A fascinating glimpse into the world of mortuary archaeology with our expert guest, Sarah N Rubin. Sarah, a seasoned archaeologist, takes us on an enlightening journey through the lens of time, sharing her rich experiences from excavations all over the world, from Ohio to Jerusalem. Promising a wealth of intriguing insights, we traverse the boundaries of science, history, culture, and literature in this captivating episode.
Eager to decode the mysteries of the past through the study of burials and bones? You're in for a treat. We discuss how the whisperings of the long-departed, from royalty like Tutankhamun to the common man, can unveil a treasure trove of knowledge about ancient cultures. Sarah sheds light on how bones offer clues about age, sex, pathology, and cultural practices. But it's not all smooth sailing - we also delve into the ethical dilemmas and unique hurdles faced in mortuary archaeology.
Finally, we turn the spotlight onto literature and how mortuary archaeology has been masterfully woven into the narrative by authors such as Aaron Alkins and Elizabeth Peters. Sarah, who is also an accomplished writer, candidly shares how she incorporates her expertise into her work. For all budding writers out there, we offer a list of valuable resources to help you bring authenticity to your novels through this unique perspective. So sit back, tune in, and let the secrets of the past unfold before you.
You can find out more about Sarah and her books at https://linktr.ee/WriterMeRSNR
Find out more about Writers' Narrative my brand new free magazine for writers everywhere. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox monthly.
Find out more about Mists and Manuscripts, a writing retreat in the heartland of Scotland, surrounded by lochs and mountains.
A fascinating glimpse into the world of mortuary archaeology with our expert guest, Sarah N Rubin. Sarah, a seasoned archaeologist, takes us on an enlightening journey through the lens of time, sharing her rich experiences from excavations all over the world, from Ohio to Jerusalem. Promising a wealth of intriguing insights, we traverse the boundaries of science, history, culture, and literature in this captivating episode.
Eager to decode the mysteries of the past through the study of burials and bones? You're in for a treat. We discuss how the whisperings of the long-departed, from royalty like Tutankhamun to the common man, can unveil a treasure trove of knowledge about ancient cultures. Sarah sheds light on how bones offer clues about age, sex, pathology, and cultural practices. But it's not all smooth sailing - we also delve into the ethical dilemmas and unique hurdles faced in mortuary archaeology.
Finally, we turn the spotlight onto literature and how mortuary archaeology has been masterfully woven into the narrative by authors such as Aaron Alkins and Elizabeth Peters. Sarah, who is also an accomplished writer, candidly shares how she incorporates her expertise into her work. For all budding writers out there, we offer a list of valuable resources to help you bring authenticity to your novels through this unique perspective. So sit back, tune in, and let the secrets of the past unfold before you.
You can find out more about Sarah and her books at https://linktr.ee/WriterMeRSNR
Find out more about Writers' Narrative my brand new free magazine for writers everywhere. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox monthly.
Find out more about Mists and Manuscripts, a writing retreat in the heartland of Scotland, surrounded by lochs and mountains.
Hi and welcome to the Writing and Marketing Show brought to you by author Wendy H Jones. This show does exactly what it says on the tin. It's jam-packed with interviews, advice, hints, tips and news to help you with the business of writing. It's all wrapped up in one lively podcast. So it's time to get on with the show. And welcome to episode 186 of the Writing and Marketing Show with author-entrepreneur Wendy H Jones. As always, it's a pleasure to have you join me this week's show.
Speaker 1:I'm going to be talking to Sarah N Rubin about mortuary archaeology, and what a fascinating subject, and I'm so looking forward to hearing what she has to say. Before then, what's the news and views from my area of the world? Well, I have been busy. I'm still recording these back to back because I'm trying to get them out in advance of my trip to the States. However, as you listen to this, in August, you will have done two things. First of all, I have launched my brand new publishing and retreat business, which is called Oz Scott Publishing and Retreats. That's A-U-S-C-O-T Publishing and Retreats and it is now the first retreat is available to book, and that is in Scotland in February, and it's called Missing Manuscripts. So if you're looking for a luxury writing retreat in the heart of the Scottish Highlands, then this is the retreat for you. I will put the details in the show notes of where you can find out more information. The other thing I've done is I have launched a brand new magazine. The first issue, the August issue, came out in the 25th of July and it's called Writers Narrative and it's a magazine for writers and again, it's a free. This one is a free magazine and I will put the link in the show notes as to where you can sign up to get the magazine straight to your inbox once a month and it's packed full of everything you need to help you as a writer, and I'm excited about both ventures and about being able to support writers in their writing endeavours. So before I introduce Sarah, I would just like to say every week I bring you the show Willingleigh, but it does take time out of my writing. If you would like to support that time then I would be very grateful if you went to wwwpartryoncom forward slash wendy H Jones and supported the show for just the price of a tear coffee for a month. That's $3 per month and it would let me know you like the show and you want it to continue. So that's wwwpartryoncom. Forward slash wendy H Jones. So what of Sarah? As I say, I'm delighted to have Sarah here to talk about mortuary archaeology.
