Katie Turner

Interview and Transcription by Laura Crawford, NAPA Vice-President

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Laura: Tell me about how you got into archaeology.

Katie: Sounds really kind of cliche, but my dad is a huge Indiana Jones fan. So I grew up watching Indiana Jones. And oddly enough, at the age of nine, I decided I was gonna do archaeology with only Indiana Jones as the preface for what that really entailed. And then as I got older, I just didn’t really deviate. I considered a few other things like an FBI agent, because, you know, that makes sense. That’s a logical leap. Decided it was not safe enough. And so that just ultimately went back to archaeology and I’ve stuck with it ever since. It just got more fascinating, the more I got into it, and was like, you know, this is cool. Then here we are, X amount of years later.

Well, people were like, we don’t make any money. I’m like, well, no one goes into archaeology because they want to make money. We’re not chemical engineers, for heaven’s sake. You know? This isn’t one of those fields. We’re not lawyers. But yeah. I very rarely ever thought that I would be happy sitting in a hole in the ground, digging in the dirt. It’s an excuse to be in touch with your inner child to just play in the dirt and get dirty and stare at stuff and occasionally lick things.

But we were out with Diane [Laffin]. She was like, is this a bone? I was like, well, I’m not going to lick it, but I licked my finger and said, I was thinking, yeah, that’s bone all right. She was like, “thanks for not actually licking it.” I don’t lick bones anymore. I’ve gotten older and smarter. I don’t lick things anymore.

Laura: Is field work your favorite part about archaeology?

Katie: I think it’s the puzzle, building together what happened. And what we can tell based off of the archaeological record as to what actually happened, who moved, where. My area of interest, sadly, because it doesn’t apply here, is 18th century warfare. And so taking the archaeology of who moved, where, which troops did what, you can recreate the entire battle just by what is left in the ground, where the encampments were, were people sick, what were they eating? Just paint a whole snapshot of life during a not so great time, and, you know, a country’s existence because you’re at war. But it’s really fascinating to me.

Laura: Do you have a favorite battle?

Katie: Well, it depends on what war we’re talking about. My favorite battle for the Revolutionary War has gotta be the 1st Battle of Ticonderoga. Just the troop movements are fascinating the way they decided to position their troops. And for the Civil War, even though it’s kind of – my mom says it’s gross – I really like the Battle of Antietam, ’cause it happens on my birthday. Just, you know, several hundred years prior. So very, very bloody, but Gettysburg is also fascinating. Three days, multiple fields, how that shaped that town is just phenomenal.

Laura: I’d love to go to Gettysburg.

Katie: It’s cool. It’s amazing. They have a bluegrass festival every year and they have a really good authentic Irish pub that sells phenomenal fish and chips. At least they did in 2009 when I was there last. So. Or 2019, not 2009. But yeah.

Laura: But that’s not your day to day. What does your day to day look like?

Katie: At NDOT, mainly reviewing projects for their potential to affect cultural resources, whether it be archaeology, bridges, buildings, TCPs, things like that. Deciding if it needs survey, number one. Then coordinating with the good folks at Highway Archeology, if it needs survey to plan what those surveys entail. And review a lot of reports that come in, not only from Highway Archeology, but other consultants, Rob [Bozell]. Or just planning big survey work. Trent Carney and I are working on the testing that we need to do for Mead, the trenching, and trying to get that testing plan approved and get property owner permissions. Planning the removal of the Red Cloud South Bridge, which will be done by a private consultant, and what is that archaeology even going to look like? Mainly you’re thinking about how do we bring everyone together for a common goal? And then how can we avoid the effect on the historic property if there is such or the archaeology site, whether it be historic or not? They still have to get a project delivered.

Laura: It sounds like a lot of what you deal with is that relationship aspect.

Katie: We do a lot of that.

Laura: Tell me more about that, ’cause that’s been on my mind.

