How I came to be a bone ID specialist
The spring before the end of my third year of undergraduate study at UBC in 1975, it was time to apply for summer jobs. The previous few years, all I had done was restaurant work and I wondered if I could now find something a little more interesting or better paying – or both.
I had taken an archaeology class as an elective that spring and the professor mentioned that the B.C. Provincial Archaeologist’s department hired students to excavate archaeological sites every summer. I decided to apply. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to sit in a wet hole for months on end but thought it would probably pay better than cooking.
My room-mate at the time was also looking for a government job and the headquarters for all of them were in Victoria, which was a 90-minute ferry-ride away from Vancouver. We decided that if I hadn’t heard about my job application by the day of our last exam, we would head over to Victoria and inquire about the situation in person.
That Friday, at about 11 am, with our last exams over, we stopped at the apartment to pick up our stuff before heading for the ferry. And there in the mail was my rejection letter.
Uncharacteristically, I looked over at my friend and ripped the letter in half. “If we hadn’t stopped at home, I wouldn’t have seen this. Let’s go anyway.”
Once off the ferry, we headed immediately to the Provincial Archaeologist’s office downtown. By mid-afternoon, I was in Bjorn Simonsen’s office listening to him tell me they didn’t have a summer position for me.
But something in me refused to give up and I sort of fell into “sales” mode, something I’d developed as a 10-year-old trying to convince my father to buy me an expensive purebred dog. I chattered on to Bjorn how much I’d enjoyed the relevant courses I’d taken in archaeology, anthropology, geology, and geography – all electives to my zoology degree.
After half an hour or so, sounding a bit exasperated, he said, “Maybe Jim over at the Museum has something for you.” After a quick phone call, he sent me a few blocks away to the B.C. Provincial Museum (now the Royal B.C. Museum).
Up on the 13th floor, Jim Haggarty, head of the Archaeology Division, took a quick look at my resume and said, “We’ve been looking for someone with your qualifications for six months.”
He and his colleagues wanted to train someone to identify the animal bones recovered from recently-excavated archaeological sites and to help develop the necessary comparative collection of modern skeletons used to do the identifications. In 1975, this sort of thing was being done routinely in Europe but was still a rarity in North America.
It meant the zoology class I’d just taken on the Vertebrates of B.C. was especially relevant because I already knew the scientific names of all the animals and their life history traits. But the geology and archaeology courses I’d taken as electives were important too because it meant I understood why the context of the ancient bones was important and what these researchers were trying to do with them.
Jim sent me down to the first floor to talk to the woman who would be my immediate supervisor, Gay Boehm (now Frederick). Gay was in the middle of butchering a one-ton male Steller sea lion, step one in the process of turning it into a skeleton. She conducted this impromptu job interview with a large bloody knife in her hand, as if it hadn’t occurred to her to put it down.
If hired, the main part of my summer job would be doing exactly what she was doing: turning dead animals into skeletons.
I was sent back upstairs to talk to Jim, who informed me I was hired and could start Monday. Gay told me later that the fact that I never flinched during our discussion over the partially-disemboweled carcass — or gave any indication I was the least bit uncomfortable with a knife-wielding interviewer — convinced her I was the right person for the job.
Jubilant, my friend and I stayed at a campground outside of town and spent the next day looking for a place for me to stay. I quickly found a room available in a 3-bedroom house within walking distance to the museum with two similar-aged housemates. The next day, Vicki stayed on to look for work herself and I headed home to pack my bags for the summer and get back in time for my first day of work Monday morning.
That informal job interview was the first and last of my professional career. I was totally unprepared from start to finish. However, because the situation was so unexpected, I figured I had nothing to lose and forgot to be nervous. Just being myself turned out to be exactly the right thing to do.
I knew how to work without constant supervision, and was organized and methodical when it came time to process animal carcasses into skeletons and label all the bones. I had honed those basic time-management skills working in small commercial kitchens, so it turned out those summers spent cooking hadn’t been a waste of time.
And when I was given a chance to work on bones recovered from archaeological sites, it turned out that I had an affinity for distinguishing the different bones of one animal from another, even when they were broken.
It wasn’t a skill I knew I had, so it was a rather big surprise to find I could do it relatively easily. Some people simply can’t do it, so I guess I was lucky – or perhaps my interest in evolution and developmental biology simply made me pay closer attention to the details.
However, it meant that without any planning, I was set up for a career in a field that I never knew existed. Archaeozoology turned out to be the physical embodiment of the concept of evolution that had so captured my imagination as a child.
Why else could you use the skeleton of a black bear that had died in 1980 to identify the bones of a black bear that had died three or four thousand years ago, if not for the fact that species are immutable and the shape of their bones reflect their unique morphology and physiology?
The fall after completing my Bachelor’s degree in 1976, I was 22 years old and had a paid job at the museum as an archaeozoologist. My salary even in that first year was more than my father had earned in the 1960s and I was excited to go to work every day.
I was as astonished as my family and friends at what had happened.