From enchanted students to educated experts

Two alumni caught the discovery bug at WWU. Now they’re back as professors to share their fascination with science and archeology.

Monique Roddy ’07

Monique Roddy is an associate professor of history and co-director of the Honors Program (see page 6), and has taught at WWU since 2018. She has long been interested in archeology and is a co-director at the Balu’a Regional Archeological Project in central Jordan, where she has led or participated in digs since 2004. She recently shared about her archeological work at a colloquium on campus and in Chicago at a conference for the American Society of Overseas Research. She teaches classes on the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, geography, rhetorical theory, and Middle Eastern and African history.

Q: What early experiences sparked your interest in archeology?

Looking at biblical stories and thinking about biblical history from looking at archeology, that was always interesting to me. But what really got it started, was a project in high school. My dad dropped me off at the public library and said, “Go look up Nefertiti or Hatshepsut.” I was convinced they were not real names.

But I read this biography that reconstructs Nefertiti's life by looking at the places where she lived—her palaces; the artifacts; the fragmentary, small pieces that remain, but they're what we use to tell her story. I was fascinated that archeology could do this.

Then as a junior in high school, I visited Walla Walla University, and Doug Clark gave me a tour of the archeology lab. I was excited to see all of the pottery that was spread across this huge area in the base-

ment of Bowers. He had me volunteering in the lab my first year here as a freshman.

As a sophomore in college, I went and taught in Egypt for a year, and then I went straight from Egypt to the dig in Jordan, and I just fell in love. I knew—this is what I want to do.

Q: You’ve given several presentations recently on a summer research project. Tell us a little about what that looked like.

A couple of summers ago, I did a research project looking at a subset of what I did my dissertation on. I was asked to contribute to a column on women in the ancient world. The idea was to take any kind of everyday artifact, and think about the woman who used this artifact and reconstruct a story about her.

The idea is based on research from the 1980s, when they’re starting to ask questions about women in the archeological record. There’s an article by a woman named Janet Spector called, “What does this awl mean?” The title is a pun on a tool that a Dakota woman used to make clothing. Spector writes this imaginative reconstruction about how it was created, how it was used, and then how it ultimately ends up in the archeological record.

This approach is a lot of fun because you’re using your imagination to say, “How much do I actually know about the archeological record? Do I know enough to tell a connected story about this artifact?”

Q: What artifacts did you explore in your piece?

My dissertation was looking at a site called Tall al-’Umaryi in Jordan around 1200 B.C. It is an early Iron Age village and includes a set of three or four houses. For this most recent project, I put together an article on three oil-separation kraters, which are a type of large ceramic bowl that has a spout. Without the spout, they're used as kind of a large mixing bowl, but with the spout, they're used to separate out olive oil.

Part of my narrative is reconstructing the use of these kraters—the women are out helping to participate in harvesting olives off of the trees in the fall. When they're ripe, they crush them with this stone to turn them into pulp. They collect all that pulp and put it in one of the kraters. The oil floats to the top, the water and pulpy stuff all sinks to the bottom, and then they can pour the oil out into a small jug or jar, ceramic vessels for storage. So I'm writing my narrative about how this would work, what it would look like, where they're doing this work. I'm imagining it outside in the courtyard, in front of the house. The women are chatting with each other as they work.

The second part of the narrative is how they're using the oil. In this particular house there is what we call a cultic corner, a space for religious ritual. The kitchen is in the front room and in the back of the house, there's a storage area where they're storing their food, like the oil and grain. And in the middle is a paved area. Flat stones have been used to create a surface, whereas the rest of the house is dirt, and there's a single standing stone. These standing stones were not necessarily meant to be the deity, but to represent a connection with the divine.

Here we find one of these nicely shaped stones in the house on pavement. We think this is a space where they are carrying out rituals. And from looking at the literature, from looking at comparisons from places where we have written records, it's often the women who are in charge of domestic religious ritual.

This leads me to imagine women using this oil to pour out a little offering in front of the stone. And I wrote a fictional narrative about it. I’m recreating this moment where everybody in the household wakes up, they're all moving out to do their chores, eating some freshly baked bread that the women have just made. Then they all go about their day, working to take care of the animals, the fields, while the women stay home and cooking, grinding grain, and whatnot. And then at the end of the day, they all come back into the house and probably a grandmother or an elder woman of status in the community, she takes the oil and she takes some flour that they've just ground, and she makes her offering in front of the standing stone.

I imagine the whole household—they're pausing, holding their breath as she does it, as they all hope, “May this be a good year, a good harvest,” whatever their activities are. So that's the narrative built around these artifacts.

Q: You presented this narrative at a professional conference last November. What was the message of this narrative, or what can we learn from it?

My argument is that it's not just the people in this house making the oil, but other community members helping too, because it's of religious importance for everybody in the community, not just that house. The fact that we have three of these very specialized pottery vessels found in one house, and none in the other houses, is significant. In fact, we only know of three actual examples across the entire southern Levant, so it's not a very common type of vessel.