Katie: On any given project that requires right of way, the number goes down drastically, if there’s no right away. If we have right of way, we automatically are consulting with 9 to 10 tribes. Depending upon where you are in this state. We have six residential tribes. And per our Section 106 PA from 2023, we talk to 18 tribes, most of which are non-residential. A lot of these tribes are not familiar with Nebraska. They’ve been so far removed that they have lost their connection. They’re unfamiliar with NDOTs programs, so walking them through, what is this project proposing to do? What is the potential effect to a historic property? Should they be present? And just fostering that relationship, so that if we do come up with an issue, we can call them, and we know that they’re not gonna doubt us, they’re not gonna question, they’re not gonna be openly hostile, although we do have that, regrettably, with some tribes, but, you know, we can call Matt Reed with the Pawnee Nation, and we have a good working relationship with him. Randy Teboe with the Iowa Kansas Nebraska. We had that great relationship with them both, so that we can call and know, we have a partner here. We’ve got that good relationship established, but we also consult with counties, cities, historical societies, local property owners who’ve never heard of Section 106, which, in a way, is my favorite, because then I get to kind of geek out about why I have a job and what we’re doing, even though their eyes glaze over. We do a lot of talking. It makes me think of Tom King’s book: “consultation, consultation, consultation, consultation, consultation,” and that really is the bread and butter of what we’re doing. You bring everyone to the table early, decide who needs to or who wants to be involved, and, if they don’t, okay. And then you just move forward. Some projects, you feel like you do nothing but consults, and others, you don’t, and that’s fine.

Laura: How do you communicate the importance of cultural resources to non- archaeologists?

Katie: I basically equate it to… I use the example – and I’m blanking on the name of the train station at the time. Grand Central Station had a sister station in New York. And it was way better, way cooler than Grand Central Station. And it was torn down in the late 1950s to build a freeway. And so people were like, we lost this amazing piece of architecture because we needed to build a freeway. Or I have seen sites in West Virginia that are associated with the Monongahela. They’re a distant relative of Hopewell. Whole villages have been destroyed by the mining industry. And when you start to tell about their lives – these are actual people. This is something they did. This is where they lived. It kind of brings it home for a lot of people, I feel like, and then you show them the detriment that you’re having by putting that freeway through without doing any surveys or putting in that mine. I’ve literally seen mining companies demolish a cemetery once. That was a nasty find, lots of paperwork. Just trying to find that connection.

I had one guy who told me that he was excited he had archaeology in his yard, because they carved Bigfoot into rocks in his yard, and I was like, well, that’s really probably not true, but, um, that’s a piece of weather worn limestone. But he thought it was really cool that somebody would have taken the time. He did have an actual site on his property. Just not the kind that were carving limestone into Bigfoot.

But just trying to make that connection to show that the farmstead of your grandparents could now be archaeology. And while that’s a personal connection for them, then you can bring it home, that we are telling the same story of somebody who can no longer tell it themselves, or who doesn’t have the means to tell it for themselves. And generally, that tends to work, and sometimes they don’t care.

Laura: It can’t be helped.

Katie: Exactly. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Laura: You talked about conflicts? There are conflicts between development goals and preservation, conflicts based on how people interpret what you should do with the resource. Tell me more about that.

Katie: So we have a project going on right now up in NDOT’s District 3. I forget what county it is because – thankfully it’s not mine. The project calls to build a roundabout. Traffic studies have indicated a roundabout is required. People tend to get upset about roundabouts. I don’t really get it, but there you go. So they’re against the project from the beginning because roundabouts, but they’re also against it because we need to buy land to put this roundabout in. So the general public already has this sharp resistance to the project. Why do we need this? Is this something the state’s hoisting on us? Couldn’t you move it over here and take it from the Native Americans instead of us?

We can’t help with the engineering aspect. We can work together. But how can we come together for the betterment of everyone? You don’t always win. I have a project going on right now in the town of Tecumseh where we’ve learned a few new things recently about properties that we didn’t know before that are posing big challenges, and some of the property owners are kind of irritated about it, you know, whether they’re gonna have to foot the bill. But at the end of the day we still need to deliver a project to the community, whether they want it or not, or need it. I think we’re gonna be able to come together and get the project ultimately delivered. That’s one of the trickier conflicts, I would say.

