FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Midday Mobile - Monday, September 9 - Hour 2 - Fan Favorite USA Anthropologist Dr Phillip Carr joins the show
be no personal nor direct attacks on anyone and I would ask that you please try to keep down the loud cheering and the clapping there will be no booing and no unruly behavior. With that this is painful and it will be for a long time. After all these are a couple of high stepping turkeys and you know what to say about a high stepper. No step too high for a high stepper. This is midday mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 1065. Well Sean is a tough guy. I mean I think everybody knows that you know Sean he took some licks he hangs in there. Yeah what's wrong with the beer we got. I mean the beer we got drank pretty good don't it. Did you hear what I said. So this is a bad council. I had no dollar bonds in that doesn't suck if you don't like it you're bad. Last question were you high on drugs last question right away we go FM Talk 1065 midday mobile on this Monday glad to have you all along and good to start off this conversation get this man back in studio and get ready phone number and text line 34301063430106. This like tomorrow is asked the sheriff on the show. Today is asked Dr. Carr on the show as well as Philip Carr from the University of South Alabama joins us again good to talk to you. Good to talk to you Sean. Last time we were talking I've mentioned this to the folks earlier. You were detailing the work y'all had done you and your team where the proposed I caught the on ramp to the bridge whatever to that 10 mobile river bridge y'all were tasked with doing the archaeology work there and the stuff you found I mean I'm very fascinated by older history and we'll talk about that today. You found stuff up to 1950s or something like that like. We did we did and you know it's that part of our past is sort of in some people's memories who are still alive today and yet it often doesn't get much attention in our history classes because it is so recent yet there was profound changes in the 1950s and 1960s particularly in mobile with urban renewal and how that changed the city. No you sold me on it because I am that person that wants to push past that and go back you know I want to talk about Native Americans I want to talk about early Europeans and you're like yeah but Sean look at this so there's definitely some consequence to that too in the work y'all did. We think so you know we're working on telling that story of mobiles more recent history what did I 10 and urban renewal and other things recast the city change neighborhoods change the downtown things of that nature so I think it's a fascinating part of the city's history that we don't want to overlook for sure for sure and that's why you did the stuff and you've got and you have the stuff now to tell the story we have the stuff and what's really neat is that we worked with a cultural anthropologist at the USA Marx library Dr. Ryan Marinny who did some really extensive oral histories in the down the Bay neighborhood and that's going to complement the stuff the stuff can only tell us so much but you combine that with the archival history and the oral accounts and you really start to have a synergistic picture of the past you can't get with any source alone that makes it probably a little easier than when you're trying to tell me we're talking about Mississippi and culture and bounds of the delta and you have the stuff but you know exactly have the newspaper clippings from what was going on then we do not have the newspaper clippings that we you know can't you know ask folks very easily with that without the time machine so right it you know archaeology as one archaeologist says you know it's not rocket science it's harder than rocket science because you can test whether the rocket goes up or doesn't go up in archaeology we are often have indirect evidence to test things in general archaeology and how it fits in with anthropology because this is part i mean this one does exist one does exist throughout the other but one benefits the other absolutely so anthropology is the study of humans and cultural anthropologists we might be most familiar with study humans today and across different ethnicities different cultures and so forth but the archaeologists add time depth to to that study of of humans and if we want to understand to me human problems today and work to solve those problems it's studying humans in the past seeing how that led to our situation in the present and hopefully understand the processes that got us here and then maybe we can shape those processes to get to the future we want and good when you got the you got the future figured out please let me know we're working on it okay we'll get that and i mean but this does have like a a physical and geographic manifestation to something we've talked about in the past that if you look around somewhere and i'm not let's look at natural features a place where you'd want to put uh your river camp or somewhere you want to put that then there's a chance right there that somebody's been there before you dig in those spots it's amazing just the time i've spent in the mobile tensile delta growing up and the places where you know people have a camper a cool spot or less camp there and you realize that then people go back and say look i found these arrow heads here i found this charred fire from way way down in the silt and all that somebody else before you went yeah it's pretty good spot too you're absolutely right you know uh access to water a well-drained hill or or little little uh elevated area people yes have been over a long period in my i don't know exactly where that you know we think that this dig might be somewhere around here but you go if i was a person back then where would i have set up shop do you ever do anything like that we really do we call judge mental examination so when we go out to do an archaeological survey we have our systematic so every 30 meters