There’s this idea that if it was just the women of this household, they probably would only need one. We’re assuming that finding three of them indicates they’re producing a lot more oil. We also found a lot more grinding stones in this house than we did in the other houses, so they’re making a lot more flour. I think other women are participating in this because they’re helping to make the offerings.

Q: What got you interested in this piece of the picture?

I’m really interested in what people are doing at the household level to create food, clothing, all those basic everyday things. I also look at how people are organizing and cooperating at a community level. What kinds of things are they doing together? This is an example of a religious ritual that may be bringing people together. I also look at things that divide them. In this period, they seem pretty concerned with storing their own grain by tucking it up in the most secure part of their house.

But looking at the women, we see they're cooperating. We are finding a lot of grinding stones up on the roofs; they’re grinding flour on the roofs. They’re dragging it all up there so they can sit on their roofs, do this work that takes four hours a day, and chat with each other.

I am reminded to look at the women and their narrative by something we did at the beginning of the dig. We would take stones up and throw them off the top of a rebuilt house down at a watermelon with a little face painted on it.

It’s referring to the biblical story of King Abimelek who’s chasing people fleeing a city and catches up to them in another city. This woman takes her millstone up onto the house. It's just an everyday artifact, why would you think this was important enough to carry with you? But for her, this is part of what she does every day. She’s like, “They’re not getting my grinding stone!” We don’t know her name in the biblical narrative, but she carries her stone up with her, and then she drops it on Abimelek's head and it ultimately kills him— even though he says, “Don’t let it be said I was killed by a woman, stab me now.”

So by recreating this moment, for me it's a reminder that women are a part of that story too. It’s not just the men whose names we know. It made a huge impact on me getting up there, my turn on top of the house, and throwing a rock down at a watermelon. I think he mostly survived unscathed … we all had bad aim.

Q: How has your work in archeology influenced your religious beliefs?

My interest from the beginning has very much been in how do I understand the Bible better when I look at the archeological record. Can I understand the stories in the Bible by setting them into their ancient context? For example, when I look at the story of Abimelek and the woman throwing her grinding stone down on him, I think about how many hours she spent with that grinding stone, how it was probably passed down to her from her mother. Some of the artifacts we have down at La Sierra are grinding stones with finger marks grooved into them from being used for so long. That's something that takes a lot of time, to work away basalt, which is a really hard stone. So these are artifacts that matter to people. All of a sudden, it makes the stories make a little more sense. It makes me think about why this part of the story is included, or why this emphasis is here in the biblical narratives.

When I’m on a dig or talking with students, it's my interest to unearth how archeology helps me understand the Bible better, to understand what those stories mean for me, and how I interpret them. I think that can be powerful.

David Cowles ’78, ’81

David Cowles is a professor of biology at WWU and has taught here since 2001. He is also the author of Invertebrates of the Salish Sea, a website documenting hundreds of species found in and near the Salish Sea. He is fascinated by how animals survive in the sea and teaches classes in general, plant, and marine biology, limnology, ecological physiology, and marine invertebrates.

Q: What got you interested in marine biology?

I've had a long-term interest in marine species. I grew up out in the Pacific Northwest rainforest and we lived at Forks, Washington, close to the ocean. I spent a lot of Sabbath afternoons exploring and was interested in that.

When I came to Walla Walla University, I really knew I wanted to study biology. When I finished my bachelor's degree, I was really disappointed because, well, I just had an introduction, but I didn't really dive into anything yet, so I wanted to study more.

There was a professor here, Larry McCloskey, who was a very influential marine biologist and did a lot at Rosario. I went for a master's with him and continued focusing on marine biology. I got my doctorate then at University of California Santa Barbara, then Loma Linda called me down to join their graduate school for a number of years. But I always wanted to get back to the Northwest.

Q: What is the goal of your invertebrates webpage and how does it work?

I wanted to be able to serve someone who really doesn't know very much about the biology of these organisms, and also support those who did. On the front page is a little introduction and then an alphabetical index of the species. If you happen to know the common name or the scientific name of an organism, well the alphabetical index is the place to go. Then there’s also a systematic index for if you know the organism is part of a particular group and you wonder what other species in that group live here, you can search for information that way. If you don't know what a species is, you can use the dichotomous key.

A dichotomous key allows you to identify by observable traits through a series of two choice questions. It asks, is it red or is it blue? If it's red, you go this way. If it's blue, you go that way and then it asks you more and more questions until you come up with the answer. Of course, I’m simplifying a lot; it might be more likely to ask about a rostrum, for example.

Well, what if you don’t know what a rostrum is? I have included an illustrated glossary, which was one of the things that really attracted me to the project. Scientific terms can be linked to a glossary entry, often with a photograph so you can see what a rostrum, or whatever, looks like.

With the combination of having a lot of pictures to see what various characteristics or species look like and having a key, it turns out to be a lot more user-friendly while still being useful for people who are knowledgeable in the field.

