PhD research during the pandemic

By John Murray, PhD candidate, Arizona State University

Hi everyone! My name is John Murray. I am a PhD student in archaeology at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. My dissertation research focuses on the origins and complexity of heat treatment technology in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa. One main avenue of this research is developing new methods to identify heat treatment in the archaeological record that are quantitative, replicable, and field-friendly. A core aspect of this is creating experimental reference collections to test the ability of these novel methods to accurately identify heat treated silcrete. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted this aspect of my dissertation work in two primary ways. First, I am unable to do field work for the foreseeable future which makes it impossible to apply these new methods to archaeological material. Additionally, the labs at ASU were shut down in the spring 2020 semester and continued to be difficult to access throughout the summer. This forced me to bring home my electric kiln to conduct my heat treatment experiments in my backyard and store all my experimental material at my house. (Let’s just say my wife is not a fan of having even more rocks than normal at the house.) This has allowed me to analyze over 300 samples of silcrete with multiple new techniques. Ultimately, I have been able to adapt (fairly) quickly and efficiently to this new way of life. Although missing field work is still a major obstacle that I need to address eventually, my experimental research at home has enabled me to weather the storm a little bit better than I expected.