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Science of the Human Past Steering Committee MeetingHarvard Faculty Club Conservatory, 22 April 2014

In attendance:Michael McCormickThomas BenjaminJoyce ChaplinEdward HundertPeter HuybersNick PattersonDavid ReichDaniel Lord SmailNoreen Tuross

Jake Ransohoff (secretary)

[Meeting begins at 4:20]

McCormick: Agenda for today: (1) Report on each other, on interesting work; (2) Mention upcoming events; (3) Discuss possibility of creating at Harvard a Mack Planck center [hereafter MPI] for the Science of the Human Past. Upcoming events in the Science of the Human Past: next Tuesday there will be a lecture by Turi King, geneticist for the University of Leicester’s Richard III identification, which is co-sponsored by Medieval Studies and SoHP. On Thursday there will be a lunch and discussion workshop which many of you are coming to already, and to which you are all invited, with the team from the University of Leicester to study the pattern of diaspora migration, settlement, memories, historical memory, archaeological evidence in the British isles, particularly in the first millennium. The people representing the Leicester team are Joanna Story and Turi King, who is one of the four geneticists with the team.

Patterson: A main issue for me: there’s an incredible project about modern British DNA, where they are being very cagey about releasing the data, and that’s really an issue. People are sitting on this data, and obviously we need to compare how ancient DNA is related to modern DNA.

McCormick: Yes, I’ve heard that, and there’s an archaeological project at Oxford studying the peopling of western/southwestern England, and Helena Hamerow was unaware of it – that’s how closely they’re sitting on the data.

Patterson: And why is that?

Reich: I reviewed the paper. They just want to write the whole history themselves, and they can’t. It’s a beautiful fix, a beautiful analysis, but they just insist on [too quiet to hear].

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McCormick: Okay, so the DNA workshop will be on Thursday, May 1st. On Tuesday, May 2nd, probably in the afternoon, we have a working group going that is studying six climate crises. What we’re doing is looking at six major climate crises that are amply attested in the historical and the natural scientific record. Francis Ludlow, who was at the Center for the Environment for two years here and is now doing a two-year fellowship at Yale, will be coming up to do that. We may meet in Robinson hall, or in my office. It will be a small group. We’re going to review there we are. Francis is a very deliberately moving person, but I’ve been surprised how with this deliberately moving person – like a glacier – a lot of earth has been moved since last we checked, and he’s actually got a lot of people who have done a lot of work on the natural scientific sources. The most important work, which you may be aware of Peter, is that there’s a very important re-dating of the ice core that’s emerging from the calibration of trees with ice cores, that tends to vindicate many of [Gibson’s? Name unclear] absolute year dates, and means the mean dating is off by 7 to 11 years or something like that, with great implications for the climate crises that we’re looking at, because some of the crises that we selected where we thought there was not natural scientific evidence – and we thought these would be good cases to look at the disjuncture between natural scientific and historical accounts – turns out actually do match our historical evidence, including for the 536 event, and the 1740-1741 Irish famine. So that’s on Friday. And then in mid-July the Coligny-Fete [sp?] ice core group is going to come together here – the two post-docs that we have with the Arcadia Fund grant, the [unclear] from Heidelberg and Nicky Spalding at Mayewski’s Climate Change Institute in Maine are going to be bringing their first results of the analysis of the ice core, trying various new techniques of analysis at Heidelberg and in Maine, so that should be quite interesting. Other announcements of ongoing projects or things of general interest to the group before we move on?

Patterson: All I’ll say is that David’s DNA lab is going full blast, tons of very exciting stuff coming down the line.

McCormick: Anything we can know about?

Patterson: What’s happened since the meeting, David?

Reich: Nothing… we’re finally producing large amounts of data, and now starting to look at it and make sense of it, and we’re basically looking at the different series. We have data going from about 8,000-9,000 years to about 2,000-3,000 years, and which sheds light on population transfers…

Patterson: I feel that I am beginning to understand the story of the present genetic structure of Europe, and that’s pretty important and exciting for me. Much of what happened in Britain must be an echo of what happened on the continent.

McCormick: Noreen? Peter? You always have a bunch of things underway.

