Ep. 119 - Archaeology Uncovered: Careers, Myths, and Discoveries with Dr. Guy Hepp

🎙️  Archaeology Uncovered: Careers, Myths, and Discoveries with Dr. Guy Hepp 

Grab your metaphorical shovel and join cohosts Matt Markin and Aurora Shiva Prasad as they unearth the fascinating world of archaeology with Dr. Guy Hepp, Professor of Anthropology at CSUSB! 🏺

In this episode, Dr. Hepp shares his unexpected journey from art and creative writing to uncovering ancient civilizations, breaks down what archaeology really is (no, it’s not about dinosaurs or aliens 👽), and reveals the exciting and very real career paths available in the field. You’ll also hear about how CSUSB students get hands-on experience and even play a role-playing game to explore the “archaeology of the senses.”

Whether you’re a curious student, a fan of Indiana Jones, or just love learning how we piece together humanity’s story, this episode will inspire you to see the past and your future in a whole new way.

🎧 Listen now and discover how digging into history can help you build your future!

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hey Yoties, welcome back to another episode of the CSUSB Advising Podcast. This is Matt Markin from the ASUA academic advising office, and joining me for the second time is...

Aurora Bell  
Aurora, hi everybody. I'm an advisor here, and I'm excited to have this conversation about anthropology and hear from our guests today. 

Matt Markin  
And so Aurora, you know, we've been doing this series of interviews, like you said, about anthropology. Our last one was about the subfield of cultural anthropology, and on today's episode, we get to explore the subfield of archaeology. And so let's welcome to the podcast. And that is Dr. Guy Hepp, professor in the anthropology department. Dr. Hepp, welcome.

Dr. Guy Hepp  
Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to do this today. 

Matt Markin  
Yeah, we appreciate you being here, and we'll just go ahead and get started. I'll throw out the first question to you, and then, you know, we want to get to know you a little bit better, so tell us about your origin story. What's been your path in higher ed?

Dr. Guy Hepp  
Well, my my initial plan wasn't to be a professor. I started doing archaeology, actually, in high school, and I began by doing illustrations for a local archeology company. It turns out that archeologists use professional illustrations for some of their for some of their work, their publications, their reports. And I was really into art, and I thought that was an exciting, you know, opportunity to get paid for my art. So I started doing that, and it gradually developed into me working for this local archaeology company through college. I also was a major in creative writing, so I was just really interested in in writing, and I got more and more interested in culture over time, but my plan was not to become a professor. That didn't happen until much later on, I started grad school to do professional archeology, you know, the private sector. And I got bit at some point by the bug, and I and it turns out that I just really I enjoy the atmosphere of a college campus I always have, and I decided at some point to never leave. So, so here I am.

Aurora Bell  
Thank you for sharing that. I think that that kind of takes us through kind of the unknowns and how you got started and you mentioned kind of cultural aspects. We had a conversation last week about cultural anthropology, so we would love to hear you not only give us kind of a definition of how you think about archaeology, but maybe how archaeology fits within anthropology and interacts with the other sub fields of anthropology. 

Dr. Guy Hepp  
So in the American tradition, you know, anthropology is the study of humanity, and really every way that we can get at that, and archeology fits under that umbrella, in the sense that we use the material record to study the human past. So just very simply, we use the stuff left behind by past people to try to understand what their lives were like. And you know, the questions we can ask about that can be really broad. We could ask big questions about social organization. We could ask much more detailed questions about people's daily lives in their homes, or how, you know, gender relations worked, or, you know, how the, how the family system was, was organized, or something like that. So really, anything, any kind of question we have about how past people lived using the things that they left behind.

Matt Markin  
You know, a question I know Aurora and I get a lot when we meet with students, is the career question. And so when we think about, like, anthropology and arc, and it's in the subfield of archeology. I'm sure you've had students that ask you about career opportunities. So can you maybe give us some information about, like, a career opportunities that might be there for someone who's an anthropology major that has the interest in archaeology? 

