welcome welcome very much to conversation is a great distinct pleasure to me to welcome to the program a major archaeologist of my time perhaps destined to be part of the pantheon of the great archaeologist in the history of human society in my humble opinion but that's joel grossman and he's a an archaeologist and he's had a very interesting career and we're going to be talking in some depth in fact we've been able to set aside two full hours of talking with this gentleman in terms of his work and his take on the work and the implications of it and also some mentioning or thought about where do we go from here and that sort of thing but joel welcome so a conversation thank you i wonder if we can in this series or talk with a number of people what we find a way to get started particularly since we've got a considerable amount of time two hours time i want to maybe you c share your own personal background born and raised and then your early education and that sort of thing then we're talking to some of the important lessons to come out of the discipline of archaeology itself and then also some of that place family in westchester but then soon after the war my parents moved to california solo's raised in southern california i see in a rural community called sun valley which is two hundred horses scout i never could make it to boy scout i got cashiered or something but it sounds to me like you were you are you learned to be thoughtful and take care of your lessons and you learned a lot of good interesting things  yeah so we were bussed down or driven out into the desert and we spun a surround a couple of times and said just you're on your own you're on your own no falling no kong no when they drove off you're there in the middle of i was very young my parents gave me a copy of the golden book of archaeology really it was not enough for me well it's a golden book series i looked through up on the internet and yeah i don't think the you i don't know i guess it mattered when did you end schooling and you went to public school i went to public school nothing extraordinary my parents didn't have a lot of money he knew that i liked archaeology because i already picked up on knowing he brought me that sco and i tried to reconstruct the score you know but had you picked up on archaeology before they got there i was you know i was then i joined it's it's like archaeology is detective work we're all absolutely yeah there were absolutely following clues anyway my dad took me to him when my mother took me to her famous israeli archaeologists name yago ye dene and he was a general and the near east and he would read the old testament the old testament and follow the guidance of the old testament we turning as a scout is just out but he i was in the impression that you had to be wealthy that endemol a lot of money to be an archaeologist is that true and well the reason i thought that was really interesting question and i've ordered the major people down through history rich milne no no i wonder no to many but that's an interesting story that we could maybe get into later yeah yeah but the idea of wealth and intellectual capability i think level of support has a lot to them which which you do later on in life well i think that's an interesting question we can deal with yeah and so i went up to this this  they've got big teeth yeah the horses are wonderful animals yeah i know i know i i'm just saying my own lack there yeah yeah so that was my revelation as get to work had radios and worked yeah they did a work after yeah they don't anybody in the audience remember he's good you have to be of a certain age that's where you you can go to sears and roebuck and buy for five dollars a radio or you could order for two dollars over there  all the parts about a one thousand parts you put them on a sheet like this if you put them very carefully together like that you get a radio right i never could make it with my friend next door used to always make it work and there's a lesson in that you know and i can way in which it like in spanish if you can say you can speak to spell it right is that right you did through other languages you know any other language it's well known just spent if you know if you can say the word in spanish you can spell it and  well that got me in with a archaeologist u c l a is i got to say about the nature of the archaeological mind no it has to do more with just bothering people tell them oh is that ok ok it's more general everybody here than usual are younger than usual and everybody who wants to be an archaeologist should start early has to start at a field school really you have only what it is because you have to get basic training yeah ok just like a doctorate yeah so by the time i was sixteen i was on digs you were going on to others who has a low level yes or no member of the crew but it's connected with the past that are part of the grounding for archaeology are very very important to understanding the human condition in certain news i i meant as a general principle the role world society should be more interested in being making our peace with and understanding the implications of the past out of which we come i think so i do i think that there are lessons that we can only get from the past yeah right i started climate they said there was not enough time depth in their work they didn't go back far enough in time they didn't use history in archaeology i'm just so you climate and climate conditions in the you know so i did a lot of history and geography and it's sort of the same the same impetus and thinking i think as the archaeology you know great respect for it yeah anyway so you were learning  which is richard nixon was in program meeting he's one and they had ministers the traditional quakers are non program to didn't have ministers and the i do they don't anymore but they used to wear those flat ath yeah the idea was to level yourself out in the eyes of god no man is superior or closer to god than anybody else that was part of your ethical training that was you part of w important to me when i was young he says it doesn't matter what you do what matters is that you do would help people get interesting answer great i think yeah yeah you do would help people and other words you have an ethics yeah right yeah then i think it's important to have an ethical perspective or a framework person who are in fact science because you have to deal with a lot of ethical issues yes indeed yeah yeah and i mentioned to you we were chatting before about working with the native americans you know well that raises a whole bunch of that's a story that's news and hot button issues or a native people all over the world for that vitamins and nutritional value than corn or even wheat that's really interesting in and of itself the kenya would be associated with south america yes that was us that was a thing that i was involved with there is there a couple years at lake titicaca and they're making and they did domestication as i read it anyway of the four major food complex it at least outside of husbandry that made civilization possible about ten thousand years ago d we had or within that frame of reference we had four different places are they means by which you could instead of hunting and gathering  meeting northern mexico while he was also working in peru in a later time well this was mexico that should have been fifty six or so i guess something like that was in the s in the late sixties and seventies he was working in know which is north of cusco yeah he went you sure wasn't disseminated from mexico i think it was domesticated if he had he had the things from which the corn was domesticated yeah there was a whole series of little tiny things that they grew said it that's it that's it exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah so that was a major trick the two big exports from the new world was core recording potato for the for the commerce of the planet karl story you mentioned promoted i had the and he was also instrumental in promoting non western