you dig what we call a shovel test you screen the soil so a shovel test about 30 centimeters in diameter you excavate it down to you hit subsoil sometimes that's 20 or 30 centimeters if you're on a deflated ridge top sometimes if you're you know you can go down a meter or more and you know to the length of your shovel and you still haven't hit a subsoil you're still in a sandy soil we screen all of that but sometimes those 30 meter systematic shovel tests don't get to a landform you're like that's where people actually live we're gonna go put some judge middles up there even though we you know in a sense don't have to base on the the what the grid says but that's where then you know you often hit the site with those judge middles yeah you go and you know where would i be i'd probably be right there that's where they are as well and i want to talk about this too because uh new book here southern footprints exploring gulf coast archaeology first of all you handed this to me i'd seen a picture of it online but you handed it to me and just in a few minutes toward the news i am captured just by the chapters that i'm fascinated with and the photographs this is beautiful thank you this is awesome tell me about this book exploring gulf coast archaeology well you know i want to credit greg wazokoff who's the lead author on there and he let me write his coattails on this and uh been my colleague and mentor for uh 25 years at the university of south alabama um so greg's retired now and um he is working harder in retirement uh or as hard in retirement as he did while he was here but he's able to focus on his research so this is something this is his vision um about 40 different projects are highlighted here they go back uh into the the deep past the native american past up until um relatively recent in time and tells the story of the gulf coast but mainly you know with mobile at its center we go into Mississippi we you know um go go certainly into Baldwin county and further east in alabama uh but it's it's uh these stories of our past that are uh highlighted with photos and in short vignettes that hopefully give folks a taste of what uh archaeology is about in terms of technique but also what we've learned yeah and what we've learned about where we live and that's what's so neat you know into conversations like i'll talk to my buddy Bill Finch and we're talking about how people are coming you know grew up watching nature shows and it was always the masa mirror uh in in africa or it's the north pole and all these things are majestic and and we're going to take you to Everest we're going to go you know into the Hindu Kush but here where i grew up we we have this amazing biodiversity and nature that that over the last 20 years i've fallen in love with same thing here we the if you watch the movie about them digging for things in archaeology it was never here it was always in some sandy dusty place but here we have this wealth of history that's under our feet we absolutely do it is a amazing place to be an archaeologist you know some folks when i tell them an archaeologist they want to know well when have you been to egypt or greece because people think yeah and then when i tell them i've never been to either place it look at me like you might not really be an archaeologist if you haven't been to egypt or greece but i say they've got nothing on south alabama uh though you said that time and time again and make that argument to folks that the reason why that they've got nothing on south alabama well because we have a long past here uh native peoples have been here for at least 15 000 years they have built great uh towns they've built great monuments and we can trace that human trajectory to the present and there's been tremendous change that we can witness so you know as archaeologists we can have the opportunity to look at everyday life here but also look at the sweep of human history that's it's occurred here and in an environment that's unique that's you know arguably at times more plentiful than than than those in egypt or greece or anywhere else and other times quite difficult to adapt to we have hurricanes that makes you know as among some other things that make us unique can you imagine that having that with no forecasting just all of a sudden it's there right that's a that's a game changer uh as as you look at the history here there's certain things that stand out there still in i guess common not maybe not common knowledge but of things you dress like the shell mounds at dolphin island okay so there's something that everybody said oh yeah there's a shell mounds and then they kind of move past but then how did how did they get there right how did those shell mounds get there they you know um native peoples uh who were indigenous to these areas they were living off the landscape or in certain periods of time they spent their time with their families um doing a variety of things like we do on the on the gulf coast and uh living their everyday life and through accumulations over tens and hundreds of of years you get these shell mounds that accumulate and for us their evidence of what that everyday life um was like and and it's you know they're not built in a day right it's it's it's an accumulation of of time um but it is also a record then of those everyday occurrences yeah i just you know i always wondered looking at them is it just because this is midden this is the this is the garbage spot or did that give them to build that mound up i'm going to talk about like the bottle creek and all that the advantages of that but down there dolphin island was that just that's where the trash pile was or was it hey let's pile this up because it gets us above water if there's a storm surge or say probably both yeah probably both i'm you know the the first folks that were there for maybe a season um then maybe think much about the long-term consequences but as they kept returning to that place uh they weren't there year-round we don't believe but when they returned to that