Huybers: I can mention one thing, a study with Zan (sp?) Stein, another scholar who worked with Francis Ludlow. We have a paper coming out in a few weeks. There’s this issue called the tree-ring divergence, where the temperature reconstructions that have been done using tree rings diverge from instrumental records diverge between 1950 and about 1980. So what you’re seeing

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is this discrepancy, and it casts a lot of doubt on our ability to reconstruct temperatures in the past, because we didn’t have a firm grasp of what caused the divergence. We’ve assembled evidence that shows that the reason why we’re getting that divergence is because short-wave radiation was diminishing from the 1950’s onward in Arctic regions because of aerosol emissions, and we can see this in surface-based shortwave radiation measurements, and they you can see it trackinf quite clearly with tree-rings in the most light limited regions as actually having less growth – lower density tree-rings.

McCormick: Which regions?

Huybers: This divergence has primarily been observed in high northern latitudes. It also has implications in understanding the degree to which a volcanic eruption actually has caused cooling, because there is both the cooling and the diminution of light that is associated with aerosol injection into the Stratosphere, and so we think also that many volcanic eruptions have been overrepresented in terms of their temperature response because it’s a double effect: both decreases of light and decreases of temperature. And so perhaps the temperature drops are not quite as large as many tree-rings would suggest.

McCormick: Very important.

Benjamin: Is this a geographically limited effect, or a global effect?

Huybers: It’s observed in places where light emission is the most severe limitation upon ability to grow, and so the Arctic is where we’ve been able to identify it, but other cloudy, light-limited environments – actually, in many areas of the rainforest this has been identified previously, where you have three canopies of trees, and the lower canopy is actually light limited, so that when people ass light you see more rapid growth. So in terms of an ecological effect it’s rather general, but in terms of a temperature-reconstruction effect it really only applies to those trees that have been taken from the Arctic.

McCormick: Other thoughts or observations? Okay, onto the business in front of us, which is the potential for jump-starting our project here, which up until now has been pushed along by the great goodwill of everybody sitting around this table, and a very small injection of funds from our benevolent dean. And for complicated reasons I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to Johannes Krause, who is well-known to many of us, and…

Patterson: He is in fact a close collaborator of David and me.

McCormick: It looks like there’s going to be an MPI for history and biology created in Jena, built from scratch, so it’s going to take 5 years to get the building approved and up. In the meantime, the future institute for history and biology really could use excellent collaborators who bring to Johannes’ toolkit things which Johannes doesn’t particularly have. The University of Jena is very find in a traditional kind of history, but the kind of things we’re doing have not been developed there. And so there’s great interest on Johannes’ part in coming up for an application to the Max Planck Society for the creation of a new Max Planck Harvard University Center for the Science of the Human Past. Max Planck has done a number of these, there are

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about 10-12 in existence; there’s one in the United States, in Princeton, for Physics. We would be the second joint venture, should we be successful. It opens up tremendous opportunities for us. But Max Planck insists on joint funding, which is both the opportunity and the challenge in front of us. My understanding – informal at this stage – is that the MPS will finance these at the rate of 500,000 Euros per year. The Center is financed for one five-year period, which can be renewed in principle only once, so this would live for ten years. But I have learned from Johannes that there is already discussion about extending the existing Chinese Max Planck Center for a third five-year term, so…

Patterson: Is that the center for genetics?

McCormick: I don’t know…

Reich: No, it’s the [unclear].

McCormick: So in other words, it’s conceivable that we could not only jumpstart for five years but for ten or fifteen years, which would be quite remarkable. The downside is that they expect matching funds.

Patterson: So that means Harvard would have to chip in another 700,000 dollars or something like that.

McCormick: Right, so that’s the first downside. Those of us who’ve has discussions with FAS deans known that this is ipso facto impossible, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. One could imagine different ways to arrive at that sum. MP does not accept in-kind contributions. But there are other ways of imagining the problem, and if we could break it down so that we only have to come up with something on the order of 100-200k from FAS, maybe we have a shot. There are donors out there. The Berkowitz-Goelet Fund for the Science of the Human past is small, but it did fund our inaugural conference and the family remains interested. I’m trying to find sources for us.

Patterson: Can I ask, if this were to happen, would there be a Harvard tag on the name?