Speaker 1:Sarah Neibor Rubin holds a BA and MA degrees in biological anthropology, with a minor in medical sciences. From 1993 to 2001, she excavated archaeological sites in Ohio, indiana, jerusalem and the city of Birkek on the Euphrates River in Turkey. When not in the field, she spent hours with human remains in museum and academic laboratories and was occasionally called to consult on forensic cases with identification and analysis of skeletonised or disfigured individuals. Dreams those that torment you at night and those your heart calls you to led Sarah out of the field and into the seminary where she received rabbinic ordination in 2007. One of Sarah's dreams is to be a writer, and so she is. Two of her short stories were finalists for the Tifaret Journal Fiction Contest and her fiction has appeared in Tifaret Journal and Dourache, a Northwest Music. Sarah is a member of Sisters and Crime, where she served on the Pujo San Chapter Executive Committee and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. So, without further ado, let's get on with the show and hear from Sarah, and we have Sarah with us. Welcome Sarah.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Wendy. It's wonderful to be here with you.
Speaker 1:Oh, it is such a pleasure to have you here it really is with such an exciting subject. I can't wait to dig into it.
Speaker 2:No pun intended right.
Speaker 1:No, none whatsoever. Totally unintentional With an accent like that. You're not here with me in Scotland, are you? Where are you in the world?
Speaker 2:I am in Seattle Washington enjoying a nice cool morning at the moment when we're talking.
Speaker 1:Oh right, it's freezing in Dundee. We need some sun and heat here.
Speaker 2:I'll send you some.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Now listen, this has got nothing to do with the show, but I believe you were in Jerusalem. So was I. When were you in Jerusalem? From 1994 to 95. Oh wonderful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've spent several summers there myself. 97 was the big summer of excavations there.
Speaker 1:Great place. Anyway, we'll find out about that in the show, so I just wanted to touch base on Jerusalem, because I love it there. It's great.
Speaker 2:Oh, it is a gorgeous city, so full of so many different things.
Speaker 1:It really is, and I'm sure that will come out in our. You know what we're discussing today, so let's find out what we want to ask about mortuary archaeology. I'm tripping over my tongue today. I don't know what's up with me. So this is a basic question, but I really feel it's one that we need to address. What exactly is mortuary archaeology?
Speaker 2:Wonderful question. So we start with archaeology. Of course is the really the anthropology of the past. We're digging up, excavating remnants of our history or of history of different cultures, and then mortuary really refers to burials and therefore we have mortuary archaeology the excavation of burials or tombs and so forth, anywhere that people have laid their dead to rest. That's where we might find a mortuary archaeologist excavating those remains.
Speaker 1:Wow, and I mean I think it's fascinating. As I say, you know, it's not a topic I never really thought about, but it's so, it's so interesting. So how exactly does mortuary archaeology different from traditional archaeological approaches, and what unique insights does it offer about past societies?
Speaker 2:So mortuary archaeology really is exactly the same as every other archaeology. When you go to a site you'll see people excavating in exactly the same manner that they're excavating anything else a little more care perhaps around bones or human remains which can be fragile. But really what we're looking at is not just the bones themselves but the practices that are involved, what is laid to rest with them, how they were laid to rest. So the cultural experience of burying or interring one's ancestors, one's cultural remains, one's physical remains. There's a lot that goes around that. So the mortuary archaeologist is really interested in the whole gamut of that grave site.
Speaker 1:Oh, fascinating answer, and I mean, yeah, it does offer us such a lot. There's so much in those graves that we don't really think about, do we? And, as I say, I find this absolutely fascinating. But I'm curious what can we learn from burials?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's so very much. I can't really. I think I could spend the entire hour on this. You know, what can we learn from burials? We can learn about some of the cultural that, maybe some of the spiritual and religious traditions. Sometimes we look at a grave site I'm actually fascinated by thinking about this, because we look at something like the tomb of Tutankhamun right and we see the immense amount of stuff that was buried with him and we see this elite person and so often the burials that we hear about when we're excavating, when the popular ones, the ones that go out to the popular culture King Richard III, just a few years ago, was excavated right, and those are the elite burials. But there actually is a lot we can learn from the average everyday person's burials, right, so we can tell maybe if there's a little more status.