place or their uh descendants returned to that place uh hey this is actually having an impact on the landscape we're modifying it in a way that's beneficial to us yeah the the idea too that's what i'd love to talk about as well that there was no landscape modification before europeans arrived uh that's silly right that's human beings you put us anywhere and we're gonna modify something we we certainly do just arm your presence begins to modify it and you know one of the things that uh that most people didn't realize and i certainly didn't realize until i became you know much more uh in learned about archaeology is that native peoples indigenous peoples modified this landscape such that they were managing the forest so um what the colonists who first came here thought of as sort of natural conditions were actually managed conditions and then after the uh native peoples are relocated west of the missippi river instead of being able to drive carts through forests that they talk about early on the forest becomes tangled with undergrowth because there's no longer someone there managing the forest with fire and other other things i i talked to my i talked to my children one of them here today when we're doing prescribed fires on our our family place we have longleaf and doing that i said what we're doing it's not real new it's just getting back in fashion you know since they get absolutely going on for a long time all right we go the news and come back i had to get questions already for dr car you can get them in at three four three zero one zero six new book southern footprints exploring gulf coast archaeology somebody wants to pick up a copy how where do they go university of alabama press uh sells them online um amazon has them as well and at the uh usa archaeology museum there's copies on sale locally and before we wrap up i'm gonna let him talk more about the museum too every time people like we have that here oh yeah we have that here be right back you're listening to mid-day mobile with Sean Sullivan on fm talk 106 five like 123 fm talk 106 five mid-day mobile ask a phone question here i'm just a quick one here robert had called he said how long does the body have to be buried before you can be digging it up i don't know what he's planning out and sins but uh yeah so you know with human remains we don't disturb human remains archaeologist when you come upon them in a dig what what do you do we call a corner okay is the first thing that we do and so the corner is going to make a determination if those remains are within 50 years old or older if it's older than 50 years then they could be excavated if we have a reason to excavate them um we would then get like a warrant excavator and how do you want a case the corner makes makes the decision then we could excavate so then it's will will we add scientific knowledge base what's the benefit y'all just doing this to do this or tell me why you're gonna write so we would do it if we wanted to learn something very specific up you know what human remains do tell you about an individual that you can't really get from the artifact so you can learn about uh diet disease and a variety of things from the human skeleton that you can't get from from artifacts alone but it you know we don't want to excavate human remains unless there's a real reason to and often it's you know something's going to be built here and we need to relocate those human remains you know i think about the things you delineated there that you can learn from that skeleton some of those things you can see but with new technology too i hear things all the time they take a sample of that bone and they come back with all these different things about you know what their life must have been like or what they're reading and those kind of things they can do a variety of things one of the you know your teeth formation uh your teeth form when you're uh a young and that actually retained a chemical signature of the water and have in the places so the minerals that did you were consuming at the time your teeth were forming so uh you can compare that to say where you found the individual and did they migrate did they come from somewhere relatively close by or from a long distance so there's just some really wow science that can be done with with human remains but you want to have descendant permission if you're going to do that um sure yeah okay i would have and this is something we talked about during the break mentioned that canal the stories i don't have eight years old out but the canal down south Baldwin county right that uh look like an i don't know mississippi and period or when you'll think that was a little bit earlier but you know but back to people doing people stuff no matter when that they wanted to find a faster way they did the exact question they dug a canal where this is down south Baldwin right yeah it is in south Baldwin county and it was actually a local individual who brought this hey we we have this uh uh feature on the landscape it it doesn't seem to fit can you guys come and investigate this and and Greg Walsakov my co-author he he did the led that work and brought in an archaeologist geo-archaeologist um Howard Seer to help us uh figure out exactly what we had going on there and then um LiDAR was something that we were able to use to trace that out so you know it starts with someone who's familiar with the landscape saying hey this looks something like something different and then it you know become something that is pretty unique again for for this area i mean you have canals and things other places but right here along the northern gulf coast this is a special feature i love it because you learn about history but you learned that people are people too because they're like okay i get from here to here i gotta carry stuff i'd rather carry it in a canoe than i would on my shoulders so i mean you talk about thousands of years ago and people did the same stuff be like yeah that's right they you know what if we could uh put some labor