unlike many of the jobs students use to support themselves, this job will enrich their education and experience.

The major pitfall at Tiny U is the limited number of students who are both work-study eligible and qualified and interested. I have one student working for me through the federal work-study program, and she is the least qualified and least engaged of my minions. But, they are all exceptionally bright young women, so that's not saying much.

4) Road trip! This summer, I took two students to Old Graduate Town to work in the museum with me. One of the students signed up for an independent study, while the other came just for the experience. I paid for their expenses while they were working with me, but they had to pay their own way to the museum.

pros: the students were thrilled to be in a cool, new city, with opportunities to explore in the evening and on weekends. They were enthusiastic about the work, and they were at my disposal, day in day out, for weeks. They did a lot of the data entry and metrics, while I identified the bones. If you have a project with a chunk of "grunt work", having a student with you in the lab can greatly contribute to your productivity. This summer was the only experience I've had with undergraduate research where the benefits to my productivity greatly outweighed the costs.

pitfalls: depending on what you're doing, students may not learn very much from the experience. My students this summer learned their bones very well, and probably have van den Dreisch memorized (poor things), but they didn't learn how to identify the different species, and they didn't get as much background on the reasons for the project as I would have hoped.

5) Seminar. I've never done this, but I know people organized entire seminars around their research. They use student projects (annotated bibliographies, class papers, etc.) to cut down on their own workload. This isn't possible at Tiny U, where we only teach three archaeology classes. Even a topic as general as "zooarchaeology" is too specific to attract sufficient students. But, depending on your institution, there may be ways to make this work.

pros: Like I said, I've never done it, but I imagine the pros are the same as those for an independent study.

pitfalls: Prepping a new class, teaching, and grading is a huge amount of work. On the other hand, if you were going to have to prep, teach, and grade that number of credits, anyway, then you're robbing your teaching time to pay for your research. Sweet.

Next post: the care and feeding of your minions.

landscape politics

If you, like me, are an avid fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates, you've probably followed his on-going debate with Matt Yglesias on whether or not the Civil War was "tragic". To summarize a complex and nuanced argument in one sentence, Coates argues the Civil War was not tragic because it is the last, blood-soaked, but ultimately triumphant chapter of a book that had been tragic up to that point: the story of African-American slavery in the U.S.

Coates' recent post features a quote from Mark Twain making a related point about the French Revolution (a.k.a "The Terror"). In his view, the real terror was the way the common people lived under the yoke of the aristocracy. Why should we mourn the vanished power of the usual reign, indeed?

As an archaeologist of landscapes, what struck me were Coates' ending lines:

This really sums up the dilemma for me. For the Civil War we have official cemeteries where presidents lay flowers. For our Long War we have nameless burial sites which people who want to build office parks routinely stumble over. For our Long War we have the Atlantic Ocean.

I've written before about the importance of archaeological landscapes to contemporary people, a well as the importance of protecting sacred places to African-American communities. Coates' article brings into stark relief how significant our choices of landscape and site preservation can be to our presentation and interpretation of our national history, and our commemoration of what is important to our national, community, and individual identities.

Cemeteries without markers and the Long Passage are neither impossible to commemorate, nor to popularize. Cathedrals can be built over the resting places of nameless martyrs. Tombs of the unknown can take pride of place in the national cemetery. The anonymity of the slaves is not the problem, the problem lies in their invisibility to most white Americans. As archaeologists, more of us need to prioritize the creation of archaeological landscapes that make every community's past visible, in all of its terrible beauty.

toucans can be trademarked?

Kellogg is suing the Maya Archaeology Initiative because they use a toucan in their logo, and this might be confusing to children who associate toucans with Fruit Loops cereal.

In my Environmental Anthropology class, we spend a fair amount of time talking about bioprospecting, and the patent laws as applied to naturally occurring phenomenon (like human genomes, and "wild" plants). This strikes me as a similar problem. The toucans in question don't look much alike, so Kellogg wants a trademark on all toucans.

druid repatriation case revisited

I blogged before about British druids suing for the quick reburial of remains found at Stonehenge. A new BBC story covers the end of that trial. The court found for the Ministry of Justice, which had allowed the archaeologists extra time to study the remains.

i'm back

Dr. Mr. Palimpsest and I are back from "vacation", if that is the correct term for a week spent driving two fussy kids across the country. I had a great summer, and filled three notebooks with data. Our house needs some work over the next week or so, but once everything is more or less settled, I'll be back to blogging on my regular semester schedule.

I hope you all had a good summer!

repatriation of faunal remains

I have a friend who works in the Hohokam area of southern Arizona. She is the faunal analyst with a long-term project whose PI recently made a deal with the local tribal representatives to repatriate all dog burials. My friend was concerned about this, as it prevents her from doing DNA studies, and future zooarchaeologists will not be able to re-study the remains as methods advance.

As I've mentioned before, I have very strong views about NAGPRA and repatriation. But I'm concerned about the repatriation of non-funereal faunal remains, and not because the world may lose critical information about dead dogs.