Speaker 2:When I was in Turkey you spoke about Jerusalem. We'll talk about that later but when I was in Turkey I was excavating Roman remains and some of the burials had pieces of vessels with them and glass bottles you know that beautiful Roman, blue, swirly glass that comes or an amphora that was laid in with them, and we don't know necessarily what was in that amphora, but you know a big vase there, but it was there with the burial. Other burials had no, nothing that actually survived time, right. So there might have been things that were buried with them, like flowers or a coffin a wooden coffin but we can learn a lot about the differences and the the way people were treated by how they were buried and what they were buried with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I suppose I've never really thought of it like that. And I mean, when you look at Tutankhamun, I mean really and truly, you can tell he was important. I've been to the Tutankhamun exhibition in Cairo and you know, it's phenomenal, phenomenal. What was buried with him. You know and you don't even you know, but you don't think about the fact that even people of a lesser status, or so-called lesser status would have been buried with stuff as well. You know, and I say so called, absolutely you know they're not.
Speaker 2:Well, and they're often the people who built those bigger tombs or the people who worked for the elites right, and so they. They're just as important in terms of the cultural history, but we often do focus just in on those elites.
Speaker 1:We do yes. So I mean I want to take it a bit further. Really, what can we learn from the bones that you find when you're doing this? We?
Speaker 2:again. I could go on for an hour about what we can learn from the bones, really focusing in on the who a person is. So there's the obvious, the identification of an individual. There's the sex, and I say sex, not gender, because there are physical characteristics based on the genetic code right, based on the X, y or X, x versus gender, which we often can't tell as much from a burial because we don't have the, we don't necessarily have information about what they were wearing or what their culture would have been wearing in that burial. But we, or how they express themselves, sometimes the grave goods can tell us something about gender in if we know a lot more about that particular culture. But we can find out about the sex of an individual, the age of an individual.
Speaker 2:Bones of a child are not only smaller but they are the long bones of the arms, for example. The ends are separate pieces that are still allowing for growth of the bone, so we can tell up to a certain age how old they are based on that growth. But even after that age, things like arthritis start to set in right. We know about that at this point in our lives and it's it actually marks the bones. But other things, other things we don't necessarily think about. If you get a sinus infection, if you have a really bad sinus infection, it can actually cause pathology in the bones, cause bone reaction inside your nasal cavities, and so there are lots of pieces of pathology that you can discover. You can tell if somebody maybe had a fracture of a bone and it healed. Maybe it healed correctly, maybe it healed incorrectly. How long ago maybe that fracture happened? And then going back to that arthritis piece which is so fascinating and this does take me into Jerusalem thinking about use patterns. Right, if you do a lot of writing, you might actually wind up with arthritis in your hands in a different way than somebody who is a construction worker who has use patterns in their hands, somebody who is a seamstress or a tailor who uses their teeth with their thread and their needles. A lot might actually have a change to their teeth. So we can learn things about cultures from that.
Speaker 2:And when I said Jerusalem, the excavations that I was doing there were at a site of a Byzantine monastic site that is actually a contemporary monastic site today. I think that St Stephen's in Jerusalem, which is just north of the Damascus Gate, just a beautiful area right next to the garden tomb and I was excavating tombs there with a team and the bones there are from a fifth century monastic site and there are signs of excessive kneeling. Now this is before the time that genuflection became a regular pattern of behavior. So why were they kneeling? What was going on in that?
Speaker 2:And there are lots of theories and lots of ideas. That happens to be one of those sites that's not so ancient that we actually have some written records which help to back up and help to understand. And what the bones do then is corroborate some of what's going on in the written record about kneeling, and what the written record does is corroborate what we're seeing in the bones. So it's all part and parcel of the whole site. Right, we're learning about the bones of an individual or a set of individuals, but we're also learning about that culture, and the more we have from that site as a whole, the more we can piece together the culture as a group.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is so interesting. I was a nurse but I didn't know bones could tell you quite so much. I thought I knew a lot about anatomy and physiology but I didn't know that you know, from looking at the bones from archaeological remains you could learn so much about society then Gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Some of my study. I worked actually when I was in graduate school in the radiology department at the University Hospital so that I could learn more about what those pathologies look like Today and how things look in the bones in contemporary society, to be able to also read back into the past.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's just. I'm blown away by how much you can learn from bones. It's so exciting this session. I'm learning so much. Obviously, when you're excavating graves, I know about, you know, the Human Tissue Act and things like that that we brought in. I mean, we've got it in the UK but everyone, every country, will have their own version of that. So there must be ethical considerations. How do you, how do researchers, approach ethical considerations when they're excavating and studying human remains?
