Research in Pandemic Times

By Mark Golitko, Associate Editor for Lithic Studies and Network Analysis

The global Covid-19 pandemic hit Europe and the US in full force right as I started by spring break from instruction this past March. I flew to Germany on March 5th to visit my family, although already concerned about whether I should travel or not. The German government made the call to shut down most public life during the middle of that following week, while I received an email from my institution a day later announcing that the campus would be shut down immediately and all instruction would move online after an extended two-week break to allow us to adjust to the new realities. I made it back to the US on one of the last flights to leave Frankfurt (being the only person in one of the busiest airports in the world was a surreal experience) before the airlines started to cancel most international routes. Being at the tail end of the stream of people trying to get back home, somehow I also made it back late enough that the six-seven hour customs/quarantine lines at US airports had largely filtered out by the time I arrived at Chicago-O’Hare. 

The next weeks were so busy with adjusting to the new realities of pandemic life that research really did not enter my mind. I focused on making the most of online teaching and somehow getting through to the end of the spring term. I watched in dismay as the initial sensible US response to the pandemic shifted to partisan squabbling, conspiracy theories, and the dawning realization that we were likely going to see the highest infection rates and number of fatalities in the world. My university closed all on-campus labs from mid-March until the beginning of June, after which we (faculty and graduate students) were allowed to return in limited numbers to resume on campus research, albeit with limited access to our research funds initially. Much of my lab work has been carried out by undergraduate interns and volunteers in the last few years, and as all internships and summer access for undergraduates was cancelled, much of my planned research was also postponed. For instance, I had hoped to begin a reanalysis of some of the early Neolithic (LBK) ceramics I studied by LA-ICP-MS during my dissertation work using a combination of techniques (XRF, XRD, petrography), and had arranged an internship for one of my students to conduct most of the data collection. In past years, I have also run our joint internship program with the Field Museum in Chicago (my former employer), but that program was also cancelled for this year.

I am fortunate to work for a very well-funded institution, but the complexity of the US funding landscape means that many of my colleagues, particularly those at smaller private institutions, face the real possibility of losing their jobs, and certainly have little or no internal funding available at present to do very much of anything. In the case of my own university, initial concerns over massive budget cuts eased when it became evident that the stock market was going to continue roaring along despite record job losses and business closures. Even so, many institutions have struggled to balance real fiscal needs with the health and safety of their students, staff, and faculty. In another quirk of US higher education, many institutions, perhaps mine most of all, are highly dependent on athletics (football in particular) for revenue generation and maintaining donor interest. Thus, we face potential institutional cuts to academic and research productivity in the event that college football does not take place this fall. After an initial spike in cases, my institution seems to have the on-campus infection rate under control (for the time being), but the situation at many larger public universities (many of which reopened in the last two weeks) is rapidly worsening. Some have already shut back down, and it takes two teams to play football! 

I had planned to conduct five weeks of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea during July and August, and in fact had just received word from the National Research Institute there that they had issued my research visa when my university announced a moratorium on all institutional travel for the summer (now extended into the fall). As the summer progressed and the Covid situation in the US continued to spiral out of control, more and more countries moved to ban travel from the US. For most of my life, a US passport was an easy ticket into just about anywhere (with a few exceptions like Iran), but we now face the reality of being unable to travel, and it is unclear when that will change. Moving forward, the inability to conduct international fieldwork will likely be one of the major hurdles facing US based archaeological researchers, and I see no real reason why that will change until a vaccine (fingers crossed) becomes available. 

I have tried to offset these substantial challenges by remaining flexible. Like many scholars, I have a backlog of data and ideas that I have not found the time to put to paper, so I’ve tried to get what writing I can done, allowing for the fact that it may be a few years before I’m able to generate substantive new data. My XRF lab is back up and running, but I have nothing to irradiate at present! Much of my stress lately stems from the concerns of my graduate students, for whom interruptions to fieldwork are far more problematic. Some of my students now face the prospect of being unable to collect critical final bits of data for their dissertations, while others wonder whether they can even hope to conduct fieldwork within the timeframe available to them. While I would be happy for them to write lab- or methods-based dissertations using extant collections, it is difficult even to obtain materials from museums and other repositories at present, and it is likely a substantial disadvantage to go onto the job market in archaeology without being able to point towards some substantive field research component. 

I attended the virtual EAA meetings last week (on the theme of “networking”, so within my wheelhouse on this blog—I hope to write something more about the content of the conference in my next blog post) and left with mixed feelings about the experience. It was nice to have some contact with scholars I have not previously met, but the online experience cannot replace the social aspect of meeting people face to face. The sessions themselves were fine, and technical glitches aside, this format may become increasingly common for both ecological and financial reasons in the future. I do however look forward to a time when we can resume at least some conferences in person, particularly smaller workshops. 

In sum, Covid has forced me to focus back on projects that I had perhaps neglected or even abandoned in the past, but overall I have been fortunate in having many such projects to resume. My university offered all non-tenured faculty a one-year extension to their tenure clocks, and I anticipate that one way or another I will remain productive enough to move up the ranks in coming years. Undoubtedly, the disruptions to my fieldwork will prove the most challenging aspect of all of this moving forward, but I imagine that for some of my colleagues, the disruptions to their research and funding have been more severe and impactful. We all need to be cognizant of the challenges that our colleagues face in these strange times, however. Many are struggling to balance increased family demands with their research, and we have all struggled to balance our collective stress and anxiety with our own and our institutional/departmental expectations, which in some cases seem to have barely changed. Being able to study the past is a wonderful privilege, but sometimes we need to prioritize present concerns.