McCormick: In Princeton I think it’s called the “Max Planck Princeton Center for Physics.”

Patterson: So this would be the “Max Planck Harvard Center”…

McCormick: Or the “Harvard-Max Planck”…

Patterson: Okay. Well if Harvard has its name on the marquis they should be putting up some money.

McCormick: Yes, and there are different angles to this. It’s a steep challenge. If we walk into the dean’s office and say “can we have 700k” they’re just going to laugh at us. But if we can come up with a real scientific way in which that 700k figure becomes more manageable, like through an ongoing commitment of one or more benefactors, this is actually something that

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could work out to the advantage of the University in two significant ways. First of all, they would have right off the bat over 3 million dollars toward their annual fundraising goal from Max Planck, plus whatever else we put in. Raising money for FAS is high on their agenda now, which, once you get beyond Harvard College is a tough sell, in terms of development. Another aspect to this which is very much to our advantage is that within the University, the hardest thing to sell to supporters is graduate financing, and the preliminary plan for this would involve support for graduate students. So that’s going to be part of the campaign particularly sensitive to any signs of support that we might find in the University where we might not expect to find it elsewhere. So those are just some initial thoughts. Also, one of you suggested it would be good to raise this issue with the people behind the Berkowitz-Goelet fund and get their reaction to it. And the University might find it interesting because Max Planck has a whole sector of supporters in Germany to which Harvard does not have access, and a joint venture might open doors for them that they might be very interested in opening for future considerations. So in other words it looks like a daunting challenge, but one that is well worth exploring with some seriousness. Reactions? Is this something we should continue to explore?

Huybers: Just to get a sense of magnitude, is this something that’s scalable or is it…

McCormick: It appears not to be scalable, but that’s oral. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some scalability once we get close, because my sense is that Max Planck is very jealous of the Max Planck name, but they are rather intrigued by the idea of a Harvard association.

Chaplin: How is the Princeton MPI funded?

McCormick: I don't know what the details of Princeton are, and I don’t know if I can know, but we can definitely explore.

Patterson: In general it seems like a great idea if we can make it go. But there are some administrative questions I’m curious about. If we have the Harvard MPI, how would it be governed? For example, it’s going to need a director. How do we appoint him?

McCormick: The appointment is made, so far as I know, jointly by Harvard and Max Planck. There are two directors. On the Max Planck side, the director would be Johannes Krause. And each institute has to have an assistant director of academic standing. Then there’s an administrative staff which, from what I’ve seen, is fairly skeletal. There would also be a board of directors or advisers, which in my understanding would be us, from the Harvard end. And I think there would be an equivalent on the Max Planck side.

Reich: But what’s your vision of what would be done with […unclear]?

McCormick: So, what I did in the document was try to… first of all, it won’t be that much, since Harvard will take a big percentage as its tax. So I’d be surprised if it winds up being much more than half a million or 600k or 700k per year, by the time all is said and done. But with that, I’d try to draw together the list of all the research that’s going on here that could be funded out of this. Some of the research that’s going on in our group already is better funded than others. This could be an important contributor to that. The area where we could see some real headway fast in

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terms of impact are exactly the areas for the SoHP with money to be raised independent. So on one hand we could see funding of research projects that we can devise and present among ourselves. On the other hand, we could easily float a series of high-powered post-docs, grad student exchanges, and even grad student fellowships. And I think the model of the Center for the Environment, for example, is a very exciting and successful one, where the two-year post-docs that we’ve been having really are having a tremendous impact on the community of intellectuals here, but also worldwide by bringing together these people and then setting them back up to word and do their things. I think that the possibility of funding grad students – for example, one could imagine having one or two graduate fellowships in archaeological science. This is an area that is not funded at Harvard, and is very difficult to fund. The Standing Committee on Archaeology has been working for several years on developing an archaeology PhD, which would fit very well into the model of an archaeological science-type program, among others. If we had two full fellowships per year for five years of study in archaeological science, that would be a really big change for Harvard.

Reich: But what would be the physical manifestation of this, like at the Princeton center? At the Chinese center is a physical [unclear] and apartments…

McCormick: Right, we’d need space.