Laura: Putting puzzles together is easy enough, because things are linear, right? There are ways things fit together. You get to humans, things get non-linear really fast. It must take up a lot of your time.

Katie: It can. Yeah, the Tecumseh Project, for example, we hit over 20 consulting parties just for property owners. We had two organizations that are active in town that we consulted with – the city and Johnson County – because they all owned property on the project. And we grappled for about a month about how to even do consultation with this number of people. The construction activities by property vary depending upon what property you own. And ultimately, we decided to build a web page to handle the consultation rather than sending out 20-some individual letters, one of which would have been about 18 pages long. It was just easier. It took a long time to build, but it avoided a lot of unnecessary confusion and potential conflict because people could easily see what we’re doing where – your neighbors could see it. You’re not the only one that’s going to have this type of work done. So then you don’t feel like you’re being singled out. It could have gone badly but it worked out okay in the end. And unfortunately, not every project’s that way. But, you know, neither is archaeology.

Laura: How long have you been doing this for?

Katie: I started doing pipelines on and off in 2013 in grad school, got hired full time on my first pipeline gig in 2014. Worked for West Virginia SHPO from 2015 to 2017 and moved back to NDOT in 2017, and I’ve been here ever since. So, for a while. Surprising to me that I am now that old, that I have been doing this that long.

Laura: Now you have be the expert.

Katie: Yeah, I guess I’m the adult in the room. When you talk to some of the younger people, you’re like, I mean, you could do that. I don’t know why you would, but that’s an idea.

Or you think to yourself, was I really that green at one point in time? Did I really not know that? Things that are just second knowledge now that I’m sure you kind of scratch your head about.

Laura: If you could change one thing about how we do archaeology in Nebraska, what would it be?

Katie: From a Nebraskan standpoint, regarding archaeology – we don’t do any more big excavations – like the glory days studies. We’re not doing these big scale interpretations of landscapes. We’re not doing a lot of that. And a lot of it is time and money. Everyone has their own priorities. Governor Pillen’s trying to cut expenditures, can’t fault him, but at the same time, yeah. For example, one of the things that our office encounters a lot is canals, the irrigation canals. They’re all over the place. We don’t have a systematic way of dealing with them. So every time we hit a canal on a project, it has to be evaluated individually. It’s a lot of research for staff. It’s research on our end, some of which we have, some of which we don’t. Sometimes you spend an hour calling around, trying to figure out who even owns the canal, because it’s not clear. And I would really love to just write a good history on the irrigation and get a good context statement for the irrigation in Nebraska. And then what does that eligible canal look like? What’s its significance? What pieces of integrity does a significant canal need to have?

We have one, the Bureau of Reclamation considers one irrigation district in the western part of the state as eligible. It’s the first irrigation district in the country built under the Pick-Sloan plan. It’s also the largest irrigation district in the state, which makes that super fun every time you hit one of the 12k canals and five reservoirs. We don’t have a systematic way of dealing with it. We don’t have a programmatic to make it easier. What do you do? If you’re just gonna pave over the road, you’re not really affecting it. But we do occasionally build things like concrete box bridges in a canal, and that’s an effect.

It’s just great to have more of research projects that serve as a context statement for other specialists, but also helps move projects along. And furthers our knowledge of sites as a whole in the state. Or, you know, having more archaeology at Fort Rob, you know, what you guys are hoping to do. There’s some things we don’t know about Fort Rob. There’s some things we don’t know about other sites in the state, but there’s one site…I forget the name of it now…that’s out by McCook. I always think it’d be really fascinating to excavate that. But at the same time, the amount of paperwork that’s gonna cost. Kind of makes me go, ehh maybe not. It’s kind of like some material removals. It causes a lot of paperwork.

Having done my internship in grad school with Pennsylvania, they do a heck of a lot of archaeological research. They excavate Fort Hunter every year trying to find different pieces of it that have never been found and things like that. And we, as a state, just don’t have that. And I also think that it would be really cool if we had a better means to sponsor and mentor up-and-coming archaeologists in school, whether they’re from Nebraska or Kansas, Missouri, whatever, having a program that helps them. The program I went through in Pennsylvania is fantastic. It’s almost kind of like a HAP situation, but it’s graduate students, and they’re learning to do the field work, write the reports, process the artifacts, you do the whole thing, and that’s experience that you don’t usually get exposure to all the time. You usually spend years building to that point. I was just thrown into it.