The argument for repatriating dog remains stems from their ritual disposal, and the meaning the animals held for those who buried them. But fauna is an underappreciated source of information about the ritual, emotional, and social lives of past people. For example, dogs are not the only animal burials found in the Hohokam area. Raptors, particularly red-tailed hawks, and wild carnivores are also found at many sites. There are also deposits of what appear to be ritual paraphernalia made of animal parts, such as deer antlers that were part of headdresses.

Taking a step back from clearly ritualized deposits, animals that were eaten also played a critical role in ancient rituals and belief systems. In Hohokam sites, it is quite common to find that the vast majority of ungulate remains come from only one or two features, frequently on platform mounds or in plazas. Their unusual distribution suggests they were part of communal feasts and rites, rather than obtained and consumed by individual households.

Taking another step back, we need to recognize that food is intimately tied into all belief systems. The meaning of a particular type of food can depend on who is eating it, when, and where. We can think of many examples within our own cultural context. How much meaning is tied up in the simple line, "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou"? And yet, that same wine and bread, when consumed in the context of the Catholic mass, has a vastly different, if just as profound, meaning.

What constitutes the sacred in "our daily bread"? Most of us would recognize that eucharistic bread has a legitimate claim for respect, even if we don't believe it to be the body of Christ. Out of respect for other people's beliefs, we would refrain from treating eucharistic bread as if it were trash. (OK, with the notable exception of PZ Myers.) But the Wonderbread on a sandwich is not worthy of special treatment. Or is it? Surely, if one is part of a belief system that sees some bread as sacred, then even Wonderbread has that potential, or at least is linked in one's mind with that which is sacred. Bread takes on a special meaning, one that equates bread with all of the food we eat, as a stand-in for all the bounty gained through the blessings of God.

My point is not that Wonderbread should be repatriated (or dogs, or ungulates), but that all food, and animals in general, are intimately wound into belief systems. To determine which animal remains should be repatriated on the basis of their close emotional or social ties to ancient peoples would require drawing an arbitrary line. I feel the tribal representatives should be the ones to draw that line. But using the arguments that were made to justify the repatriation of dogs, one could extend repatriation to a large number of faunal remains, and to many other artifacts, as well.

wild mustangs and the fallacy of environmental baselines

The always fascinating Sociological Images has an article about wild mustangs that reminds me of some on-going debates between environmental archaeologists and environmental policy makers. Early conservation in the U.S. was all about protecting so-called "virgin" landscapes, or, alternatively, restoring non-virgin (promiscuous?) landscapes by keeping exotic plants/animals out, or reintroducing plants/animals that had gone extinct.

There is nothing inherently wrong with excluding exotics, or reintroducing native species. But these decisions are too often made through a baseline perspective on landscapes. That is, a perspective that assumes all landscapes have a single "natural" baseline state. In this view, human activity disrupts the "natural", and it must be restored by returning the plants and animals to the original baseline.

We now know that the landscape of North America wasn't "virgin" at the time of European contact. (Loewen's line in Lies my Teacher Told Me is something like "it wasn't virgin, it was recently widowed.") Declaring any time period after the initial peopling of the Americas to be the environmental baseline would be arbitrary. Such thinking also ignores the human/environment dialectic, even though people are part of the ecosystem and we play our own part in creating and maintaining it.

Baseline views of landscapes are also misleading and fail to meet our environmental policy needs. Asking what the "baseline" environment should be is like asking which molecules of water are in a river. One could flash-freeze a river and measure each individual water molecule, but the dynamic and flow of the moving water is far more important for understanding how the river functions. So, when conservationists or wildlife managers make policy decisions that lead to some animals or plants being introduced or removed from particular landscapes, sometimes they're making the best decision for the health of the ecosystem, and sometimes they are not. But often their stated purpose is, to extend the metaphor, to restore the exact molecules of water that once flowed in the river, rather than to ensure that the river's overall dynamics are healthy.

Which brings us back to the feral mustangs of the West. There are plenty of arguments for getting rid of the mustangs from a "baseline" landscape perspective. After all, they are exotic animals, introduced originally by the Spanish. There are also arguments for keeping them. Social/cultural factors are influencing our policy decisions. Unlike many exotic species, such as zebra mussels or emerald ash borers, mustangs are charasmatic megafauna: easy to love, and to build a PR campaign around. The mustangs are a tourist attraction, and a symbol of the West. Their relationships with humans, symbolic or physical, are critical to understanding our current policies toward the species.

From an historical ecology perspective, the arguments surrounding wild mustangs are complex. The horse is an exotic animal, but at the same time it is native. Horses were part of the North American landscape during the Pleistocene, and were only extinct in the West for some 10,000 years, a blink of the eye, evolutionarily speaking. The Western grasslands coevolved with ruminant species, many of which are now extinct, but their Old World cousins, in the form of domestic horses and cattle, are filling in the ecological niches those ruminants once filled. Horses became a critical part of the cultural landscape, as well, fulfilling many different social, ritual, and economic roles for many different cultural groups.

The question is not whether exotic species belong on the Western plains, or to what "baseline" environment we should restore our "wild" places. The questions are: are the grasslands healthy? What constitutes health? What policies (for fire, hunting, provisioning of mustangs, reintroduction of wolves, etc.) will ensure a healthy, dynamic, resilient ecosystem, despite, and because of, the constant changes that have occurred in North American environments over the last 500 years?