Q: How did this project come to be?

I began working on similar projects in the 1990s, right as HTML came out, because I was interested in learning this new programming language. The LLU biology department had me set up a webpage for all of us and I got to thinking this could be useful as an interactive key to help students understand more about the organisms we're dealing with.

After I came to Walla Walla in 2001, it started out just as a helpful guide in the Rosario classroom for when students were talking about a species, I could pop it up on a screen. They were really basic pages with the classification of the species, a description, some pictures, some things we know about this species. I put it on a university web server and external people started hitting on this and it became really popular. As far as I know, today it's probably the most popular site for marine species on the entire west coast of North America.

So far there are a little over 450 different species on the site, so there's pretty well all the common things you're going to find. I also made this a potential project for students. If they find some new species that I haven't found, I make a page for it and have an incentive for them to get a little bit of extra credit.

Q: This has been a longstanding, ongoing project. Has it unearthed any surprises for you?

Several years ago, there were some divers working with Dr. Onthank studying an octopus in a bay near Rosario that you wouldn’t expect to find there. The octopuses are only out at night, so one night the divers saw a weird thing swimming through the water. They caught it and brought it back to me. It turned out to be a big ribbon worm, a Nemertean worm. I had gone through the key and thought I knew what it was, but I sent it off to the Smithsonian, and an expert there on Nemerteans, confirmed my identification. The species had been discovered back in 1905 or 1906 up in an Alaskan bay and had never been seen since. Those kinds of discoveries are fun to encounter.

Q: Are there any species that you know are native to the area that you haven’t found? A white whale, so to speak?

For sure! Tusk shells are one example. It looks like a small tusk and is called Dentalium. And I know they can be accessible but are hard to fine because some of the original Indian tribes along the coast used them for money, for trade. And if they found them without scuba diving, then they should be around. I have found a couple tusk shells from deep sea trawling, and I’ve seen a sample, but I’ve never found one alive myself.

I finally discovered why I wasn’t able to find them. Apparently, the Indians couldn’t find them either except in the sand of several beaches out on the west end of Vancouver Island. I haven’t been there, so that’s why.

Q: You mentioned it’s a very popular website. Beyond being used as a teaching aid, who else is using the site?

Field scientists, students, and marine biologists up and down the coasts use it. A few other scientists and regular citizens have been collaborators. They say, “Hey, I found this really cool organism. Do you want to have pictures of it for the site?” Most are from the United States, but I’ve had collaborators from Russia and other places in the world as well.

It’s also become quite popular among the regular people that are interested in beach combing. They’ll send me a picture or ask for help identifying something after seeing my site.

The Encyclopedia of Life is a big consortium including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and they’ve asked me to be one of their content providers. I’ve even had multiple textbook publishers reach out about using photos or illustrations from the site. So it’s become a really great resource.

Q: This project is specific to marine invertebrates found in and near the Salish Sea, which is also home to a satellite campus of WWU. What is unique about that area?

Rosario is really quite unique as a place where undergraduates get a chance to go out and learn in the field with courses that are strongly marine focused. If students are interested in pursuing marine biology, they’ll truly get a solid foundation for graduate work. Rosario is a great facility with seawater tanks, seawater tables right in the classroom. Students can do experiments, ask questions, and form their own research from beginning to end; that’s truly a unique experience that would be hard to get anywhere else.

For students with other goals—like going into medicine, as many biologists do—it’s a great way to learn how the rest of the world functions. If you spend a lot of time studying human anatomy, human physiology, knowing alternative ways that a variety of organisms accomplish a particular thing can be medically valuable. And of course, there’s parts of pure science that can be useful down the line too: problem solving, looking at things from different angles, following the scientific method.

I think it's also useful and exciting for students to understand more about all these weird organisms that they hadn’t thought about. Ninety-eight percent of the world of living organisms are not mammals and to come to understand those better is a value in itself. A lot of people do bird watching and things like that, which is similar to tide pooling or beach combing. It’s a way to release from the tensions of life and to go do something relaxing and cool.

Q: I know this is an unfair question, but are there any particular species on the site that you find fascinating?

Crustacea is a group that is really, really big. There are way more crustacean species than there are among all types of vertebrates; all birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish all put together. Crustaceans just blow them out of the water in terms of number of species. When I first started studying crustaceans with Dr. McCloskey at Rosario, I was intimidated. It seems there's a million different species and you just kind of say, ‘Whoa, how do you deal with these?’ But over time, you discover they're all very interesting creatures.

For example, there’s a cute little crab called the elbow crab. It's a little tiny crab with these tiny, backward pointing pincers. Most crabs use their pincers to grab things, but how do you catch anything with claws like that? Well, the elbow crab grabs things with their elbows, like a head lock.

There's lots of interesting things like that to discover and to document. And I think it glorifies God to see and point out His creativity. Although it's not a religious site—I don't talk about God directly—I think it's glorifying God to find those examples of infinite creativity.