Adventures in Archaeological Science Coloring Book

Info

Open access coloring book created by scientists to share the joy of archaeology with children around world. Available in multiple languages.

Geschichte

The story behind the coloring book:

An interview with Dr. Christina Warinner

Q: Where did the idea for a coloring book come from?

CW: Digital illustration has long been a hobby of mine, and for the past several years I have offered workshops to teach students how make their own custom graphics for scientific publications and presentations. I also have a young daughter, and as a fun activity I would make her coloring book pages about my field projects and laboratory methods in order to show her what I do at work. In many ways, this is what planted the idea for the “Adventures in Archaeological Science” coloring book, but the final product was really the group effort of many generous and talented people.

Q: How did the book project get started?

CW: The story behind the coloring book began this past summer, when Dr. Jessica Hendy and I offered an introductory scientific illustration workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), and around the same time our institute began planning exhibitions and events for the Long Night of Science, a biennial public outreach event hosted by publicly funded research institutions throughout Germany. I thought an archaeological science-themed coloring book would be a great activity for the outreach event, and to help the workshop students hone their digital illustration skills, we decided to have them make a coloring book page about an aspect of archaeological science as a final project. The project ended up being a lot of fun, and the students really did an amazing job coming up with ideas for each page, designing the layout, and experiencing the full process of publication from start to finish. Dr. Hendy and I edited the final product, adding text and giving the book an overarching narrative by arranging and supplementing the pages with additional material.

Q: What inspired you to crowd source the translation of the coloring book into so many languages?

CW: As we were making the final touches to the coloring book, we realized that it would be a shame to have it only accessible to English and German-speaking children. Human history belongs to all of us, and the research and discoveries we feature in the book have taken place all over the world. We thought – wouldn’t it be great if we could share this information with children everywhere – in their own native language – so that they too could experience the joy and excitement of science and archaeology? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could bring this book with us to our field projects so that we could explain to local children what we are doing and what the world learns by studying people from the past? And most importantly, what if we could show these children that they too could be part of this process and inspire a future generation of archaeological scientists around the globe?

One of the best things about being at an institute like the MPI-SHH is that our researchers come from all over the world. I’ve lost count of how many nationalities are represented among our students and staff, but it is more than twenty, and together we work in dozens of countries on every continent. As the coloring book was nearing completion, we asked for volunteer translators and we were absolutely overwhelmed by the response – with immediate offers for Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Croatian, Finnish, and Swedish, among others. After posting the coloring book to Facebook, we had many more offers from archaeologist colleagues and collaborators, and we now have translations underway for Hindi, Turkish, Italian, Greek, Ukranian, and Hebrew. And we’ve also reached out to the communities where we conduct fieldwork, and we will soon have translations in Nahuatl, Yucatec Mayan, Nepali, Mongolian, and Tibetan.

One of the things I have loved about the translation process is that nearly every translation is being performed by an archaeologist or anthropologist who is a native speaker of that language. This means that in addition to learning about archaeological science, the children will be introduced to someone from their own language group who is participating in this research. We hope that this will help give the children tangible role models from their own countries and communities, and to help make this connection even more clear, we are adding “cartoonified” portraits of each translator to the back cover so that children can see them, look them up, and learn more about their work.

Q: What are your hopes for the coloring book?

CW: Our aim is to make this coloring book as accessible as possible to every interested child – no matter where they are in the world or what language they speak. That’s why we licensed the book under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone anywhere to download and print it and to distribute it freely with no royalties. We’ve also preserved the editable features of the PDFs so that they can be modified to suit local needs. The coloring book is available to anyone anywhere with an internet connection and a printer.

Q: What have been some of the challenges?

CW: So far, we have translations posted in English, German, and Spanish, and many more underway. Our biggest bottleneck is in typesetting, which takes quite a bit of time because each word bubble has to be individually adjusted for the text length. We are hoping to hire student assistants who can help us speed up this process, and I appreciate everyone’s patience while we try to catch up with demand. I’ve also added a “translation tracker” so that people can see which translations are in progress and approximately how soon they will be released.

Q: Do you have a favorite page in the coloring book?

CW: It’s so hard to choose! There are aspects of every page that I love. I think the thing I am most proud of is how hard our students worked on this, and how much creativity and knowledge they have invested into each page. It may not be apparent from a first glance, but all of the pages feature real research and many of the images are based on actual photos from our own projects. It’s been a chance for us to share the parts of our research that aren’t normally visible, such as excavation preparation, scenes within the lab, and the many microscopic things we study (like starch granules, bacteria, and proteins). Archaeological science is an enormous and diverse field, and at only 12 pages we weren’t able to show everything in the coloring book, but we are at least hoping to give readers a taste of what the field has to offer. We hope the coloring book will inspire other archaeological scientists to make additional pages, so that the book will continue to grow and grow.

Q: What does being an archaeological scientist mean to you?

CW: The thing I love more than anything else about being an archaeological scientist is that it has allowed me to meet so many talented, kind, and generous people all over the world – from the rainforests of Belize to the Himalayan mountains of Nepal to the steppe grasslands of Mongolia. I feel so fortunate to be part of this amazing global community of people who share a deep love of learning and discovery. It is my greatest hope this coloring book will inspire future generations of children around the world to pick up a trowel and a pipettor and join us in writing our shared story of humanity.