into this canal so digging it's going to take some some effort and it's going to take some know-how in terms of water rise and water receding uh so a variety of things going into it but it is going to save us time in the long run if we invest in our time in it now it's so cool and you mentioned LiDAR and so dr car immediately he knows he mentioned slide dar here comes Sullivan with his the lost lost uh village or city of maul billa there's i mean my whole life i've been reading books here it was here and now it's over there and now it's over there and then some a couple years ago LiDAR says they can see the representation of where it was where are we and then that was it's like traded around the internet is like here's the hottest new thing you know it it does have that attention getting uh and and it you know the story is a fascinating story of about this you know huge encounter between europeans and native peoples and uh the pitched battle and things of that nature but we we're still you know we do not have an exact location LiDAR hasn't revealed anything that specific yet and the artifacts that date to that time period are you know uh you asked dr ashley dumas at the university of west Alabama is tracing those out and i think she's going to have us an answer here in the next few years okay so we'll have to keep our eye on her work and it's come LiDAR but also combined which is good oh on the ground folks out there you know her and her crew looking for the artifactial evidence it's it's neat the link between these things we're talking about archaeology linking with anthropology and the value there and then there's history nerds like me that are looking to archaeology looking to anthropology to fit in a keystone or something into this history we have there's this narrative and here's the city of maubilla and you know you and and where was it and then so it's been written about but then if somebody can tell you that's where it was then it i don't know it just makes history more interesting to me it does it it comes to life you fit that in and then then you have other potential aha's oh it was there so what does that mean how to you know that ripple effect from other aspects of history and and how that fits in so i think that keystone you mentioned is is really important there and it it um you know it's a signature event in the gulf coast past okay coming back for the break because i gotta i get asked about cave paintings too in drawings as well at the book out now southern footprints exploring gulf coast archaeology what a beautiful book right here i cannot wait to dive into it on sale now you can go to amazon you said you got university of alabama press and also get it at the at the museum the usa archaeology museum all right good stuff coming right back this is mid-day mobile with shawn selvan on fm talk one oh six five right one thirty three fm talk one oh six five and mid-day mobile on this one day check in with my buddy ron at mobile bay coins and find jewelry always talk about precious metals and we talked about how you can buy them coins and different sizes but you mentioned something during the news break to me fractional gold and silver what's that may i know what fractions are ron but what are we talking about yeah so with the gold fractions of an ounce you can get really small but one tenth and one quarter ounce american gold e gold kurug uh kurug lands and maple east we're heavily stocked on them right now so i mean usually the premiums are much higher so we got a really good deal on fractional gold and ten ounce silver bars and hundred ounce silver bars we purchased a lot and it put us over our maximum inventory in mouth so we get a great deal so i mean we sold about three-fourths of what we have we've been talking about it for a couple weeks but they're still so available somebody must get a great deal on gold or silver yeah that would be everybody so we go do you know what ron i don't want to get a great deal on it a lot of people have come in and since we've been talking about it so keep them coming all right for tell folks how to who haven't shown up before how they get there where they find you well yeah we're located at 2204 government street in midtown and call us at the shop 251725 1590 or find us on the web at mobilebaitcoins.com thank you ron thank you all right uh there goes ron at mobilebaitcoins and find jewelry continue our conversation with dr phillip carr university south alabama anthropologist author uh bombavant adventurer never been to each he's a archaea he's done never paint anthropon never been to egypt that's right hey it's it's it's just do your work here like you got stories to tell right here at home we we absolutely do have these stories right here at home and uh you know each is still on the bucket list but uh me too you know it you know if it doesn't happen i'm you know i will live have lived a fulfilled life here on the on the gulf coast yeah i've even got uh i've got my mother who went raster to egypt on my you know she listened to me yak on about as a child but she came back she said i'm with you i don't know how they built them either the pyramids i don't know how they built them either i just i can't figure it out but you know i know there's explanations but none of them i'm like yeah that's it's a lot of weight to move at one time a lot of blood sweat and tears yeah for sure oh by the way to people are asking uh it's the what's the fastest way shawn in ballwin county said amazon's quoting october delivery for your book anywhere quicker than that at the museum at the school copies at the museum yeah there's copies at the usa archaeology museum let's mention that too because yeah you know you have events that uh for people to come out and take part in the museum but that's not the only time it's open that's right uh tuesday through friday and some saturday's their facebook page will give you the details on on which saturday's that they have an event or or they're open but it's um and actually uh greg and