Dr. Guy Hepp  
So right now, I'm teaching our senior seminar course in anthropology called ANTH 5000 and we've redesigned that course to be kind of a professionalization course and kind of a career course where the students develop a portfolio that includes a CV and a resume and cover letters and so forth over the over the semester. We talk about jobs all the time, and that is totally valid. You know, I am a firm believer that higher education should be, it should be kind of the intrinsically interesting study of whatever it is that excites you. But at the same time, we have basic needs. We need to be able to support our families. We deserve a living wage. And there are jobs in archeology, absolutely. There are jobs in anthropology. 95% at least, of archeologists in the United States don't do what I do. They're not professors. They work for private corporations or they work for some kind of government entity, either for the state or for the feds. And there are tons of jobs. I post job ads for our students in a little sort of a. Nine Network that I've built on on LinkedIn recently. All the time we get, we get local companies looking for, for, you know, entry level archeology jobs. I would say, every couple of weeks I get some kind of message about that. So, yeah, that's one of the great things about it's called cultural resource management, or CRM archaeology. Those jobs are all over the country, and they're tied to both federal and state laws that have to do with development. So if there's a new project that goes in, let's say they're building a new highway, or let's say a corporation wants to build, you know, a new factory, or build a parking lot, or anything, anything that involves development, there have to be certain surveys to understand how that's going to impact resources, whether those be resources, like natural resources and endangered tortoise or, you know, a rare plant or something, but also cultural resources. It doesn't say necessarily that like we can't impact those resources, but there needs to be a survey to understand how we're impacting those resources and how we can mitigate that. So those jobs are common, and they're, you know, they can be demanding. They can sometimes be a physically demanding job. They can be really exciting job. I've had some, you know, my early years in archeology, that's what I was doing, working in the cultural resource management world, but it's also a, you know, it's a decent income. It can be a really fun job. I would, I would categorize it when my students asked me for details, I would categorize it as a good middle class or upper middle class income, doing the thing that excited them, you know, in university, which was learning about, you know, ancient societies. 

Aurora Bell  
Thank you for touching on those careers, even for us to have that conversation with students, but I'm glad to hear about the resources and the LinkedIn group too, kind of in thinking about misconceptions, maybe not so much with career, but maybe in the classroom, are there certain misconceptions you feel that students either within the anthropology major, or maybe even other majors that are taking an archeology class, maybe enter having and maybe how you think that those misconceptions might change?

Dr. Guy Hepp  
Of course, yeah, so archaeology has, it has kind of like a popular draw to it. And so there's a lot of popular interest in archaeology. And so when I'm talking to people outside the university, sometimes when I'm talking to students, particularly non majors, I hear those, you know, I hear people refer to ancient aliens, or I hear people refer to digging up dinosaur bones or something like that. There's some pretty wild stuff out there on YouTube about what archaeology is, and some conspiracy theories and so forth. So in some of my classes, where we get a chance to talk about how archeology is a science, we're not just making up information, you know, we're, of course, there's an element of interpretation, but, you know, it's always based on data that we've, you know, produced about about the ancient world. So I tackle those, those issues, and I explained, for example, that although it has this kind of popular draw, for example, ancient aliens is is fundamentally racist, it's this implication that past societies were incapable of developing whatever interesting thing it is that we're talking about this week on ancient aliens, and instead that that influence had to come from outside. You know, for a long time it was, the argument was, Oh, it must have been some European society, or Lost Vikings, or the lost tribes of Israel or something had to come in and influence this society so that they could build pyramids. Nowadays it's just aliens. They've just substituted that for aliens. So I've heard that one. I've heard giants. I've heard all kinds of conspiracy theories about, where did the pyramids come from? Oh, it must have been giants, because the statues are giant. So we, we, we sort of one by one talk about those misconceptions, and we unpack how archeology is based in, you know, scientific approaches to to the information that we recover. And I think that ultimately, where we arrive, at least, I hope that where we arrive in one particular class I'm thinking about which is kind of our introductory class to archeology called ANTH 1400 world civilizations to circa 1500 I think that we eventually arrive in that class with the understanding that the truth of what happened in the past is much more interesting and much more exciting than Oh, aliens came and helped them build pyramids.

Matt Markin  
A couple of weeks ago, we got to talk with Dr. Des Lauriers about the applied the MA and applied archeology. And I believe you also teach classes at the graduate level as well. I was wondering, you know, of course, if someone's listening and they're interested in that master program. Of course, you know, listen to that episode that talks all about it. But I was wondering if someone's listening. To this, and they're hearing about, oh, there's a master's degree. Can you talk a little bit more about about that program?

