Rackham Graduate School - University of Michigan

A L U M N I P R O F I L E S2DEInterdisciplinarity? Archeologypractically invented it, saysAndrea Berlin.“To me, it’s the most inherentlyinterdisciplinary field in the academy,”she says. “You cannot pursue itwithout understanding a great dealabout history, the classics, historiography,geography, geology, andmaterials science.”Any one of them — and manyothers — could come into play atany time, adds Berlin, an AssistantProfessor of Classical Archeologyat the University of Minnesota whoreceived her PhD in classical artand archeology from U-M(Michigan, that is) in 1988. “Theamount of stuff that I draw uponevery day that I’m standing out on asite … what part of graduate schoolprepared me for this? A small part;the rest I had to pick up on myown,” she says. “Any successfulpracticing archeologist draws uponthings that by rights fall within anumber of departments, but theyare all truly part of the core ofarcheology. There is no end to whatis relevant.”Basically, anything that helps tofill in a blank is useful, and imagination,to paraphrase Einsteinslightly, is at least as important asknowledge. The fondness of archeologistsfor detective fiction isalmost a cliché. “Archeologists as agroup are some of the biggest fanson earth,” says Berlin. “It must besomething that attracts that kind ofmind.”TECTIVE ON A DIGPhoto by Jim HansenAs she herself says,her field is “detectivework of the most funkind.” With, of course, atleast one conspicuousdifference. In dealingwith the non-literaryrecord, “you never knowif you’re right. You mayconstruct a scenario thathangs together in a waythat people in relatedfields find compellingand helpful, a little bitlike what in a court oflaw is circumstantial evidence,and when youaccumulate enough of it,you tend to feel you’vefound out the truth, butit’s not provable in thesense of a science problem.In the end, it’s likeone of those detectivestories. You need a storyline. You need imagination.”Take the pottery shestudied last summer at a dig inTurkey on the site of ancient Troy,pottery for the most part excavatedthe year before. Pottery is her specialty,and she was good enough atunearthing and interpreting it tomake a living as a free-lancer for adecade while her husband taughtand their two children were born,not to mention good enough to landa tenure-track job at Minnesotadespite 10 years out of the academicloop. She is one who can, in the“. . . it’s like one of thosedetective stories. You need astoryline. You need imagination.”words of the poet William Blake,“see a world in a grain of sand.”“Half the job is finding it and theother half is explaining what it isand why it’s there,” she says. Thematerial she had found dated fromthe 4th Century BC, a time whenTroy was largely invisible historically.