That’s two things, but I think that that’s one way or two ways archaeologists in Nebraska could be doing. More research, but again, funding, and time. And just mentorship, you know?

Laura: How do you see archaeology in Nebraska evolving in the next 10 or 20 years?

Katie: You know, and I haven’t talked about it with my supervisors, and they would probably snicker and go, yeah, right, the funding alone for that. How do you figure that? But I would love to create a mentorship program like I did when I was an intern at PennDot in grad school. We just did highway projects. That’s all we were doing. One time that we got sent to Washington’s Crossing, but most of it was bridge replacements, road realignments, they were putting in a roundabout, 3R projects, as we call them, the resurfacing restoration, and whatever the other R is I can’t recall.

It’s invaluable. You can’t expect archaeology to move forward in Nebraska if the next generation doesn’t have adequate training to do the job. And they’re not gonna get that unless someone takes the time to actually mentor them, which is why I’m so glad that we’re able to have Stacia [Burda]. We can go, this is probably what your professor meant, or instead of looking at it like this, why don’t you look at it like that, or have you considered this? You know, have you thought about the fact that there might be buried soils there? You know, that sort of thing, that they don’t think about because they don’t have to. Compliance archaeology is its own beast versus, you know, academic. And they’re learning academic archaeology, which most of your jobs are not gonna be doing. And it’s not the same.

Makes you question your life’s decisions pretty quick sometimes. Standing in mosquito infested hell covered poison ivy going, what am I doing with my life?

Laura: Oh, I’ve had plenty of moments like that.

Katie: Like, where your crew chief goes, “we can totally survey this field before it pours”. No, you can’t. You get back to your hotel room and pour water out of your boot. Nothing quite prepares you for that decision. And you just go, well, tomorrow’s another day, and hopefully it doesn’t suck that bad, and just keep going.

Laura: Have you ever been on a real hardship tour where every day was a slog?

Katie: Yeah. I worked the southern half of the DAPL Pipeline, so not the part that got lawsuits against it. That was hands down the most confusing, irritating pipeline I’ve ever worked on. None of it made sense. Everything just sucked. It was really, really hot that year. I was right out of my undergraduate classes, so I had a vague understanding of what the heck it was we were doing. And I remember at the end of that, I almost gave up. I was like, you know, to hell with it, maybe I don’t want to do this. And then I got on the Phase III data recovery in northern Illinois. That was fascinating. And I was like, you know what, I really do love this. So, yeah, we all have those projects that just suck and you think, why am I doing this?

Laura: Archaeology is like a toxic relationship. It’s like you love your boyfriend so much, but he’s not very nice.

Katie: Yeah. A project in Kentucky comes to mind with that. It was wild raspberries and what is that plant that causes those photosynthesis blisters? Is it wild parsnips, maybe? I can’t think of what it is now. It’s native in parts of Kentucky. So you couldn’t walk really anywhere, your hands and arms were all scratched to hell. You’re trying not to touch the plant that’ll give you photosynthesis blisters.

We found a hole that somebody else had dug previously. It was full of baby doll heads. Just heads. And we were like, hey, we’re not about that. We wrote that off as bad juju and left. Kentucky’s a special place. But that project equally sucked, but I think it was just because it was in Kentucky. So, nothing against Kentucky, but that project was not great.

Laura: Are you from Nebraska?

Katie: I am, yep. Born and raised in. Born in Hastings, raised in Juniata.

My master’s program was at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know how they like to name their towns after other states. It’s like a running gimmick with Pennsylvania. Did pipelines for a while after college and then wound up in West Virginia for two years, and then when we were tired of all the craziness that is West Virginia, the position at NDOT opened up when I was like, sold. And we moved home. So my husband’s from Superior. We finally came home after six years of meandering out east and moved back to where things make slightly more sense than staring as your neighbors going, you think that’s an east coast thing or are they just crazy? It’s legit.