i are talking about southern footprints tomorrow at three thirty at the archaeology museum so we're going to give a little bit of uh you know maybe a little more than a teaser but a quick uh and run through the book and give people some ideas of of you know what it was like to be part of the archaeology here on the gulf coast so that'll happen at the museum tomorrow at three thirty now do we need advanced tickets or anything we just walk in and how's that work it's just a walk in and you know typically it's it's you know not a huge crowd you know the room holds about forty or so but uh you know we would love to have folks uh come for that and and visit and we'll we'll figure it out yeah i want to talk as well uh you about uh the porch band of creek indians and creek indians here and i'm you know very vested in the history of the creek indians but somebody asked me this the other day we're talking about it and i gave them my answer they said how did even though creeks removed you know these several waves moved west uh alto cahoman i'm gonna talk about that in a second but we still have the porch band of creek indians here i used this is me in selvanese i said because they didn't find them it's why these creeks got to say is that accurate or is that that that's part of it these are the people that stayed on land they didn't find they didn't get removed and then they stayed where they their ancestral home was and you know they had done some of the ancestors of the porch band of creek indians had worked with u.s. federal government and were given um some lands in treaties specifically for them for some of that service that they had provided as scouts and and other because of people think about creek indian war you had red sticks and white sticks and the white sticks were fighting you know with the europeans a lot of times against the red stick creeks you had a a bunch of different trunks too exactly so a very complex sort of interactions there just like today not everyone agrees and uh they you know different sides can form uh along those lines so so the the porch band descendants today um have reservation lands here in the state of alabama because they both had access to those lands through the the government and and wanted to stay behind what is the exhibit we were talking about an email the other day you're going to so that's the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma so these the Choctaw's which were i mean this was kind of buffer zone between creeks and Choctaw's in this neighborhood right i mean west of the town big b more Choctaw well east you know creeks southwest alabama is Choctaw country yeah this one so yeah this is like the the creeks were i mean i know this is overly simplified but i've always said you know as you're going up the river yeah alabama river over there you know mostly creeks west of you know bobby orton big b river mostly Choctaw yeah you could you could set you know say that although i think the Choctaw would push you a little bit further east but you know in terms of a general dividing you know that that gives a people a sense of uh you're right in Choctaw you know certainly in Mississippi and and a big presence there and you know the Chickasaw we've we've got a number of groups uh in uh that would need to be considered but the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma the they were moved from here to Oklahoma the way creeks removed Oklahoma right that that's what we write and you know spoke that you know so a similar language family Muskogee um so the dialect that the Choctaw still speak today western Muskogee versus the eastern Muskogee that the creek speak and and so there's uh some intelligible words between them like we might have between uh you know English and German okay so that's I never had somebody explain it to me how close they or how distant so they're not close like uh you know i would even like French or French Creole they are is just i mean they're related but English and German have a lot of same words and structure but i don't understand a German speaker who just talks to me except they say a word here and there that's right okay so that's how different yeah would be be that level of of difference in in the language and um so the the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma have a wonderful cultural center in Durant, Oklahoma and they are have a temporary exhibit there with artifacts that their ancestors gifted to the French back in the 1700s and now they've come back from France to be exhibited in the states for a period of time yeah so they this stuff that from here in the United States in the Choctaw nation went to France yeah and then came back and it's that whole we don't have time for it but that whole how the French interacted i know everything's not the same but in more cases and not the way the French interacted with Native Americans versus English and other extractions right the French seem to work better with Native Americans than than the English uh is that fair i i think so it was certainly more of a you know live a one layer and they allies yeah you know i think there was an ally ship without the French really thinking so much about um colonizing and and certainly people did come here from France to live but it wasn't the same push right it would they just kind of doing business and and and by the way i've gotten some pictures here and people do this every time you're on sending me artifacts somebody's found here Stapleton in Baldwin County maybe i can send these on to you and even they're asking for you know to look at them and where they came from but what is so neat in conversations we've had before which is why you have to come back that people find things here people find things on the and the Tom Bigby River in Washington County well it was found there it was used there but that thing came maybe from up on the paint rock river in north Alabama right because we didn't have the rocks down here that's absolutely right so and you've got you've got