Departmental News

Posted:  Aug 27, 2025 - 02:00pm

In a new article in Sapiens, Dr. Emily Jones discusses the role of fiction and imaginative play in inspring students to learn about ancient pre-history.  Archaeological Fiction and a Scientist’s Dilemma, she discusses her experience in writing a young adult fiction novel based on the archaeological record and some of the conflict she experiences as a professional archaeologist writing a fictionalized account.  She writes: "My experience made me more aware of the dangers of fictionalizing the past, but it also made me realize just how often I use my imagination when doing scientific archaeology. I can’t come up with hypotheses to test without imagining the past. Nor can I interpret findings, or communicate findings to any audience, without imagining the past."

The novel, Nahia, is set in prehistoric Spain 8,000 years ago and is a Junior Library Guild "Gold Standard" selection.  In her author statement, Dr. Jones writes:  "Nahia is a novel, and it should not be confused with fact. But, at the same time, this book tells the story of a change that really did happen. Western Europe was the realm of hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years—first Neanderthals, and later Homo sapiens, members of our own species. But beginning about 7,900 years ago, those hunter-gatherers were joined by people who practiced agriculture. Eventually, all the hunter-gatherers were either absorbed into agricultural populations, adopted agricultural practices on their own, or disappeared. Which of these happened is a matter of debate, and probably varied from region to region, but either way, eventually, no hunter-gatherers remained. Very few people today carry any DNA that can be traced back to these European hunter-gatherers....I am an archaeologist, and I used archaeological data to inform Nahia, but I also think the first responsibility of any novelist is to tell a good story. So when the archaeological record isn’t clear on what happened at a particular point, I didn’t let the lack of information stop me. At the time I’m writing this, ancient DNA analyses tell us that the first agriculturalists in Iberia were new arrivals, and the patterning of Neolithic sites along the coast (as well as the speed of settlement) suggests that these new arrivals did use boats to colonize. The physical appearance of the people of the bands (including the presence of people with dark skin and blue eyes) and of the strangers also matches what ancient DNA and bioarchaeological studies have told us. Raids, abductions, and hybrid villages composed of both foragers and farmers, such as the one Izara founded, on the other hand, are hypothesized by some archaeologists, but there is not yet clear evidence."