Speaker 2:So it's a very interesting thing. Things have changed a lot in the last 20, 30 years. You know, I got into this originally in the early 1990s and the United States had just passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and NAGPRA, and I volunteered at a museum to learn more about archaeology and to get involved, and they needed an assessment of all of the human remains that were stashed away in this warehouse at the museum. Now just think about that for a second Hundreds of bodies stashed away in a warehouse. Where did those bodies come from? Those bodies came from graves that people put into the ground intentionally. Right, there was a cultural reason for intering those bones and there was a cultural approach to intering those bones. And then along come the archaeologists dig them up, move them into a warehouse and leave them there. There's a big ethical concern right there. Right, who owns these? Who do these remains belong to, and how do we respond to them? Who has the right to stash them in a warehouse? And so the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act came along as some way of trying to reconcile what we had done in this country, which was the early archaeologists especially. We're so excited. Let's find out about all these ancient things? Let's just dig up all these Indian remains, right? The indigenous peoples, of course, have their own feelings about this, and so the repatriation of those bones to indigenous peoples was a response both a legal response but also an ethical response to what our historical archaeologists had done, and even up to the contemporary day, we're still doing that.
Speaker 2:There's a big racial component, if you think about it, to a lot of the early archaeology, including using the bones to try to identify race and we don't use this anymore but to try and denigrate certain races. Right? Less human, less brain capacity. If you put enough beans in the skull, how many do they fit? How much fills it? Things like that really don't tell us anything about the intelligence of a person, but we're laid into some of the early archaeology and early bone analysis from archaeological sites and from contemporary people as well. So there are so many layers to thinking about this.
Speaker 2:I think the best approach that any archaeologist can take is archaeology, is anthropology right? This is the study of people and it is the study of culture in particular, whether it's past culture or contemporary culture. We need to consider who we are working with, and that extends beyond the people who were in that area, who were excavating. Maybe that culture is long gone or maybe that culture was an invasive culture.
Speaker 2:For example, again when I was in Turkey, there were Roman burials that I was dealing with primarily, and the people who live there are not Romans. The people who live there today were Kurdish and Turkish cultural descendants of a long history in that area, and so they have nothing to do with the bones themselves, but they have concerns about the disturbance of the dead, the disturbance of the souls there, and so thinking about how are we responding? How are we reaching out to the people who are living there? How are we reaching out to the descendants of anybody we might be excavating, if there's a need to excavate or an interest in excavating from the part of those who are culturally descended, if we're going to lose that information because of the flooding from dams, maybe we want to excavate, but is there a reinterment? How are we approaching that culture, not just repatriating Native American graves that were excavated 100, 200 years ago without permissions, but even how we're doing the archaeology today? The long answer for and again I can go on.
Speaker 1:No, it's a brilliant answer because it's so true, because the thing I mean it's shocking what was done in the past in the name of historical context.
Speaker 1:It's shocking what we did. I mean, I tipped up against it. Not, they weren't dug up, but I tipped up against it a bit. I worked at Royal Naval Hospital, hasler. I was a naval nurse and an army nurse and when I was there there was a graveyard there, an ancient graveyard, and it was. I think it was Turkish soldiers, but they might have been French, I can't remember, but anyway, there were soldiers not soldiers, sailors that were buried at the back in an ancient graveyard.
Speaker 1:Now, nothing ever got built on that. And then the land got sold because the hospital closed down. We closed down all the military hospitals and they opened. They sold the land to build housing and basically they were not allowed to build any housing on that graveyard. It had to be left the housing. That piece of land had to be left as a graveyard. Nobody was allowed to touch the bones, quite rightly so, you know. And yeah, I mean I doubt there's anybody alive now actually cares about these bones in terms of their relatives, because they probably don't even know they're buried there. Yeah, but right, you've still got to be. You've got to be what's the word I'm looking for tactful, and you've got to be respectful of the dead.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that's actually part of why I don't do this work anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I can understand that. Yeah, so what are some of the most common challenges faced by mortuary archaeologists and how do they overcome them during the research process?
Speaker 2:So there's a science to archaeology in general, right In the excavation of remains, whatever it is, and so the challenges are. The biggest challenges are really about how much care you can take with a space and if you're excavating over several days, over several years, how much can you get? How do you protect the integrity of the site itself from okay, I'm just gonna say it grave robbers or from those who are really interested just in gathering the stuff of their own private to sell on the market rather than to use for scientific knowledge, for the historical knowledge. So protecting that information. Going back to what can we learn from this? I didn't even mention taking soil samples or DNA from the bones. There's a certain amount of integrity to the site that you have to keep you If you want to find out. Potentially you can get information about stomach contents if you excavate correctly.
