From Lawyer to Archaeologist, But Why?

When I tell people I used to be an Assistant District Attorney and am now a struggling grad student, they look at me like I'm crazy! I left a challenging but rewarding position as a lawyer in the criminal justice system in North Carolina to go back to school in a profession with an uncertain job market. Archaeology PhD programs can be extraordinarily long - I've now been in grad school for 8 years, longer than my entire legal career (law school + 2 years of practice). As many will attest, these programs are long because archaeologists spend years finding sites, applying for and gaining funding to excavate those sites, and then dealing with drawn-out permitting processes in foreign countries, in languages other than English. So why did I sign up for this?

In the law I defended and prosecuted criminals. I saw firsthand how state systems impact violence and malnutrition, and how those systems perpetuate social inequality. I'm grateful for the wonderful people we have fighting for justice on both sides of the criminal justice system, but I wondered about the origins of violence and malnutrition, and wondered how some of the earliest states and empires affected health and risk for violence. In some prehistoric cases, empires smoothed health disparities and reduced violence (as in a "pax imperialis" or imperial peace model). But it other cases, state expansion caused increased levels of violence, malnutrition, and even starvation, at least for poor people.

Uraca dates to the time of the expansion of one of the first empires in the Americas- the Wari Empire, which spread across the Andes around 600 - 1000 AD. Excavating here and at other sites in the region will help us to understand what impact the empire had on interpersonal violence and health for people living in the rural margins of the empire. By understanding the social and environmental factors that drove violence and bad health in the past, I hope we can make better policy decisions in the present and future.

Photo: Beth K. Scaffidi and Samantha Seyler cleaning up a looter's hole at Uraca in 2014.