A Recap of Weekend Talk feat. Dr Karen Bellinger

Welcome to a captivating world where anthropology meets the airwaves and television screens!

In issue 7 of our monthly newsletter, we have the immense pleasure of introducing you to an extraordinary guest who effortlessly dons the hat of a distinguished PhD in anthropology, a charismatic podcast host, and a captivating presence on television.

It's our absolute pleasure to welcome our esteemed guest Dr Karen Bellinger, who is an anthropologist and historical archaeologist. She works as a popular media communicator and educator across TV, podcasts, and various interactive platforms. Trained as a field archaeologist, ethnographer, and archival historian, Karen has investigated sites in Europe, Africa, and North and South America, exploring human behavior from prehistory through the modern day. She appears on multiple factual television series in the Discovery/Science network (What on Earth, Forbidden History, Secrets in the Ice, Ancient Unexplained Files) and the Smithsonian Channel (Secrets), and is host and co-producer of the Working Over Time History and Culture podcast. She even writes middle grade historical fiction. Karen earned an undergraduate degree in English Literature from Yale University and an M.A. and Ph.D in Anthropology from New York University. She has held teaching and research posts at New York University, the College of William & Mary, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Queen Mary University of London.

Get ready to be inspired, enlightened, and mesmerized by her profound insights into humanity's past, present, and future. Together, let's embark on this extraordinary adventure that will forever change the way we perceive the world around us.

SCHG: A very warm welcome to you, Karen, and thank you for being here. Our readers would love to learn more about you. Please share a few things about yourself!

Karen: Thank you for having me! I'm Karen, and I have a PhD in anthropology with a specialty in historical archaeology. This means that I work both with material culture and, when available, with archival materials relevant to the site that I’m working on. My formal academic training is in economy, craft production, and industry in Early Modern Europe and their expansion in the Atlantic world, in various colonial ventures. But I've expanded beyond that in recent years when moving out of the academic realm to do more popular media work. I'll talk more about this later.

I had a career that spanned traditional academic archaeology in the classroom and in the field. I've worked in museums, largely in public outreach roles, and most recently in popular media, such as factual television, and I also host a podcast. My field work has centred largely in living history museums in the United States,for instance, Plimoth plantation, which interprets the year 1627 in the colonial village. I am pleased to say that because of the involvement of anthropologists like myself, research is shifting its focus to include much more of the native American story as well. That site was known as Patuxent to native Americans, and so there's some sort of change in the name ongoing but most people will recognize the name Plimoth plantation. In Virginia, there is a similar living history museum called Colonial Williamsburg, which traditionally focused on the 18th-century white male, elite leaders, driving around town in carriages. I'm really glad to say that in recent years it has incorporated the voices of enslaved African-American people and natives, which has been shockingly slow to come about. So, those are all really positive aspects of a new kind of thinking and awareness about public history, public archaeology, and bringing in previously suppressed voices. Also, including the visiting public and the general public in sharing this understanding of history. That's very much what drives all of my work, and it's what's made me shift almost exclusively into the popular media realm these days.

I loved to teach and be in the classroom, but to me academic writing isn't the most stimulating thing to create or to read, if I'm honest. I've really enjoyed the opportunity to be a consultant, researcher, writer, and presenter for factual TV programs for the Smithsonian, Science/Discovery, the History Channel, and the BBC. I started a podcast, and I even made a game for kids, an archaeology-based game, and that's where I see the future of doing archaeology, in a way that'll make a real impact on broader audiences. 

SCHG: Thank you for telling us about your fascinating career path. As a follow-up question, how is discussing archaeology on TV different from talking about it on a podcast? What are the main differences?

Karen: The main difference I feel is that if you don't make it brief on TV, it'll get made brief in the cutting room, and you will end up being made to say things you never intended to say. Whereas you have this freedom on podcasts to discuss archaeology in a detailed and in-depth way.

SCHG: If you could choose to do one for the rest of your life then would you rather be on TV or would you just do a podcast?

Karen: I think I'll say the podcast because I'm in control, and I could talk to as many wonderful people as I like. I have had absolutely the best time in the past year and a half that I've been recording this podcast. I not only host but also research, write, and help to edit and produce it with my production partners. I've grown so much in doing it, as a person and as a thinker. TV is fun but you really don't have the editorial control over the final story. And also it is all unscripted so you have to be very savvy. I would say you have some degree of control but it's amazing how they can turn a story of a 15th-century slave trade outpost into one entirely about cannibals.

SCHG: As an anthropologist, could you elaborate on how anthropology differs from archaeology in the USA in comparison to the rest of the world?

Karen: In the USA, anthropology is typically taught in four separate sub-disciplines or fields. There is cultural anthropology or ethnography,  which is participating in observations of another culture or a subculture. Then, linguistics, which is language-based anthropology. Moreover, there is biological anthropology, which has to do with human evolution, genetic, and DNA studies. These days it has a little crossover with archaeology because they'll often study fossils and other human remains in biological anthropology. So, my own subfield of archaeology is the study of  human culture through the material remains left behind.