Speaker 2:So there's a challenge in that physical work of protecting the site. It's a very fine work and sometimes we think we go in with a big trowel and we just dig it up and we get it out of there. But also there's a you lose information very quickly If you leave that open overnight. You have to work quickly enough to get material out during the time that you have during the day. The other big challenge is a lot of major archeological sites are in very hot places and a lot of archeology happens during the summer, between academic terms. So, yeah, I've worked under very hot conditions. I think those are.
Speaker 2:There are all sorts of challenges. You can also lose materials, just little, tiny, tiny things, right? So, yes, there's the big pieces that you see immediately, but taking a sieve, you see the, you see people, archeologists take a sieve and it's really just a bunch of chicken wire, a fine chicken wire that is in for different sizes of materials to get them out. Some of the hand bones are really tiny, oh, hands are just a couple of meters long, but they can give us information. Are they there or are they lost?
Speaker 2:Other challenges are just when you sometimes you're doing this in the middle of a project, like you've mentioned, not being able to build on that land where there was a graveyard. But a lot of times there is building happening. The excavation of King Richard the 30 is discovered, I believe, under a parking lot. Yeah, park, yeah, right. And so how do you get things out quickly enough? The people who want to do the construction on a site just want to get in there and do it, where they're building a dam and the river's going to come. So you have limited time. I don't know if that's what you meant by challenges, but those are the challenges I think about.
Speaker 1:These are great challenges. Well, they're not great challenges, but the great thing about it is what I'm saying. I wouldn't want to be faced with any of them, quite frankly, oh heavens. You touched very briefly there on DNA and I'd like to just unpick that just a little bit more. So how is technology such as DNA analysis enhanced our ability to interpret luxury sites and learn more about the individuals buried there? If it does play a part.
Speaker 2:Well, it does play a huge part because we now can actually connect people in those gravesites to other cultures, other people around. I've taken my DNA and I spat into a tube and sent it off and I know what my ancestry is. We can do the same thing with DNA from bones or teeth, that we can find out what were the actual genetic connections, where did these people come from originally, and we can make bigger connections to the story of how people populated the globe and what was going on. But we can also learn a lot, not just from DNA but from samples of the bone. What nutrients did people receive from their foods? What were they eating? What was their diet like?
Speaker 2:And I mentioned, maybe you can get some stomach contents. If you're excavating right, you take soil samples and you can get a lot of information out of that as well, if you take a soil sample from the area where the stomach would have been, as well as other soil samples around, so that you make sure that you are not getting lost in what's just in the air. And if you have a seed, if somebody's got a bunch of raspberry seeds maybe they were buried under a raspberry bush, we don't know right. So you wanna actually be able to make sure that it's what is just in that area and not what was also outside of that stomach contents area. But we can find out a huge amount really about not just the ancestry but the current contemporary lives of those people, what they were eating, what they were doing, just from the micro analysis of the bones and the soil around them.
Speaker 1:Wow, fascinating. So seriously I did not realize you could find out so much from all of these. You know, you think you know and you really don't. Yeah, but you've said before again, you talked about it earlier. But what role does the analysis of grave goods and burial offerings play in interpreting the cultural significance of mortuary sites?
Speaker 2:So I think that's the big key to mortuary archaeology. The analysis of the bones is really a part of physical or biological anthropology at its core, which is connected directly into the archaeology. But if you think about what a whole archaeological site is looking at, they're looking at the cultural goods, they're looking at the weapons, they're looking at the vessels that were used for cooking or eating, or maybe they're looking at woven materials that are there. So what we can find again? We can find some of that from micro analysis in the graves, as well as the macro pieces, as well as the large pieces. Sometimes you have actual clothing or leather goods or pieces that are in that grave.
Speaker 2:The other thing is, think about a grave site. Most of our grave sites are not, that they're not directly associated with the living areas. So sometimes it's off, at a distance from a cultural living area, from where the houses are, and you can begin to connect with the mortuary goods, with those items that are included in the graves. You can begin to connect them to the correct sites, the correct cultures of other archaeological sites around which may be at some distance.
Speaker 1:As I said, I've never thought of that. But see, in Scotland all our graves tend to, sometimes they're rural and they're next to a church, in the middle of nowhere, but like in a city like Dundee, they're surrounded by houses. But obviously at one point they weren't, because they're very old graveyards, right. So at one point they weren't surrounded by them like that. So, yeah, it really makes you think, wow, yeah, we're very big on old graves in Scotland.