uh items moving being traded but you also have people moving so you have both of those situations so just and i'll send these on and or you can get in touch with dr car directly um your email p car at south alabama dot edu okay in texture i'll put that in the text back to you but yeah that that's you know people find things oh i found this in Baldwin County i found this in Mobile County and yes obviously that was its resting place but it the church or whatever came from somewhere yeah where it was manufactured where it was used and you'll have found stuff like the distances just give me like a takeaway like the distance between where something would have been quarried that's not mine i guess would be quarried and where it was found if people think you know days of american's only like lived in this very parochial area stuff what thousand miles yeah yeah well i mean we've got a traffled gulf coast shell that ends up in michigan and we've got cold hammered copper from Michigan that comes down to the gulf coast and sort of everything in between that's that's something it is as we as technology improves to something you and i've talked about off air that you have these judgment these theories these ideas that came out about you know that we think this this and this about you know about history about anthropologists ancient cultures how much of the difference is technology in confirming those are denying those is it a yearly event is it a decade an event that you go wow okay that thing is true or that thing wasn't true like you know i in some ways it's it's sort of the scale of how big the idea is you know so um big ideas sort of get incremental evidence and and become confirmed but you know it's probably annually that that's something new is known or confirmed that you know we we maybe guessed at or hypothesized about so the technological change and what it's doing is really transforming our understanding of the human past um you know when we go back he's moving it things i read he keeps moving it back often yeah we we had sort of a uh you know oh it can't be that old sort of attitude and then the science you know and you know it's not archaeologists that are doing the uh radiometric dating it's physicists that are doing this we've got to use them to give a shout out to the physicist a a exactly give the shout out to the physicist we send them a sample and and they can do their high-tech work and and come back with a date and we go most of the time go wow we didn't think it was that old speaking which before we wrap up show we traded emails about some cave art talk about this story then the age on this so in denisia we have cave art now 51,200 years ago that 51,200 years ago right so you know when you think about last go is is in france the the famous cave art there you know 30,000 plus years ago and that it's it's fabulous art and that was for not for novices like me that was seemed like the genesis of it like that's the oldest thing and everything comes after that that that has been sort of what you know as you were pointing out that you know science sort of accepted or we were kind of like well that's that's the beginning that's the start and and we're finding that that the story is much more complex than maybe we we ever would have considered and you know now the the hypothesis is is that culture bearing ancestors maybe 150,000 years ago 200,000 years ago we don't have the evidence but looking at the what if we moved at these big like you and you not talking about the footprints at white sands if we move it by 10 20,000 years in a shop when the stuff comes back I think you could say it's a jump ball whether it goes I mean I would say it's just as much a chance as it does go back another 100,000 then then it doesn't that right right it didn't spring up there as as complex and and you know it happened to hang around for us to date so yes I think it wouldn't be you know it would we would not be surprised as archaeologists to think it pushes back that far and one of the things it ties to the genetics suggests that our ancestors came out of Africa about 150 to 200,000 years ago and what allowed them to sort of become dominant is is they were culture bearing whereas before they may not have they they had you think there was theory town versus science you think there were non-culture bearing and culture bearing groups of humans passing each other on the Savannah kind of thing or in the step or yes yeah that that you know and in this group had moved on that much more than this other group that was traveling the same trail right so that fascinating and it really your definition of culture matters a lot here you know because technology has been around a long time and technology certainly part of culture but it's not maybe the most important point in the reason that this story in Indonesia is so fascinating is it's not just art it's not just you know abstract but it looks you know they're making the argument that this is storytelling so you're talking about that's a culture yeah there you go when it's when you're really manipulating symbols that's what we do right you can you can chimps will make tools but you try to explain to a chimp this is water and this is holy water chimp doesn't get that right or like hey you know your great great chimp grandfather did such and there's no right they have no idea right right so you know we have a brain that can comprehend symbols we actually sort of are drawn to the symbolic aspects of culture that's why arts are so prominent in our societies today still I mean we've been like everything we talked about the things we're doing now we've been doing for a long time we have been and you know we think of ourselves as quite quite new and innovative and things but we have a history of it and and that's it's a fascinating history and we should celebrate absolutely the book now southern footprints exploring Gulf Coast archaeology this is something could do a two for one they could show up tomorrow you said at the museum 330 330 