Dr. Guy Hepp  
Sure. One of the things I love about my job is that I get to teach what I consider kind of three different levels. Here. I teach this the intro class that I was just talking about that includes majors, but also a lot of non majors. Then I get to teach the sort of senior and junior undergraduates that I talked about earlier with my senior seminar, and I get to teach to I have taught others, but currently I teach two of the grad courses as well. So I really enjoy seeing the students at different at different levels and having different kind of conversations there. In particular in our graduate program, I teach our sort of history and history and theory seminar for archeology, and I also teach the proposal writing class that helps them develop a proposal for their master's project. So we've designed the program fundamentally, as I'm sure Dr deliria explained, fundamentally the program, most of the students who graduate from that program go on to work in cultural resource management, archeology, often locally, but not always. We've had students go, for example, I just had a student, an alumnus from working in Alaska, visit my class yesterday. But we've also designed it to be a really robust program, and we've had students go into PhD programs. So for instance, my theory course is a is a pretty heavy hitting graduate theory seminar that you'd expect in a PhD program. And I do that on purpose. I want it to be a challenging course, but it's not punishing. It's just It asks a lot of the students in terms of reading and talking about complex ideas and archaeological theory. And as part of that we we really spend a lot of time talking about strategies for reading. Instead of being overwhelmed by the amount of reading, we talk about how to, you know, approach a reading strategically. And then in the in the proposal writing course, and I actually do this with some of my undergraduate courses too. I really teach that as a writing workshop, where the students are building an assignment or building a writing project over the course of the semester, what we call that like a scaffolded writing project. But then they're also, in addition to getting feedback from me, they're spending a lot of time getting and giving feedback to each other. So it becomes kind of a writing circle where they're really they really rely on their on their classmates, to to be there for them, terms of giving critical, but constructively critical feedback and developing their writing skills, and thinking a lot about sort of what, what it takes to be a good writer for you, like, what is I call it writing hygiene. What is your writing hygiene? Like? What time of day do you write? What do you need with you? What do you need around your desk to focus? Like, how can you take on what might be considered sort of a daunting writing project, this master's thesis, and turn it into an approachable, surmountable challenge?

Aurora Bell  
Yeah, that sounds like they get a lot out of that. I'm glad that you have those conversations with them. Kind of just to wrap up, are, is there any other advice that you would give to a student who maybe comes to you or comes to one of us with the hopes of pursuing a career and a degree in anthropology, specifically focusing on archaeology?

Dr. Guy Hepp  
Yeah, so I pretty much always say yes when someone asks me to come to a career day or ask me to visit their class to teach about archeology as part of their science curriculum or something. And I do that because I feel strongly that, that we don't hear enough about what anthropology is about, what archeology is in K-12. I didn't you know when I was in high school, granted, that was a long time ago, but when I was in high school, we had a, you know, a US history class, but I didn't really hear about what archaeology was at that time. So I, you know, I think that maybe there's a misconception that that archeology is is kind of a niche topic. Anthropology is kind of a niche topic that you won't find jobs that way, you know. And a lot of our students coming from, you know, families where maybe they're, they they're first generation and their family to go to college, and their their family rightfully thinks of them as kind of a representative of the family. Okay, you're going to college. We finally made it to the point where one of our kids could go to college, and you really need to go get a good job. And so if the if the student comes back to them and says, Hey, mom, dad, or whoever it is, I want to, I want to major in archeology or anthropology, the response to that could be like, well, you know, I don't hear about jobs in that is that, is that really a good career? I think that's a misconception. I think that higher education can be a study of what you love, but I also think that it can, it can support you, it can be a good job. So we spend a lot of time talking to our students about the careers that they can develop. I spend a lot of time talking to my students about how you can you. And study what you love and learn what you love, and also live a good life.

Matt Markin  
Excellent advice. And yeah, I'm trying to try and think, yeah, when I was in high school, I don't think anthropology or anything, any subfield was brought up. And, you know, so I'm hoping that anyone's listening to this really kind of wants to explore it a little bit more. And also, too, I like that. Anthropology has some courses that also meet some of the general education requirements, so that can also be an entry point as well meet a GE and explore anthropology and even a subfield within it. Absolutely So. Dr. Hepp thank you so much for being on the podcast today and sharing information about archeology and you know, let us know about some of those misconceptions, but also let us letting our Yogis know more about the subfield.

Dr. Guy Hepp  
Absolutely, you know, we have a lot of one of the things I love about anthropology is how broad and how diverse it is as a discipline. We have a lot of different classes and a lot of different topics. In one of my courses, the students get to play a role playing game that I developed just just for a class about the the archeology of the senses, which is kind of my favorite little pet theoretical topic in archeology. That class is really fun. We've got a lot of great cultural anthropology classes talking about different parts of the world. We've got a linguistics class the chair department, who I think you've you've met on one of your episodes, specializes in in biological anthropology. So it's a it's a broad discipline. There's a lot of fascinating different angles you can take on anthropology. And yeah, I've really enjoyed this conversation today. Thank you for for inviting me. Thank you so much.