Patterson: I can almost bet that Max Planck will want their own building.

Reich: But that’s not enough money…

McCormick: No, it’s not. I don't think Max Planck has its own building in Princeton. They have offices for sure. We’ll see what the details are, and these are very preliminary conversations, but they do present it as something that is intended to capitalize on the preexisting initiative or center or intellectual group/department that has strengths and complimentarity that Max Planck is lacking.

Reich: Just to give people a bit more background on this initiative on the Science of Human Past in Germany, it’s really quite impressive. I’m most familiar with the MPI for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig, which I’ve been to a dozen times. There’s 300 people there, there’s a building that probably costs a couple of hundred million dollars to build, and I expect their budget is 50 million dollars per year, and I think this is probably something that is built in business together with Jena. So basically take 300 and people and multiply their salaries and add postdocs, and that’s what it costs. So that kind of investment for this kind of activity – I’ve never seen anything like it in this country.

Patterson: So Max Planck in this area is really serious about funding.

Reich: I think the Chinese Max Planck is very impressive, and has the kind of… [unclear]…so the scale of potential funding seems…[unclear].

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McCormick: I can’t answer that, I don’t know the details of what’s going on in China. They’ve just come to an agreement with Steve Weinerhaus [sp?] with the Center for Archaeological Science in Israel.

Tuross: So he had a tiny building, really tiny, and he had that before the Max Planck agreement. No it’s very much like the scale of what you’re talking about, Mike. It employs three people. They put forward three areas of common interest. Max Planck out of Leipzig signed a collaborative agreement with them, five years renewable for another five years. So it’s the Leipzig-Max Planck Institute. It’s working very well there. When they went to hire heads of these topics, though, Max Planck vetoed two people at the Leipzig. That didn’t go down well. They were very heavy handed about whom they would accept in these positions. Now, whether that’s the nature of the structure they set up, I don’t know. I wondered – I can ask Steve – I don’t know if what they brought to the table was an accelerator, because Leipzig bought an accelerator to do radio carbon dating, because there’s none in the Middle East. But only one of the three positions had been filled.

McCormick: That’s a pretty new thing.

Tuross: Yeah, it’s new.

Patterson: I do think, Mike, if this shows signs of going anywhere, it might be worth you making a trip down to Princeton, and really just talking about the admin issues, ask how it’s working out. Because there will have to be parallels, at least on the administrative level.

McCormick: That’s a very good thought. Absolutely.

Hundert: I think Princeton is particularly strong in the way it is governed by collaborative relationships. My guess is that there will be a natural idea that we should do it the way they did it.

McCormick: A very valuable point. Because the whole point here is that this is a way to jumpstart our project, and to give it a real institutional structure that can live beyond he initial five or ten years, and beyond me and many of us sitting around the table, and to get this moving.

Reich: You mentioned the Grote [sp?] Institute. In one sense it’s a good parallel, in one sense it’s not a good parallel. The sense in which it’s a good parallel is that the Grote Institute is in some sense symbiotic with the Boston Biology Committee [?], and the reason why it’s symbiotic is that they have all this money from private donors, but in fact they don’t use any of it. They just appoint people from around town who are getting paid anyway. They supported things that were already existing, but all these people get appointments – like me, they don’t pay me, but I just show up and participate in things and so raise money through [unclear]. So it’s actually an interesting model, because they’re contributing very little. But they create something that’s more than the sum of its parts because it creates a center. So that’s actually interesting. And when they hire people in biology, there’s actually the ability to get some funding from the government, so the level of income and grant support dwarfs the amount of private funding. And that’s the

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reason why it’s a bad parallel – because that will never happen in this case. Private donor money is used more as incentives for particular projects; it’s not the money that the center runs off of.

McCormick: Very astute.

Hundert: I think the other thing would be to understand the precise constraints that MP is setting by “can’t be in kind,” etc. Because there are some places that would say, “Well, when we thought it was an institutional commitment, we weren’t talking about you finding a donor in Germany to put up your half of the money. That doesn’t count.” Or something like that. So understanding what the rules of the road are now, before we go down and start doing things. Because I think from the Harvard perspective, they are jealously guarding any potential donor already on their list. Whereas if you bring in a group of new potential donors, there’s no down side to them. So then the question would be, would they be willing – in an overstretched development office – to free up the money to help do research on questions, for example, of people in Germany who might have connections with Max Planck so they will become people for Harvard to tap. Because Max Planck has a major research development office, where they could answer that really quickly, and help us target those people. But they are very jealous about giving you a minute of those people’s times. So exploring what are the constraints of that early on would be really helpful to know how to proceed.