Speaker 2:We're a very old country, ha ha ha, indeed, so is America, in terms of the land, right, we are very old and I think that we think we're a young country, but we are an old land and we need to respect that piece of the cultural history of the indigenous peoples.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yes, and that is important, extremely important, but yeah, but I mean we've got great. I mean you spoke earlier about grave robbers. We're big on grave robbers, or we were in the 19th century, we were big on grave robbers in Scotland, which just seemed to be a cultural sport.
Speaker 2:It's terrible. Absolutely. It was a cultural sport, not just in Scotland. It's been a cultural sport of colonizers, for example, what can we pillage from this land? And grave goods of the elites were sometimes the most the wealthiest pieces that you could pull from the land.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, when you go to Edinburgh, you can actually go on a tour about Edinburgh and they tell you about the graveyards and the fact we had mort cages, where people had to put cages around the deceased so that nobody would come in and steal the body, because what we were doing was stealing them and giving the body to medical science. We're selling the bodies to medical science.
Speaker 2:And that was also going back to the ethical considerations of what are we doing with these bones. So my mother, long ago, when I was really involved, early in my stages of getting involved in this, she said to me you may not take my skeleton and put it in a laboratory when I die, as if I would ever have actually thought of it. But if you go to the idea that I was in a room with hundreds of skeletons at the moment, she said that to me. Of course she might think that I'm so fascinated by this. And a couple of years later I actually did take I used when my rabbit I had a pet rabbit and he died and I took him and I had him, took him to the lab where they had him for a while in my house and I don't know.
Speaker 2:I was interested, I was fascinated a little bit and then years later I was like, why don't I have this? And I wound up giving that and some other pieces of things I had collected over the years to a high school science teacher. But what was I doing with that? And of course my mother would think I was just crazy enough to put her skeleton after she died. No, no worries, she's buried under a tree in my brother's yard.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, how lovely, sorry. Well, hey, this takes us beautifully, really, onto our next question, which is quite a serious one, really, because I know you've had some spiritual experiences in the field, including a curse. Are you happy to tell us about these?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm happy to tell you about these. So I think that there's a lot, a lot of layers to my spiritual experiences. I have always I had a sense of spirit in the world. When I was little, I visited the Alamo and I could not stay inside the Alamo because I felt the energies in the Alamo and so my mom had me well, my brother and the rest of my family explored inside. I just stand so far away from the Alamo itself. When I was older and I went out into the field as an archaeologist go back to that warehouse I had dreams, and one of those dreams was about being greeted by a mummy.
Speaker 2:Now, all of the boxes I was working with were supposed to be entirely skeletonized materials. There were not supposed to be any mummies. There were a couple of mummies in the warehouse. They were down on a different floor in a different section. I pulled the box off the shelf, doing my analysis.
Speaker 2:We were inventorying everything. We had no idea and it was a semi-mummified all of the tissues that were holding the bones together. Still, there was not enough to sort of recreate the face out of it, but there was enough mummified tissue to hold the bones together in large part and it blew me away really. But you mentioned the curse and so I'll come back to that. That was really the beginning of the end for me. Again, I had been having dreams and I had been connected to the people in a way, and it really helped me to think about the skeletons as people. But when I was in Turkey excavating, I was working on a particular grave site. Everybody else was working. I was the only one doing the mortuary archaeology there. Everybody else was working on the 7,000-year-old houses that were there. I was working on the 1,500-year-old bones that were there and one of the village matriarchs she had vines tattooed on her face stood at the edge of the pit and started screeching at me in Kurdish.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:And I really had no idea what she was saying. But one of my workmen said she's cursing you and everybody moved kind of out of the way. I still have no idea exactly what she said, but I decided it was something like go bury your own people or go work with the living instead of the dead, because that's what I wound up doing. And I wound up a year later entering the seminary and ultimately became an ordained rabbi and I have performed burials not quite as many yet as excavations of human remains but maybe some of my flipping back around to that ethical piece, going back and saying, okay, I'm going to work with my culture, I'm going to do some interment instead of disinterment and I'm going to work with the living and the grieving around that work as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, you've certainly led an interesting life and, to be honest, if somebody was screaming curses at me, I would rethink what I was doing as well. Oh my goodness. So how has mortuary archeology contributed to our understanding? Of ancient funerary practices and how they've evolved over time, and I think that's a great question. So how have they evolved over time?
