Jessica Thompson
To start with, where do you do most of your fieldwork and what kind of research do you do?
I’m a human origins researcher. I work on understanding the biological and cultural emergence of modern humans. I do fieldwork in various places in Africa and lead fieldwork in Malawi. We have a number of archeological sites in a particular area where we’ve been working for seven years. Prior to that, I worked on a project in a different part of Malawi for another six or seven years. It’s been a big effort and I’ve had a lot of students come through those sites—more than 150 students over the years.
I’m curious about your first field experience. What were your research interests at the time and what was the fieldwork like for you?
I was a sophomore in college. I really ran into it by accident. I was taking anthropology classes and somebody said to me: “Oh, you’ve got to do this summer field school!” So I signed up for it.
There were two concurrent courses in the field school. In one of them, you went out and did the digging and the sieving and all the things people imagine archeologists doing. The other course was technically at the same site, but you were mostly working with items that had already been found and you didn’t really leave what we would call the dig house or the research house. I happened to be in the field. I actually think I may have signed up for the wrong course code, because I thought I was going to study something else entirely, but when I got there, I found it unbelievably absorbing.
What did you love about it?
Every day, when I go into the field, I get this feeling of: “Today’s going to be the day! We’re going to find something cool!” That’s what hooked me. I must have spent thousands of days in the field by now and I still wake up every day with that feeling.
I also love the sense of freedom, that sense of being somewhere that’s still your life, but it's not your normal life. You get to live in two different worlds. And you get to meet so many different people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in. That’s a really fun experience.
Have you had any negative experiences in the field?
Something I should say, probably to my own embarrassment, is that I was not a very mature student on that first trip. There was a drinking culture in archeology at the time and I thought it was marvelous: Partying all night and waking up in the morning with a hangover, then going into the field and digging a hole. I was lucky because the people in that particular group were nice people. We weren’t all making the best decisions, but no one was exploitative or mean.
I think that’s where a lot of early negative experiences happen. There will always be people who haven’t had a lot of exposure to the wider world. They’re in a new environment, living and working with people who are interested in the same things, and it feels like a great friend group. But they’re far away and isolated from their support systems, so if anything goes wrong, it’s almost impossible to report it or even discuss it with somebody, because that would ruin the entire social dynamic. So they sit with it.
I’m saying that from experience because I had many experiences in the field and not all of them were positive. You have to be lucky when it comes to the people and power dynamics around you. I think many young women don’t necessarily understand that before they go out into the field. And how could they?
Now that you’re leading field trips yourself, how do you create a positive group dynamic?
It can be hard to find a good balance. You might be the leader of the trip, but you aren’t the parent and you don’t want to micromanage all the young adults who are on the trip. And they don’t want to be micromanaged, either!
One thing I do is articulate in writing, in advance, that we’re trying to promote a safe, inclusive environment. There’s a community compact everyone has to sign. It says things like: “I will look after project equipment.” But there’s also a long paragraph at the bottom that basically says: “You will be working in a diverse group of people from a number of different nationalities, ethnicities, language groups, gender identities, and so on. By signing this document, you’re committing to being part of an inclusive working environment and making everyone feel comfortable.”
I let everyone know which people they can talk to if they feel uncomfortable. I try to list at least two people of different genders. And I include the email address of the Title IX office at Yale in the community compact. I tell people they can email the Title IX office anytime and nobody else needs to know about it.
What do you do if someone approaches you and expresses that they’re uncomfortable?
If someone comes to me with a concern, I ask them how they would like me to handle the situation rather than saying: “Here’s what I’m going to do about it.” Sometimes they feel uncertain about their options. In that case, I suggest some options for what I could do and let them choose. I’m trying to put agency in their hands as much as possible.
What are some other major challenges you’ve faced as a field scientist?
Making sure my team is safe is hard. These days, it’s really likely that someone in the group will end up catching malaria. That didn’t used to be happen, but recently, we’ve been staying in a slightly different place where there are more mosquitoes. Local people have also noticed that the climate is getting warmer in that area, which means more mosquitoes and more malaria. So I’ve had to revise my safety plan. I’m constantly having to revise the plan even for things I thought I’d figured out.
You’ve previously written about combining your role as a parent with your role as a field scientist and leader. How have you reconciled those different roles?
There’s no perfect solution to that issue, so I’ll start by saying what has worked for me won’t necessarily work for somebody else.
I’ve been lucky enough to be supported by family. Without that, I would never have been able to pursue a field career and be a parent. My oldest son was three when I first brought him with me to the field, but he had been looked after by his grandparents the previous two field seasons. I was a single parent at the time.
It’s horrible to be a new parent and leave for a long time. It causes a lot of worry. Will your child remember you when you come back? Will they understand why you’re not there? Will they feel abandoned? You don’t have the answers to any of those questions. You just have to decide how much you can tolerate and how much you think your child can tolerate.
Now, I have a wonderful husband and we have more children. We’ve had to do a crazy dance every year. This last field season, I was gone for around ten weeks over the summer. I had my fifteen-year-old son with me, which was a really wonderful bonding experience—for me, anyway. I loved having him there. But it meant my husband had the younger kids on his own and that was hard on him.
What do you think needs to change in STEM, and in archeology in particular, to make it more accessible to parents, women, and marginalized communities?
Whenever you have a particular group of people that already has to work harder to do the same thing everyone else is doing, whether it’s because of a disability or a gender dynamic or something else, asking them to do a little bit more is actually a bigger deal than it might seem on the surface. And when it comes to fieldwork, the planning and organizing process is incredibly time-consuming. It takes a lot of extra work.
I think women in general are already having to do more than people who don’t identify as women in their everyday lives. There’s an expectation for women to spend more time on their appearance and their families. All those little things add up. Each one of them individually is so small that it’s hard to point to them and convince people that they’re having a big impact on your life—but they all take up time and drain your energy. I feel like that might discourage women from doing fieldwork-heavy research programs, especially in their early careers.
Part of the problem, I think, is that universities are not well set up to support field scientists. Most people in administrative positions don’t have direct field experience, so it’s hard for them to know how much time and energy goes into planning fieldwork. I’m currently trying to figure out how I can advocate for more administrative support as a practical solution. Taking away some of the administrative work could level the playing field.
What general advice would you give people, especially girls and women, who are interested in getting into field science?
Find yourself a mentor! Don’t be afraid to talk to somebody who does fieldwork and whom you identify with in some way. Developing a relationship with someone who has that kind of experience can be helpful, whether something has happened in the field or you’re about to depart and need advice about what to expect—those are things that you can’t necessarily find on the internet or in a book. A real person’s experience can be so valuable.
I have a feeling there are a lot more potential mentors out there than young women might imagine. If they’re in college, they can try to develop a rapport with somebody on the faculty who does fieldwork. A mentor can also be an older student. The main thing is not to feel like you’re navigating everything on your own, especially in a field that might feel unfriendly from time to time.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Images used with permission of Jessica Thompson.