SCHG: Amazing, now let's start with some general questions: how do you think the pandemic has changed academia and archaeology?

Karen: I am an archaeologist who tends to revel in the opportunity to work with existing collections and to reexamine things that have already been looked at as orphan collections, which has kind of become a specialty of mine. On the flip side, if I can put a silver lining to this, I mean to the experience of students who are coming out of grad school, the situation must be really tough. I think individuals in education from kindergarten up to adults, who've been in school for longer than most people ever dream of, have lost a lot through this pandemic. Whereas, on the other hand, I think those who could have found some really interesting ways to use technology have benefited greatly. A lot of cultural institutions, museums, academic institutions, and archival institutions have for the first time made huge volumes  of digitized material available and provided, in some cases, full-on online courses. In fact, this organization, the Save Cultural Heritage Group, is doing a great job with that as well. So, I think the pandemic has made us pretty flexible and responsive in some ways.

SCHG: How do you think the pandemic has affected you, particularly with regards to working from home?

Karen: I started my podcast in lockdown, so I saw the lockdown as an opportunity to stop putting off this big new venture. Obviously, I wasn't sure how well it would work. For example, Zoom was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. My production partners had actually approached me prior to the COVID lockdown. They wanted to do a TV pilot with me on a kind of a crossover between Dirty Jobs and the Mythbusters show. The idea of the podcast was attached to this, in order to have more in-depth conversations offscreen, and, quite frankly, I was more excited about  that part, anyway. As it was assumed that we were not going to be making a TV show anytime soon, we decided to launch with the podcast. We have recorded 50+ episodes with people from every continent and time zone. Sometimes, technology doesn't cooperate but it's still a great experience. Fortunately, there was a boom in interest in participating in podcasts  during the lockdown period, as potential guests suddenly had more time on their hands than usual.

SCHG: What was challenging yet satisfying when starting the podcast during the pandemic?

Karen: It is difficult to think of a challenging aspect because technology made it possible despite the pandemic. I think that the mandate to do it remotely actually gave me more of a blue-sky approach to it. I could approach any potential guest. My podcast is always a conversation between myself and an invited guest, an expert in a specific area. I never needed to worry about geography or time zone. That's a freedom that I wouldn't have felt if I was recording in person in a studio.

SCHG: What advice would you give to someone wanting to start a podcast?

Karen: I would like to say that what really matters is to have a very clear and specific topic or area to begin with. For me, my topic is history, archaeology and the sciences, which is really broad. Our strategy is looking at society through the lens of work over time and across cultures. It is historical and anthropological, and often has to do with science and technology. But it has a really narrow focus. I think otherwise it's pretty hard to come up with a coherent narrative line, which is needed to attract a listening audience and keep them coming back. People need to know what kind of content  they can expect on your podcast. And you need to keep them interested. So, I think it comes down to storytelling at the end of the day.

SCHG: Our readers would also like to know how you deal with so many things without ever being exhausted!

Karen: Do what you love! You don't feel it as something burdening if you love it. I do think that if you're fortunate enough to be able to choose the subject area and hopefully a career that you are passionate about, you'll always find time for it.

SCHG: How should one go about pursuing a higher education after graduation?

Karen: This is related to making the change that you want to see in the world. Do your research, read, and then reach out to people and experts. According to my experience, most people that I've contacted at any stage of my undergraduate and postgraduate studies were delighted to hear from somebody who knew about and admired their work. I would also mention  my own experience of making connections throughout my own department and more broadly in the university. I was in anthropology but history is also very relevant to historic-period archaeology. So, I made sure I knew the faculty members in the history department. In fact, one served on my dissertation committee. If there are people who specialize in what you hope to study and they're not at your institution, then you may need to seek out the top advisors elsewhere. For example, I was at New York University, which for a number of reasons was the perfect place for me to get my anthropology degree, but where historical archaeology wasn't really a specialty. So, I did all of my work on historical archaeology through contacts I made at the college of William and Mary, in Virginia. That's what got me to the Williamsburg Foundation and a role in their archaeological department. And this is how I landed my first job, and so on. It's really important to think broadly. Luckily, the internet makes it easier to find people and to reach out to them, in a way you never could before.

Join us for an exciting journey on our edutainment show ‘Weekend Talk’! Watch the full interview and relive the memories of the launch ceremony 🎉🎬

It has been an absolute pleasure to have shared this wonderful interview with you. Our guest has provided many valuable insights and left us inspired by her journey. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Dr Karen Bellinger as well as our readers for joining us on this adventure. Fear not, for this is just the beginning! There are countless more awe-inspiring interviews and captivating stories waiting to be shared.

Stay tuned and brace yourselves for the remarkable tales that lie ahead!

This article is a compilation of an interview that was conducted as part of the launch ceremony for our media project the “Weekend Talk” - an edutainment show. The interview was first published on our YouTube channel on November 14, 2021. We would like to acknowledge and thank all of our guests and volunteers who were involved in the production process of the show and the compilation of this article.