Speaker 2:What's really interesting is, I don't think that they've evolved all that much over time. If you think about it, the Egyptians were embalming yeah, and we embalm If you think about all of the putting of grave goods in with burials. Now, what may be most interesting is that, if you think about that elite versus average person burial today, the big differences are in, maybe, the type of coffin that gets purchased. I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world really, but here in the US you can buy these yacht-sized things and they are gilded and they are. There's no way that the worms are going to get into them. Or you can bury in a simple wooden coffin with no nails or anything that would be left behind other than some of the fibers from that wood, and so the average burial, I think, has become more elite, though, and I think about the things that we put into caskets with people who die. I think about, in particular, a friend of mine died when I was a teenager and she was buried with pictures and with her leather jacket and various other things. People just kept pouring things into that casket before the internment. I think if I was an archaeologist 100 or 200 years from now excavating that site. Her burial likely would have had more in it than most of the burials around it, even in a cemetery in the middle of the city of Seattle, in the middle of the United States. There was something about that that struck me. When I think about an elite burial, what do we actually know? So we know that we have everybody's a little more elite now, but what do we think about going backwards?
Speaker 2:I don't think this is your question at all. I think I've gone way off topic here from your question. I don't think we've changed that much. There are still places where cremation is the standard. There are still places where embalming is the standard, but there are still places and still cultures in every place the Jewish culture, muslim culture that do not embalm, that do not use cremation, that do not use large elite vessels of interment, that in fact try to equalize in death, and so we're still doing things very much the same way that we have in the past.
Speaker 2:I think one of the new things is really also an old thing and that is echo interment. I'm hearing a lot about people, you know, are they buried in a vessel with seeds or with a? Are they buried with a tree so that they're finding ways to try and give back to the earth or go back to ashes to ashes and dust to dust right, but there have always been cultures that stuck with that. You know, 20, 30 years ago would my friend have wanted that instead of the fancy coffin and all of the things tossed in there with her? Maybe you know, but it's again. The interment is actually about what the people who are living do with those who are dead and not what the people who were dead necessarily would have thought to do with themselves.
Speaker 1:I agree, you know, we all people go oh, what do you want to happen when you die? And I'm like I don't actually care, because do whatever makes the people that are left behind happy. You know, it's like I'm dead. What does it matter to me? But it's true, if people do want a specific burial and they want eco burials, then that's great, and we're swinging towards the eco interment here as well, and so it is swinging towards that. People are trying to, you know, and of course, then you've got the places like and this is not what we're here to talk about, so I'm going off piste as well but you've got the places like New Orleans, where everybody's buried above ground.
Speaker 2:Well, absolutely, sometimes you have to Right, there are different and the city of San Francisco didn't allow for burial inside the city. All the cemeteries are outside of the city and there's one particular city outside of San Francisco that has more dead people than living people easily by far, because it became one of the places where people could enter the city, partly because of the hills, partly because of the runoff of the water, partly because of sewage. You know some, some of our internment of the dead and some of the reason that it's at a distance is because death and the desiccation of the dead afterwards is actually a pretty gross thing, right, and can be unhealthy. It can contribute to problems in the, in the sewage and the water flow, in the, you know, in the water supply for those who are continuing to live in that area. So we have to move the dead off and you know things with the plague moving the dead off into mass burials to get them out of the city and out of the way of the people who are living and hopefully still healthy.
Speaker 1:The cities have a way of growing, and suddenly they're inside the city again.
Speaker 2:Well, that's. You mentioned that in Edinburgh that the cemeteries weren't always in the middle of those houses, but now they're in the middle of those neighborhoods.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. You know I could talk about this topic all day, but I know we've only got limited time, so can we bring it round to writing? How can we use this knowledge to ensure authenticity in our novels?
Speaker 2:Well, there are so many layers to this. I think this is the. This is great. So there are a couple of novelists who have really worked with this material Aaron Alkins, a number of years ago, his, his mysteries, the Amelia Peeba study series by Elizabeth Peters, right, of course, in her Egyptology. So this information can be really helpful in understanding how graves are put together. And I think about also Patricia Cornwell, for example, who is a thriller writer, and then you know, maybe there is some ritualization of burial or of you know what one does, what a serial killer might do with their body. So we can learn things from that. But the integrity of how to do the archaeology, what kinds of information can come from DNA? What kinds of information can be learned from the bones? But also, what kinds of information can be learned from how that burial was done? Were they just shoved under a bunch of leaves or were they ritually laid out in some way? I think that we can really learn a lot for writing mysteries, but also for understanding the culture of the people as well. So what's going on learning who a person, who the living are, who did the interment? Right, as we said before, it's really about the living. They're the ones doing the burial, not the person who died. So I think that's a great thought.