Patterson: I have a friend who [unclear]… when she was set up there was a great fanfare about how Harvard was going to chip in 100 million dollars. But the fine print was that Harvard would use their best efforts to find 100 million dollars in new donors. That isn’t exactly the same.

Benjamin: In shaping the programmatic angle of this institute, I would want to know more about where the parts of the complimentary expertise lie, and what kind of programs really make more sense. One can easily imagine a postdoctoral exchange in genetics or population structure. But I don’t know what Johannes’ view is on this, I don’t know how it goes beyond his direct interests.

Reich: The institute that they’re setting up has two areas of weakness. One is it has no expertise in history, in linguistics, in archaeology, in ancient DNA; and it doesn’t have expertise in population shifts.

Patterson: Are we talking about Jena or Leipzig?

Reich: Jena. And so the obvious thing you would want to do if you were studying the Science of the Human Past is – I mean, it’s a disaster if you don’t have someone to do archaeology, because that’s the core discipline. And genetics, they have problems that Europe has in general, which is that they have the best ancient DNA in the world, and they actually have very little ability to [unclear] the data…[rest of statement unclear]. So that’s a weakness, but they don’t have archaeology.

Patterson: If I can rephrase what David’s saying, one of the things this whole enterprise is doing – its very multidisciplinary. We have climate science, we have archaeology, we have computer science, we have isotope work, and we have aDNA. And it’s not really going to be sensible, at the scale we’re talking about here, to do all of these things. You can have one grad students in

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each of these things, but what sense does that make? So it seems to me that, at the scale we’re talking about, we need to pick our horses. This is not David’s Leipzig Institute with 300 people. You can’t do everything.

Huybers: There’s that model. Or there’s the model of having a center that bundles together a lot of ongoing activity, but tries to make it stronger through collaboration, well-targeted funding, and interaction. So maybe one way of getting to fairly large numbers is by having a number of other activities that are maybe supported, but would not have otherwise be thought of as contributing directly to the SoHP, as somehow being counted under this larger umbrella.

Reich: I think that that’s what needs to happen. I don’t think the right thing to do is to divide into smaller groups, but create some kind of presence […rest of statement unclear – something about postdocs].

Chaplin: Because that would be absent? Would there be graduate students?

Reich: That’s another problem that the MPI has, I’ve seen it in Leipzig. It’s not a degree-granting organization, so students have to get their degree at a different university but do their research at Max Planck, and it’s hard. Not a perfect situation. It might be much more attractive to go somewhere that you could do research and get your degree.

McCormick: In point of fact, within the Max Planck society this is an acutely felt situation. Insofar as they are training people toward a PhD, there’s some sense that their main source of supply should be Germany, but the university professors are blocking the best graduate students from going there, because they want to keep them for themselves. And consequently there is some sentiment within some areas of the MPS that they’re getting the second tier of graduate students.

Reich: It’s true. If you look at Leipzig, all the students are French and American and British – they’re all foreign.

Patterson: In fact there’s a specific reason, many people in the old West Germany don’t want to work in the east. And Leipzig is very nice by East German standards but it’s not Munich, and people don’t want to go there. So it’s easier to have foreigners.

Reich: I like Peter’s idea to craft something on graduate training and [unclear]. If you can’t hire a new group, it would be nice to have here at this table an archaeologist who [rest of statement unclear].

McCormick: Well we have Noreen, who’s more of an archaeologist than she lets on.

Tuross: I don’t dig dirt. [laughter]

McCormick: But you’re quite right, David, that it would be nice to have an archaeological…

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Reich: Weren’t we going to have an archaeological director…[rest of statement unclear – something about two and a half weeks time].