Laura: Yeah, when you go elsewhere, and then you come back – like, oh, this makes sense to me here.

Katie: Yes, exactly. And the fact that the people from Pennsylvania are so standoffish, it’s crazy. They’re very aloof. We had a next-door neighbor when we moved here, and my husband and I were like, oh, he’s really not very nice. And then his wife was like, well, he’s from State College, Pennsylvania. like, it’s just because you’re a Pennsylvanian. That makes a lot of sense. Like, it’s nothing personal. You’re just from Pennsylvania. So, it’s like New York almost. Come on, bless your heart. Your football team and all of that in Pennsylvania.

Laura: In your wildest dreams, what would your career trajectory be like? What do you want to do long term?

Katie: Right now I’m really content to stay with DOT. If that’s the rest of my career, I’m okay with that. Once upon a time, I had grand dreams of being a park archaeologist at Ticonderoga or Stanwix. And then after talking to a theme park archaeologist, I was like, you know what? This sounds terrible. I don’t know that I want to do that. Now I’m glad I didn’t, because the federal government is the federal government. So, if I can stay at DOT and help the archaeology for my home state of Nebraska, then I don’t care. That’s a career well spent.

Laura: I love that.

Katie: I told my boss during my interview, I said, the people of Nebraska deserve good roads, but the good roads shouldn’t come at the cost of cultural resources. And he was like, that’s fantastic – I’m going to use that in meeting. I just punted that. But sure, dude. But it’s true. Everyone needs good roads, but not at the cost of your history. That’s just anarchy. It’s like people who dog-ear their books. It’s just anarchy. Writing in them is one thing, dog earring them. That’s what bookmarks are for.
We cannot dog-ear a page. I cannot do it. Even a Post It note for God’s sakes.

Laura: That’s extreme, Katie. I’m gonna put my foot down on that one.

Katie: I’ve got a few crazy ideas. Mm hmm.

Laura: Just… spitball. What’s on your mind? What’s important to you, in terms of archaeology?

Katie: One thing that comes to mind – because my husband literally asked me this over the weekend – the coolest thing that I – in my personal opinion – that I have ever found…and I feel like archaeologists get asked this question a lot…was oddly the first indoor toilet to ever be installed, and I forget the name of the county now. It’s out by Valparaiso, Indiana. It was the first indoor toilet installed in the entire county, and this wealthy – I don’t know if he was the governor or what – a wealthy person. And when we were excavating his house, for a road realignment, we found the entire toilet just sitting pristine in the ground. Still connected to plumbing. I mean, obviously not functioning. But it was just sitting in the ground. And I was like, what are the chances with hundreds of years worth of plowing? If this thing is still intact? And tragically, my boss said, that’s really cool, take this sledgehammer and bust that out of that hole because we need to see what’s under it. And we couldn’t lift it up because it was enormous. But it was pretty cool. Then I had to smash it with a hammer. Somewhere I have a picture of it.

Laura: I think that indoor plumbing is the greatest invention our species has ever devised.

Katie: That and air conditioning.

Laura: That’s up there with the internet and plumbing. And the internet.

Katie: Indoor plumbing! How many lives that’s saved? There’s no longer cholera outbreaks or dysentery. Your chances of contracting some god-awful disease went way down, just because of your plumbing. You could bathe, you could get rid of nasties. You were just throwing it in the street on some poor schlub walking down the road. I mean, it’s crazy. The amount of trash that we find in our own backyard, too. I mean, I think garbage collection is a whole, too. Also brilliant. And also saved a lot of issues. Only if they had had that during the plague. We could have learned a lot.

Laura: Makes me think about, garbology – which I think is really interesting. Because, you can talk to somebody and they’ll tell you about their lives. But then if you dig through their garbage, it’s like…

Katie: It’s a whole other, yeah.

