Women in science- Interview with dr. Martina Blečić Kavur 

Women in science- Interview with dr. Martina Blečić Kavur 

Between 11 February (International Day of Women and Girls in Science) and 8 March (International Women's Day), we present UP researchers who have achieved important milestones in their research work and their thoughts on the position of women in science in the past year.

Dr. Martina Blečić Kavur deals with archeology, especially prehistory, metal technology and is an expert on Illyrian helmets. She is a co-author of an article published in 2021 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

INTERVIEW

What was your scientific path like? Were you hindered from doing so by being a woman in archaeology, which has traditionally been considered a field of men's research? What is archaeology look like today?

The journey, if you could call it that, was quite exciting. If we skip my studies in Zagreb, Berlin and Ljubljana, I "traveled" from the museum in Zagreb to the museum in Rijeka, then through the Ministry of Culture to the University of Rijeka and finally the University of Primorska. It is good that in our country (and I mean 2 countries), archaeology has not been explicitly a male research field for a long time, which does not mean that it is implicitly gendered balanced. I see a bigger problem, for both sexes, in the intergenerational misunderstanding, if I use a milder form to describe the contradictions. The latter is the main problem for the development of a much more open science, or for faster and bolder verification and correction of established beliefs. Archaeology, as part of the humanities, is too often caught up in some imaginary “national” framework based on repetition rather than fact-checking and developing behaviour. Above all, institutional frameworks, from the system of evaluating and funding research to editorial boards and review procedures, are too often caught up in hierarchies and power relations of the past. Archaeology, as part of the humanities, is too often trapped in some imaginary “national” framework based on repetition rather than fact-checking and developing behaviour. Above all, institutional frameworks, from the system of evaluating and funding research to editorial boards and review procedures, are too often caught up in hierarchies and power relations of the past. Archaeology as a part of natural science is in a completely different context. The latter allows us to escape from this captivity and at the same time allows the development of archaeological interdisciplinarity, which above all requires a multidisciplinary background linked into a large scientific network. Material culture, or objects that we discover through excavations, are historical "documents" of archaeology. However, objects alone are not enough to accurately reconstruct a particular way of life of individuals, social structures, even the wider culture of a community or entity. We must also consider the environment, flora, animal life, climate and climate change, geology and resources for making objects, then physical anthropology, which removes "invisible" injuries, diseases, diet, habits, trauma ... - especially when we study the (prehistoric) history of people. To meet this requirement in terms of observation and interpretation, an archaeologist without a multidisciplinary team of different natural sciences has only a two-dimensional layer of the sample, insufficient to explain our multidimensional past.

What was the key to your decision to study the Bronze and Iron Ages?

 You always need a good motive at the beginning. And a charismatic teacher is often the best motive. In my case, it was Professor Nives Majnarić Pandžić in Zagreb, Professor Biba Teržan in Ljubljana and Professor Bernhard Hänsel in Berlin and Preston Miracle in Cambridge, who unconditionally opened new "windows" and new dimensions of archaeology for me. They were teachers who knew how to stimulate interest, support a good idea, inspire in one way or another. Above all, there was Professor Mitja Guštin, who helped me a lot in preparing for my doctorate and later. Because iron is wrought while my design is hot without the help, encouragement, encouragement, understanding of a multitude of friends and colleagues, especially the life companion of Professor Boris Kavur, it would undoubtedly not be as it is and for that, I am infinitely grateful to them all. And of course personal interest. I have always been fascinated by challenges and prehistoric archaeology is an endless challenge. When we seem to finally understand something, it turns out that the matter may be quite the opposite. Such is the case, for example, with the cultural behaviour of the communities that first interculturally connected Europe in the Bronze Age, much more complex and much more sophisticated than one would expect. Traditionally, the public looks down on prehistoric archaeology, and today the latter is becoming a development laboratory for research methodologies and technologies, as well as theories of explaining cultural development and the common European cultural heritage.

You wrote about one Lady from Čikata and you are studying Illyrian helmets. Why have you been attracted to researching helmets and why is this Lady special?

At this point, it is necessary to turn the perspective - from the general to the individual. I am generally interested in contacts between Mediterranean civilizations and the prehistoric communities of Europe, on the one hand, and long-distance trade and exchange, on the other. Of course, these are themes that organically intertwine and complement each other - especially in the very dynamic period from the Late Bronze Age to the Late Iron Age, or at the end of the 2nd and 1st millennium BC. Since the northern Adriatic, the starting point of all my research, is at the crossroads of these worlds, the challenge of understanding and reviving this mosaic is unlimited in scientific and historical terms. Individually, I dealt with a plethora of topics, sites and finds from the area from Greece to the Alps, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. Luxurious bronze vessels such as situlas and weapons such as Illyrian helmets are only the most exposed content due to their media representation and popularity. It is certainly necessary to emphasize the problems of prehistoric urbanism and the formation of social elites, which in the past we did not control trade but the transfer of knowledge and ideas. Here the urban history of Osor and Kvarner, in general, the northern Adriatic, comes to the fore, or the Etruscan figurine named the Lady from Čikata because it was found on Mali Lošinj. On the other hand, there is still the issue of ways and reasons for the donation of bronze objects in the Bronze and Iron Ages in the form of depots, and changes in burial rituals such as. at the cemetery in Zavrč and we could list more. At the core of all these themes (sites or objects themselves) is their uniqueness, diversity, unity and supraregional, which connected even remote regions and communities, strongly influenced the development of civilization and culture, the development of man and society as such. Even though the themes are located in the period of the 2nd and 1st millennium BC, the globalization of our world, in the 1001 sense, begins just then and continues unstoppably to this day.

You are a co-author of an article published in the journal Nature. What have you contributed to this?

In order to reach the finale result, the path is important. The path is not progressively linear, but depends on a constellation of constellations, the socio-political situation and the method of perseverance. Due to good constellations, in 2018 I obtained a basic research project, the Community of the Dead, the Society of the Living: The Late Bronze Age of Eastern Slovenia, which was financially supported by the ARRS. As part of extensive research, I tried to collect as many multidisciplinary results as possible with an interdisciplinary team of experts (geologists, metallurgists, anthropologists, zooarchaeologists ...). One of the achievements of this multi-year work is the analysis and interpretation of ancient DNA, which was published in December 2021 in the journal Nature.

This is the most extensive, so far published analysis of ancient DNA samples, which puts a number of previous claims about the migration of Bronze Age communities as well as regional physical or genetic development, putting European populations in a completely different perspective. It is very convincing that the last great prehistoric immigration of populations to the British Isles from Europe took place in the Late Bronze Age. Over the centuries with lower immigration, these populations have evolved in a different direction than European ones, as evidenced by the ever-increasing lactase retention in adulthood. In other words, the ancient inhabitants of the Islands digested milk much easier than others. Moreover, the data justify the claim that these populations already had to speak Celtic languages. The article is the conclusion of a work involving more than 200 researchers from more than 70 institutions. The number alone shows that we covered the area from the British Isles to the Carpathians and the Adriatic, defined the archaeological contexts from which the samples originated and compared the results of analyzes with a multitude of theories on Bronze and Iron Age migrations from across the area. The annexe to the article alone, which contains basic information and has also been published in the public domain, is more than 200 pages long. In fact, this material hides the contributions of everyone involved, and the article is just a summary of many years of research work by a large multidisciplinary network of experts led by Harvard University, York University and the University of Vienna. I am grateful to have been a part of this remarkable team.

dr. Vesna Grahovac, Sector for research, development, and artistic activity