grain oh grains that were like you know yeah any north american which is the sister crop is called amaranth yeah that's right sawers as i understand you yeah i was really privileged to i guess be kind of i guess i don't want to say young just leaving student or that they had me teaching and a course where the old professor that i was on the young guy the candidate used to go up to chicago apply get courses everyone but he came there to indiana university was o there and he had a seven i think there were three of us in this room with the man and he had a pipe and he was had a beard if i remember and he was exactly what a professor smoking would be wise and thoughtful in everything and we were able to have and you could produce your own form so absolutely conjunction with some husbandry of animals and so forth but it made possible to be getting things of what was to become civilization we are studying how that transition  over your work it's absolutely just i pop in lee good thing and i congratulate you i wouldn't get to that maybe we had another hour we can talk about ok you know i don't magnificent work and things are getting to that and i can graduate i have i think it's an diseases yeah well my my whole take on the importance of work you know generally mentioned that before i think archaeology is one of those sciences that has either you know ease or yeah they had to be for my understanding mcnish another day they began or like what i call an em or where the type of wheat i think of barley up there in europe and everything but they began it was very likely there'd been all kinds of people making presumption might have been women who did maybe discovered more men were out trying to hunt down some big beast or something to bring meat home you know when the women were gathering had to be over time selected out through the selection process and yeah is that correct or is that pretty valid you know yeah pretty close for this major thing learning agriculture as a way of getting food supply and archaeology can tell us when and how that took place yes we can't explain everything but by contrasting things in different periods you can see how the environment changed you can see how the climate change  we can that be overread you think climate change historical climate change it's a big question isn't it i want to time it changed to what degree is it relevant to major changes that came to be manifest idea that there's a climate change taking place today yeah with the warming global warming yeah you know that is a condition that we have never in changing the face in the once we discovered this power to maybe change the way things gave us a real strong hand over everything in terms of the the way the planets operate in the us in ordinary sewing growing all the time that's true and in order to understand that current situation that we're in is good if we can get back to the roots of how we got d here and that's called what is it it's called archaeology it's a very bridge very noble study of on it and i was in that room with the man in were talking about things and everything he had the understanding that as i understood it we're talking about four different places where there was this development and was an independent developer and in those four play yes or was it the idea that you can put you can grow your own food develop one place and then disseminated by people that knowledge were disseminated  know which i thought he was giving very secure he thought there was maybe one place maybe southeast asia or something where developed the idea and it was disseminated outward from there he was talking in a time around he was talking in a time when people believed that the peruvians were influenced by the people that boats were coming across the pacific and populating in giving and i did as two people in south think you're not you know when you study the whole thing i think where did the idea didn't occur in a couple campfire somewhere in the world and they went out and carried the thing like johnny appleseed the whole world or was it discovered independently i would thought it was you trying to understand the whole story of the evolution of human culture yeah it's a larger issue well one of the things we're trying to do is date when corn came in very simple question  carbon was used it only goes back thirty thousand years and then the really carbon peters out ok then you need other systems the longer half lives but those are both collectively giving us a better handle or method for getting at the truth of what the reality was and well they get they didn't work there vince yeah better they did and they got that say under two hundred years ago and well now we're getting to the point where we can date it's the ideal yeah ok you want to it's ideal it's much more accurate in much more specific in time because we used to put some minus three hundred years yeah right or plus or minus a one hundred years this is fifteen years that's getting down to a generation yeah yeah and so what we do is archaeologists is we tell the other sciences what the chronological framework is what the amazing you know on everything but anyway so the dating system becoming back and everything's growing archaeological capability to get we're getting a better picture all the time of the evolution of  culture writ large on this planet we're getting a better understanding of what's going on i would say so i think we're getting more precise more precise in our age in time different and are we getting more accurate in the accuracy the actual prehistoric economics yeah you do yes well that's that's a major area of my interest in peru i studied i found a three thousand year sequence in the book in north upstate new york and i started to tell you but upstate new york and in peru in the upstate new york case the archaeologists that were working at this site hit burials native american burials you know but tried to keep it a secret why they didn't want to deal with and in the native americans they didn't want to deal with the indians they didn't want to be interrupted they thought that they would when they did they have a project of building project they were to get on with a ram or something  they were building a water treatment and they had to return ratios for investment and they had to live up to and so forth and well these are federal projects so they have a set but at the end but they do with  also have an economic thing to have its own outcome even some from the government or not but the investment bankers have the same kind of mentality yeah i want to get on with the bride the bottom line is they can't go ahead with a bit if it's a federal project yeah or a federally permit it project yeah they can't go ahead with the project unless they do justice to the earth killer gee that's some new thing that's been coming in from certain quarters of our society intellectual or otherwise that it's gotten in the way of the devil may care kind of attitude of your interbrand or who says tao with history is a punk i want to get on with my project i've got investors i have to  project in new york it's the under the len mercs commission they have jurisdiction very state to state in various projects state and city who where is the best guardians of the  really it's really that's just getting us up to the present in a very real sense and the trouble with you is that you've got a lot of troubles you know you know that you know you're too damned interesting if you could just calm down and become a little more boring and talk you been able to bring you this beginning program of two we're going to have another program with him following this one so we invite you to tune in at that time and joe thanks a lot for such a thank you very well led life and we're going to see if we can't in the day or so i had and joe once again stay put don't move don't go anywhere don't go anywhere you're coming up for a nd program momentarily well thank you very very much for that and we'll be coming back tomorrow with another program thank you