Tuross: There is some good news on the archaeology front. Jason Woar [sp?] was just tenured. And he does really interesting work. He’s worked with classified spy satellites to look at landscape archaeology in the Middle East. Really neat stuff. Let’s get him onboard.

Smail: What was the two and a half weeks that you’ve been mentioning, David? Because it’s not reaching down to this end of the table.

McCormick: This came out of a long conversation I had with Johannes Krause two and a half weeks ago, about this idea, after he had a meeting with the president…

Smail: Because you mentioned there was something about archaeology at Jena that would…

McCormick: Oh. So the question is what is the structure of the institute at Jena. And there’s supposed to be a department of history, a department of archaeology, a department of linguistics and a department of biology and biogenetics. And now they’re down to a department of biology and a department of linguistics.

Smail: I see. The larger conceptual issue – and this is partly a history of the discipline issue that I’m trying to get my head around – is to some degree the SoHP is sort of trying to repair or moving beyond the rift in anthropology that cut the cultural apart from human evolutionary and the archaeological and linguistic. So there’s a whole tradition of four-field anthropology which got exploded by what happened to cultural anthropology. And then the added question is how do you conceptualize what is now a three-field anthropology, when all of these new things – including population genetics, things like stable isotope analysis – get added in, because that wasn’t part of the original framework. This comes back to this… I guess I keep turning to you, Noreen, because this is your world. You went through this five years ago…

Tuross: Oh no, no longer. I don’t think it’s the purview or the venue of this small group to try to repair anthropology. I think it’s beyond us, frankly.

Smail: But this is my concern, because, as archaeology and ancient DNA analysis develop – archaeology and aDNA are now in different departments here. They’re moving apart, rather than moving together. This has nothing to do with Max Planck, it just has to do with the larger issue of what is happening institutionally.

Reich: Well HBP [?] decided not to support ancient DNA. It was a decision not to support ancient DNA, several years ago. I was extremely unhappy, but there was a faculty search for someone in genetics and aDNA was excluded. So that’s a statement about – if that’s an activity that falls within the University, it’s doesn’t fall within HBP [?].

Smail: But that’s not related to the rift with cultural anthropology.

Reich: Well it must be a cultural anthropology…[unclear]…but it doesn’t belong in HBP [?].

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Smail: I think these are parallel conversations that aren’t meeting…

Reich: But we only have a flawed university to work with, and we have to work with what we have. I mean, different departments, they don’t really have homes to support different activities…

Chaplin: If I could back up from Harvard for just a minute, does the University of Munich have… [the rest of this statement, and answer by Reich, indiscernible at my end of the table. Tübingen is mentioned].

[Smaller conversations begin around the table].

Hundert: But still I think these [unclear] support is that rather than this idea of let’s pick courses and dtart from that would be strategic about saying, well, if you had some additional funding, and you wanted to be opportunistic about advancing SoHP, and you’re saying – should we invest this in postdoc? Should we invest in [unclear]? Here you do have to place some bets one way or another. What’s going to give you the most mileage? It may well be that where we could see some strength in something that Harvard could bring to the table that could be done in collusion with Germany… I mean the whole idea is that this is a collaborative center. So it’s not like both sites have to have all the things that they need…

McCormick: No, on the contrary. The philosophy of these things is geared toward complimentarity.

Patterson: So Mike, I said this earlier, but I really believe that archaeology is the core discipline in this field, and if Jena are not going to do that, is that an opportunity for us?

McCormick: Exactly!

Patterson: I mean it seems to me that pretty much anything we’re doing here – you just have to have archaeology on board.

Reich: I think Johannes is extremely disappointed by the fact that that’s not manifesting itself as a component of what they’re doing in Jena…

Smail: Where are the European archaeologists here? They’re not per se in archaeology, they’re in…

Tuross: We don’t have much in the way of European archaeologists here. There are Near eastern archaeologists, but not European.

Smail: This has long struck me as one of the big sticking points. Why don’t we have one? I mean, I know why we don’t have one, but how we can get one?

McCormick: Well, that could indeed be something that could build into this.

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Tuross: To tell the truth, it’s not a strong group in the US in general, not to mention Harvard.

Smail: Jukowsky has people.

Tuross: Jukowsky does, they’ve done some really smart hiring. I’m going down there tomorrow to start a collaboration with one of their archaeologists.

