Maegan Gindi

I am primarily an archaeologist. I also teach Cultural Anthropology, but that is something I do mainly because in the United States, archeology is considered a subfield of anthropology. I mainly work in the part of the world known as Mesoamerica, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, studying a group of people called the Zapotec. In addition to that, I’m also an archeological scientist, or what we call in the field, an archaeometrist, and that’s really what brings me to RIT... I saw the job and I said, “That’s what I want to do.”

Well, teaching archaeology is really a wonderful thing. In a sense, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: you don’t have to sell the subject to students. A lot of people come to archaeology classes with a real desire to learn, and as a professor, you can’t ask for a better situation… RIT students are very interested in applied learning, so I try to do a lot of that... I’ve got kits of artifacts, some of them as much as 5000 and 7000 years old, that students can do things with. In “Exploring Ancient Technology,” we have students doing things like making stone tools. They’ve really done some amazing pieces.

I’m in Mexico as much as three times a year. The longest single time I was ever there was five months. I come by [travel] naturally: I was actually born in Turkey because my father was in the American Navy, but I’m not actually Turkish. Although at some point, I had the right to Turkish citizenship because I was born in a Turkish hospital and my birth certificate is Turkish (which causes me no end of trouble)... After Turkey, my father had lots of tours of duty over the world, and I’ve lived in the United States, Korea, and Japan. Since becoming an archaeologist, I’ve worked in Israel, Turkey, China and the United States–just sort of all over the place.

Actually, there is one really interesting one: I was working on an excavation a number of years ago... As we were digging outside this wall, we found a pit. Inside, we found the skeletal remains of two eaglets., both of which had their heads cut off. I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting, they’ve been very carefully laid in this pit. They weren’t food rubbish.” Aside from missing the head, all the bones were there and in place. The Zapotec I was working with said, “I know what this is. This is a curing.” Then he went on to describe to me that when someone is really sick and the doctors don’t seem to be able to cure them, what they do is undergo a special ritual where whatever is afflicting them is magically transferred to a bird...They’d then kill the bird, bury it, and it would take the sickness away...I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting. Here we have an archaeological data point that’s over 1000 years old, and people are still doing it in modern times.”

As far as the wackiness, I think I was dropped on my head when I was a child. Actually, my father tells me that at least on one occasion I fell out of my high chair before my first year. And I continue to bang my head, so that might have something to do with it—the cumulative brain damage. I think part of the goofiness comes from having spent so much of my life outside of the United States. When I came to the US to go to college, I’d spent half my life outside of the US, so I had sort of a different socialization than a lot of people do here. Sometimes, I probably say things that are a little too edgy.... Like today, we were talking about sexuality in Cultural Anthropology and whether or not there’s a gay gene, so I posed the question: If there’s a gay gene, is there a gene for bondage? Or masochism? Or nurse’s uniforms? That’s a ridiculous thing to say, of course, but it sort of drives home the point.