Speaker 2:There is a great book I think, that your readers, your listeners, would enjoy. It's still one of the best, I think. It's called Death to Dust by Kenneth Iserson, and it is Death to Dust. He's a physician, but he includes in here everything basically that happens after you die, that desiccation process, what you can learn from the bones, but also mortuary practices, and he has a whole section on epitaphs and poetry about the dead and what I mean. I have. Mine is bookmarked with so many different little sticky tabs here. I have recommended this book to writers over and over again. There are some other more contemporary books that focus in on the topic of burying the dead, so it's actually called Burying the Dead. Lorraine Evans wrote this book called Burying the Dead, which is really about mortuary practices in general. I think that we can learn a lot to put this into our writing, to bring this to the reader with integrity.
Speaker 1:That's excellent. Now I was going to ask you where would be the best place to start, but you've answered that already, which is marvelous. You've given us some resources, which I'm really pleased about, because I'm going to be looking them up. So I know you're an author, I write it as well, because we met through sisters in crime. So we're sisters Absolutely In crime, of course in crime rather than genetically. But so can you tell us about your own books?
Speaker 2:So my own books are in process. I'm currently querying a novel with my book called Inherit the Dead. I hope it'll hold on to that, but it might not hold on to that title, you know, in which Henry, who's a librarian, suspected of murdering her neighbor, gloria, must trust her not so imaginary friend she has ignored for years. She's got this voice in her head and she's afraid of being crazy. Her mother told her she was crazy, but she has to find out what Gloria was hiding, and one of the things that Gloria was hiding was that she was Henry's birth mother.
Speaker 1:Excellent, I'm good. I wish you all.
Speaker 2:So I'm querying that. Let's hope, let's hope I you never know, right, I get a rejection every day, but it's also out full manuscript with with agents, so we'll see. I also have I do have a couple of short stories published. They all have some, and I didn't realize this until I started pulling the list together. They all have some sort of this little spirit nugget in it. Right, and the friend who is who speaks to her? For example, there's a rabbi, a short story about a rabbi who sees the past spirit of her, of her congregants, and learns about her synagogue when she's new to the synagogue. She learns about it by actually seeing the ghosts of the past walk through the building, for example. And then I have another short story in which a father is grieving for his child using the traditional mourners Kaddish it's called living Kaddish, and his child is trans, and so he's grappling with his child's life. Life changes, and I'm currently working on stuff too, so who knows where to go?
Speaker 1:Hey, what is it you say from your mouth to God's ears? Is that the saying, or have I got?
Speaker 2:lost in the stuff. Yes, please.
Speaker 1:I'll probably get into trouble for cultural appropriation, now you know.
Speaker 2:Oh no, you can take that one. Your mouth to God's deers is I'm happy with that one Excellent.
Speaker 1:So my final question where can my listeners find out more about you and your books?
Speaker 2:Well, I do have a website, sarah Neber Rubincom, but that can be really really hard to spell out. So I have a link tree and that is under the name writer me RSNR, so writer me, me, and then RSNR for Rabbi Sarah Neber Rubin, and that has all my information, or at least most of it at this point, on it and most of my social media is under that as well. So RSNS so writer me R for Rabbi. Snr for Sarah Neber Rubin.
Speaker 1:SNR. It's just, I'll put that in the show notes. I'll put the link in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Sarah. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. It's been amazing.
Speaker 2:It's been fun. Thank you so much, Wendy. I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1:You are welcome and enjoy the rest of your day.
Speaker 2:You as well have a wonderful one. You must have a little less time left to your day than I do. Yes, it's 4pm here. No, just about 8pm. 8pm, see, I'm already ready to be done with my day. 8am here 8am.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll be a bit, a little bit closer to you soon, because I'm flying to the East Coast on the 1st of August.
Speaker 2:Well, I wish I could fly to the East Coast and come meet you in person, but I'll have to hold that for another day.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Bye, take care.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye. That brings us to the end of another show. It was really good to have you on the show with me today. I'm Wendy H Jones and you can find me at wendahjjonescom. You can also find me on Patreon, where you can support me for as little as $3 a month, which is less than the price of a tea or coffee. You go to wwwpatrioncom. Forward, slash wendahjjones. I'm also Wendy H Jones on Facebook, twitter, instagram and Pinterest. Thank you for joining me today and I hope you found it both useful and interesting. Join me next week when I will have another cracking guest for you. Until then, have a good week and keep writing, keep reading and keep learning.