McCormick: With who?

Tuross: [Name unclear. Sounds like Domall?] But they’ve set up an endowment and they’ve set up a home for archaeologists, and it’s very focused. Sue Alcott has done a great job in bringing in really good people. With postdocs. She’s done a good job in integrating it into undergraduate and graduate education, but it’s focused.

McCormick: It can be done.

Tuross: And it’s old world, with limited time period boundaries. So they went in knowing what they wanted to do, and with the Jukowsky money upfront.

Reich: Mike, is there an interest form the business [?] point in getting graduate students from their institute who could get a degree at this institute?

McComrick: This would need to be worked out in detail with the dean of GSAS, these are very complicated matters, but I think that Johannes would welcome the idea of having a built-in PhD program where we foresaw that they would spend one year or two years of their PhD doing research there, after their first year of work here.

Reich: I think the thing that could create the most presence here would be sponsoring graduate programs and postdoc programs, conferences or meetings – those things that create community…[unclear]…The most attractive option would be to have a rotating string of people who would be willing to move back and forth between Harvard and Germany and have some part of their training here, and some part there.

Chaplin: I like the idea that you would have phases, divided between here and there.

Reich: Could history increase its intake, and ask for some of those slots to be set aside for people interested in the Science of the Human Past?

McCormick: Well, I’ve been involved with GSAS for years, and it’s the most difficult thing in university funding: to get graduate funding. And it’s particularly difficult in areas without government funding, which funds so much of graduate study in the life sciences. You can talk to Hanna Gray about this as well, but it’s really very difficult and very challenging. But this could be an early phase to bring some really talented people to Harvard from around the globe, and then share them with Johannes on the Max Planck side.

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Tuross: So let me ask the question, when Max Planck sets up in Jena, would it be history and science?

McCormick: Well, the last title I heard was the Institure of History and Biology.

Tuross: But then they’re not hiring an historian?

[Multiple people speaking over one another.]

Tuross: If they do it, is Johannes automatically the director? It’s a package deal?

McCormick: Yes, without Johannes I don’t think this would happen…

Smail: And why biology as opposed to evolutionary anthropology?

[Multiple smaller conversations taking place simultaneously around the table.]

Hundert: So…back to the big picture, though, if the whole idea is to leverage funding to create multiple centers, you could step back and say – if you really want to do this, do it at Harvard where they do have history, and make sure that the projects are being worked on from an historical perspective, and have students in history who would be part of this joint venture. Maybe that’s just a positive spin, but the whole idea of this is that – well, maybe that is what they would look for in a partner, someone who has a great deal invested in history. And there the whole game becomes – how much of the budget that we invest in these things already could be separated out to count towards the final amount. And there are creative ways to count.

McCormick: I think so, so that the 700,000 dollars – as imposing as that may appear at first blush – we can find creative ways to whittle that away in a substantial fashion.

Tuross: So biology is at Jena already?

McComrick: That’s another Max Planck.

Tuross: Right, but it’s a natural conversation partner…

McCormick: That’s right. And another criteria more honored in the breach than the observance is that Max Planck centers have relations with other Max Planck centers, even if they have primary relations with their host partner institute. Further thoughts? Would is be feasible to ask for comments and notes on the draft that I sent around? I tried to represent some of your ideas, and didn’t try at all with others for fear of misrepresenting them, but to go at it with a heavy pen and put in your desires and ideas.

Smail: I have a rhetorical issue which is that there’s a lot of “ancient” in here, and I love ancient things as much as anyone, but what it assumes is that the SoHP is concerned solely with the distant past, and recapitulates one of the whole issues of archaeology, which is to keep ourselves uncontaminated by the historical narratives. So the historical archaeologists always find it really

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difficult to justify themselves to the “true” archaeologists, and I’m concerned with replicating that with the presence of the word “ancient” in the text, because there are so many ways in which SoHP deals with things that aren’t ancient, like your work Joyce. And we might alienate lots and lots of historians. I want to make sure there are things not branded ancient, but much more recent, because the technique doesn’t care about the time to which it applies.

