Dr Ronika Power had her own mortuary when she was growing up. “I was one of those children who displayed an interest in things that others might flag as being a concern,” she admits. “I was obsessed with death from when I was very young, from two perspectives: firstly, as a biological imperative, understanding that every living thing eventually will die; and secondly, as a cultural imperative, understanding how different communities across the world integrated death into their beliefs and practices.”
The “mortuary”, that Power speaks of, was a little patch under the mulberry tree in her family’s backyard. There she would bury things – such as a dead canary – to scratch up later and observe the process of decay first-hand.
This experimental forensics lab, combined with the young Power’s fascination for ancient Egypt, led her down a life-long quest to understand the connection between science and culture. “I was deeply impacted by the Egyptian cultural phenomenon of mummification, and what that meant about their beliefs surrounding the body,” she told The Brilliant.
At school, Power devoured biology and history, but couldn’t imagine she would ever combine the two fields. Now – as Associate Professor of Bioarchaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, and Director of the Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment – that’s exactly what she’s done.
Her journey, however, hasn’t been straightforward.
After falling ill with glandular fever, Power was unable to complete her high school leaving exams. Then she was left with chronic fatigue syndrome, which she suffered for eight years. “It stole my youth,” she recalls. When Power eventually recovered, she gravitated not to academia but business, at which she excelled.
“Business management was a really important training ground for my sense of entrepreneurship – identifying opportunities, understanding the viability of ideas, and translating them into outcomes,” she explains.
“I was certainly very stimulated by the challenges of business management, but the whispers of the ancient dead were calling my name. I thought, I need to do something with this.”
She enrolled as an undergraduate at Macquarie University to study Ancient History and combined that with as much science as she could. “I emerged,” she says, “with a very strong understanding of the scientific foundations of archaeology, in terms of the fundamental principles of geology, biology, anatomy and histology.”
Power went on to complete a Master of Science in Human Osteology and Palaeopathology in the UK, then returned to Australia to finish a multidisciplinary PhD on child, infant and foetal burials in ancient Egypt. “My passion is for us to understand that science and culture are symbiotic phenomena,” she says. “Each shapes and directs the course of the other.
“A huge part of my role is to capitalise on public interest around the ancient world, particularly via an understanding of lived experiences that may be accessed through the body. There are important conversations about the ethics of displaying and analysing human remains. But it is limiting to exclude the biological testimonies of people when we know, through our own lives, that corporeality is a profoundly significant driver of lived experience. There are implications for our understanding of life, diet, disease, demography, migration, politics, economics, religion, trade, art, literature, war – all of these different aspects of ancient culture were experienced, materialised and relayed by embodied human beings .”
Power says that she’s driven to facilitate a dialogue between the living and the dead. One of the most profoundly moving incidents in her career occurred when she joined a University of Cambridge analytical team following an excavation in Kenya. “The team were brought to a space where there was thought to be some human remains, some bones completely isolated in the middle of the desert,” she says. “But it turned out, as they explored a little further and scraped away the surface sand, that they had actually come across the site of a massacre that occurred in 10,000 BC.
“On the shores of the ancient Lake Turkana a whole group of hunter-gatherers – men, and women and children, and also a heavily pregnant woman – was ambushed and brutally killed. This was a deeply significant find, because it challenged notions that were previously held regarding hunter-gatherer populations – that there wasn’t any reason for them to engage in intergroup warfare because they had no settled place or immovable possessions – nothing to fight for or protect.
“This story demonstrates what humans are capable of doing to each other when they are subject to the pressures of the environment and resource availability – in this case, caused by climate change. Finding ourselves in the midst of our current climate emergency, we should reflect on the capacities of humans and what we can learn about ourselves through these stories. Unfortunately, it is certainly not our capacity to remember our histories that strikes me – it’s our capacity to forget them.”
The discovery in Kenya made headlines, pushing Power into science communication, which she relished and still does. “We must engage the public in these opportunities for understanding the human experience and recognise that we’re part of a continuum. The past is deeply connected with and enmeshed in the present and the future. I would like to see those of us engaged in all historical, archaeological, archival and museological disciplines us having a much bigger role in public discourse,” she says.
“Why aren’t we permanently and consistently consulting government? Why aren’t we permanently and consistently engaged in large-scale scientific research projects to better understand and contextualise the cultural aspects of these endeavours and their historical situations? So much of what we’re doing is looking towards the future, which is fantastic, but I think we’ll end up somewhat lost if we don’t take the time to consider and respond to the lessons of the past.”
Power was the first Australian to win a national award for tertiary teaching while still a doctoral student. “My approach to teaching is that learning is a community exercise,” she says. “I learn as much from my students as I would hope that they do from me, but also I facilitate a space in which they can learn from each other. I believe that when people are engaged and contributing to their own learning and the learning of others, it is a far more fulfilling experience.”
Power’s perception of death hasn’t changed since childhood. But her perception of life has changed profoundly.
There is nothing like looking into the face of someone who was alive 5,000 years ago to tell you that life is such a precious gift, and that every single moment matters,” she says. “Ultimately, mine is an embodied love story of the inextricable links between science and culture. I want to share that love story with the world.”
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Article by Iain Scott
Photo credit: Joanne Stephan
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