330 here you and Dr. Russell Cough talk and then by the book while they're there but if they can't the copies are available there University of Alabama press is a publisher we really thankful for them working with us just you know they they helped make sure that we could get this published and then Amazon also but it sounds like it may be a while before Amazon is ready to distribute oh by it by it here locally that's right that's right in person do the old-fashioned thing and as well the museum you said even if they can't make it out for this event the museum is open Tuesday through Friday all right Dr. Carr as always I mean it's just the tip of the dig here when I talk to you tip of the dig all right we'll get you back soon thank you all right on on the way time for a check up and we'll wrap it up here on the day mobile here in my car this is midday mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM talk 1065 welcome back to midday mobile in time for a check up here on FM talk 1065 and joining us from Southern Cancer Center Michelle Sanford nurse practitioner good to see you thanks for coming in thank you thanks for having me okay so we're gonna get an education like we always do when folks from Southern Cancer Center come in first up genetic testing now genetic testing seems to be on every other conversation these days but in the world of fighting cancer would it from your perspective genetic testing what is it we have two different types of genetic testing but the most common type that people actually come to see us about that may not have cancer or and especially those that do have cancer is testing them to see if they were born with any genes that predispose them to cancer so people that are healthy but have a lot of cancer in their family tree can come in and see if they've inherited anything that can predispose them to cancer and then people who already have cancer can get tested for the same thing genes that they were born with that could have predisposed them to getting the cancer that they have and sometimes we can use those results for treatment options because we do have some treatments that go with some gene mutations and then we can also use that information to screen them for other cancers that they could be predisposed to yeah no conversation we've had before with doctors from Southern Cancer Center what you said there's certain cancer treatments that are for certain cancers not all they're not all the same that's correct yes everybody's treatment is we have precision medicine now so even people with the with breast cancer don't get the same treatment it's broken down into what type of specific cancer is it what does it respond to what markers are on the cancer cell and do genetics play a role or genetic mutations play a role in it because some of the mutations do have a specific treatment that target it okay so if i'm thinking the things you said here i probably you know we want to get this how do i do it i mean do i do i need to get a referral what do i do you do not have to have a referral so you can actually look at our website and there's a list of in the genetics section there would be an outline as to what people would qualify for genetic testing usually your primary care doctor or if you're a female your OBGYN and even your urologist would should have a checklist that can that you can go through to see if you would qualify for genetic testing so anybody that really has a specific or a significant family history of cancer in their family especially breast prostate pancreatic ovarian and colon cancers so usually if you have somebody who's had cancer under the age of 50 in your family that is one of those breast ovarian prostate pancreatic or colon if you have two close family members say a sister and a mother or a mother and an aunt that have the same type of cancer or the same family of cancer so breast ovarian pancreatic and prostate are related so if you have somebody who's close to you that had breast cancer and an uncle that had significant prostate cancer like metastatic to the bone that would be something that you'd want to um you know ask about genetic testing and that type of person okay how do y'all do it what's the for at like risk procedure so we screen you first to um make sure that you qualify for testing because we don't want to add any unnecessary copays um you know to a person if they're if the test isn't right for them so we make sure that this test is right for the person and then um we also go through the risks and benefits of testing because there are risks the risks can be um emotional stress of a positive result um uh the old ignorance is bliss yeah it can be bliss and it can also be stressful too so we go through each side how it can be stressful to know or it can be stressful not to know um we also do the um go over the effects that it could have on your ability to get things like a life insurance it won't affect your ability to get health insurance but it could affect the amount of life insurance you could take out in the future or long-term care insurance so we just make sure that you're aware of everything before you go into the testing to make sure that you're ready for it okay Michelle people want to they've heard these things you said and said yeah I'm probably a candidate for that how they get in touch with you how they get this process they can just call our office number and make an appointment for genetic testing and then we will send them out an information packet it usually goes through the email or their text right now and it's all done online if they're able to and they fill out their family and their health information and they come in to see one of our genetic counselors okay so just uh if they google something cancer center get the phone number call and say yep say i would like to make an appointment for um genetic counseling okay and we only do um genetics for cancers okay all right very good well we appreciate this and appreciate you being on the show thanks Michelle (upbeat music)