McCormick: Right, yes. Johannes and I spent a couple hours on Skype and came up with these ideas, and the “ancient,” I’m using that in very general terms: if it ain’t walking, it’s “ancient.” [laughter]

Smail: So it’s dead?

McComrick: Right. In writing that I was thinking ancient DNA, I didn’t want to say “Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern…”. So that was my thought. But if we could find another word, something more elegant and less problematic, that would be great.

[Smaller conversations begin and persist around the table. First people start to leave at 5:35.]

Hundert: One of the things that my experience with potential philanthropists has taight me is that they – the rap they have on universities is that we’re so siloed, and they love to discuss how “I couldn’t have made all my money in this industry if I didn’t have my marketing people talking to my other people,” and here in universities your historians don’t talk to your archaeologists don’t talk to your biologists. And so one thing that they like to do is to feel that their generosity is tweaking the university and forcing us to cut across silos. So it could be that – rather than picking specific areas and saying “I want to fund studies of population movements in Europe,” or something – that what you would say is “here are six disciplines, and we’re only going to use your funding for a project that brings at least three of them together. So you’re insisting scholars work across boundaries, and your philanthropy is going to be a catalyst for new discoveries, because we only use your money to fund – whether it’s a grad student, a postdoc, a conference or whatever – something that combines three of these six from the menu.” And then for us, that’s what we do. That’s what Science of the Human Past is. And it becomes a way for them to feel like they’re forcing us to do it. Which they like.

The other thing is that – I would urge Mike to go to Princeton (and I would be happy to even go with him) and really study the governance issue. That’s one of the first things that the provost and president are going to ask. That’s their issue. And so you’re never going to get thing up to the dean or provost without really understanding the governance. Because Harvard has been very jealous of doing joint things with joint names on it. They’re very jealous of “what do you mean it will be ‘Max-Planck-hyphen-Harvard?” And we have to have a really good answer, and say, “You know, they worked all that out with Max Planck-Princeton, and it works very well for them, and here’s why…” Because Drew Faust can always call the president of Princeton and say “does that really work?” and when they say “yeah it really works,” she’ll say “oh okay.” That’s what we really need. So really understanding the details of administration will be an important ingredient for internally selling it.

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And then I think it’s important to really understanding what Max Planck means by “matching funds,” and what are the limits on those – what's allowed to count as “matching funds.” For all we know, if we got a donor to put up most of the money they would say, “Well Harvard is still not putting up any money, that’s not what we meant.” We have to really understand what counts and what doesn’t. So for example, if the History Department was thinking of funding a grad student, but now we say “no, we’re going to have our history department fund a grad student in Science of the Human Past. They’re going to actually put up money.” It’s not necessarily a match, since they might have funded it for some other thing in History, but now they’re funding it for SoHP, that might still count as a contribution because it’s hard money coming from Harvard that is now going directly to this. So, it’s not like they’ll be counting a grad student they already had, but it’s actually “we’re going to do more of this than we used to, because we’re channeling money into it.” That probably does count. If we have a secretary that used to work in some other area, but now they’re going to be assigned to give administrative support for this – does that count toward our contribution? Because if so, you could really start whittling down that $700,000 and make it a more manageable sum by redirecting money already in the budget, but which is really going to this new thing. If you say that there’s this professor already here and we’re going to count this salary – they probably wouldn’t accept that. But if you say, “There’s a graduate student who wouldn’t have been here but for this program” – well the truth is there probably would have been some other graduate student doing something else in History, but it would have been something different. So that goes for administrators, it goes for grad students, it goes for postdocs, and it even goes for faculty. If we had a faculty hire for something else lined up but now we’re going to it for this – that’s not an in-kind thing, that’s actually channeling money into this initiative.

I do think that getting the Goelet family to become partners in finding other donors is also key, because they obviously love this stuff. They in their own family probably can’t do as much as we would like, but if they become our partners and find other people of means who they would bring to the table with us, and probably wouldn’t be on the Harvard donor list and therefore would be strictly kosher to go after – I think that would also be helpful. To view the Goelets as partners in fundraising, and not just as target donors. That’s something that Partners In Health have done very well, Paul Farmer and company. It’s just amazing. Their early donors all became their partners in finding other donors.

[Meeting ends at 5:48]