This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

In today's bonus episode, there's more to explore at Boom Plus Cave in South Africa.

In our last episode, Field School Diaries, we took you on an immersive and emotional journey

through the field school experience. Today, we're digging deeper into the scientific research

they do at Boom Plus Cave, to learn what makes it such an important and interesting place

to learn about evolution, climate change, and human adaptability.

So Origin Stories producer Ray Pang interviewed Leaky Foundation grantee, Baldwin Fellow,

NYU professor, and field school director, Professor Justin Pargetter.

Here's Ray.

First off, thanks so much for recording like dozens of hours of field tape.

It's a real treat to have gotten such intimate recordings from you and your students. We haven't done that before at Origin Stories. So this is kind of a first for us as well.

You're welcome. Yeah,

it was quite a new experience and it took a lot of getting used to, but it, I think, allowed all of us to get a sense of where we were as a team. And there were a lot of conversations that followed

from those check-ins that gave us insight on who we are as people, who we are as scientists, who we are as a community.

So what, you know, what we hope that students get out of it is a view of archaeology as an international science, that it's not nationalistic, right? It's not about

what country you come from or what your background is. It's about your question and your approach.

And the idea is that they leave and they can go and start their own field sites. You brought up the

point that archaeology, at its best, it shouldn't be like a nationalistic

pursuit, but so many countries have used it as such.

Yeah.

You know, it's, we have a legacy in our field that has traditionally excluded communities from participating in science at the top levels.

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