There’s a site in Pennsylvania called Ephrita Cloister. And it was a religious experiment. This is the best way that I can think to explain it. They believe that they had to be celibate. You had to be awake every morning from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. because that’s when Christ was supposed to come, and if he didn’t come that day, you could go back to bed for a few hours. But since they were celibate, they didn’t believe in children. There couldn’t be children. They also didn’t believe in music. It was outlawed. Don’t ask me why. It was created by this crazy German guy who was thrown out of Germany because of his radical religious beliefs. And Ken Sawyer, who used to be the State Archaeologist for Pennsylvania, found – it was all broken, tragically – but it was a glass trumpet that somebody had carefully turned while they lived there, was made by one of the celibates, and they had buried it to hide it, and they think that once it – if it were still whole – it would have actually played. It would have functioned.

But when we were there in 2013, we were surveying for a new pipe, a water line that was going in. And we found evidence of children that dated to the time when they should have been celibate. There shouldn’t have been children present at that site, because the last celibate died in 1932. But the toys that we were finding dated to the 1890s. So, somebody somewhere did the hanky panky and was keeping a child that they weren’t supposed to be having. I don’t know how they hid that. I mean, it’s been done before. But it was pretty interesting. I go, oh, really? There were no children? Then what is this? You know? It’s… This is a porcelain doll that was only manufactured during this time period, and it was very easily identifiable what it was when it was made. It’s like with Thomas Jefferson. Well, he didn’t own slaves. Then what be these slave cabins back here? Hmm. Something doesn’t add up. That’s another thing about archaeology. I love to learn the dirty secrets that no one wanted you to learn.

Laura: People look at historical archaeology, and they say, “well, we don’t have anything we can learn from this because it’s all written down.”

Katie: I have a friend who’s an accountant, so he’s defective to begin with. But, he said that to me once, and I said, yeah, because history is not whitewashed, and won by the men, and the victors of war. How many documents have been tailored to tell the side of the ruling? A lot. A lot. My own great grandmother doesn’t appear on paper till she’s 14, because she was the wrong race. It happens all the time. Even the Bible has been futzed with and manicured to be what some white dude, somewhere, thought it needed to say.

Laura: How often do you think about the council of Nicaea, Katie?

Katie: Well, after being raised in a very religious household, I have lots of opinions. My mother would wash my mouth with soap. Some things stuck, just the fact that the Bible was pure. Yeah, not so much. Courtney [Ziska] keeps telling me she needs to take me out for a drink to get my views on evolution. Whole other conversation. And it’s actually probably more of a debate, at least with Courtney.

Laura: It’s good to keep those sparring skills intact.

Katie: I never did debate school, but, you know.

Laura: What is the one takeaway that you want to leave people with?

Katie: There’s a saying in history, and I don’t know if they ever know who said it, or if they do, I don’t recall. But it says, “those who don’t recall their history, or remember their history, are condemned to repeat it.” And I think that that’s so profound and so true. If we don’t look to the past, and the struggles that our ancestors or their ancestors went through, we’re just gonna repeat the same mistakes. One of the big reasons that we remember big events, like World War II, or the Holocaust, or the Spanish flu, the Civil War. If you don’t remember that, then you just repeat the same mistake.

My great grandmother was alive at the very tail…she passed away at the very tail end of COVID, thankfully not from COVID. But she talked a lot about the parallels to the Spanish influenza outbreak when she was a girl, versus what was happening during COVID. There’s a lot of parallels there, and it didn’t work then, and it’s not working now. And it’s true. You know, if you don’t dig up people’s trash, ’cause that’s regrettably what archaeology is, studying dead people’s trash – then you’re just gonna repeat the same mistakes. That says something. And no matter what went on in history – it is your history, it’s the world’s history. And it deserves to be told. No one needs to be marginalized, because they didn’t win the battle, or they were the wrong color, or had the wrong religion, you know? It’s all part of the grand story. And it all deserves to be told, whether it hurts people’s feelings or not. And that’s part of why I do what I do. Not that I’m really getting a lot of that from, you know, resurfacing a road, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I do. I like to think I do, at least. I say that’s the big takeaway: history’s important. And everyone thinks lawyers and doctors, you know, sure they’re important, but what they learned came from previous people. And if no one had written it down or left behind trash for somebody to find, how would we know that? And paper doesn’t always survive.

Laura: Katie, thank you so much. This was a great interview.