Your Hosts

The Dirt Podcast is written, recorded, edited, produced, and managed by Dr. Anna Goldfield and Amber Zambelli for distribution via the Archaeology Podcast Network.

Anna (right) with a partially mummified fox with whom she became acquainted at the Boston University forensic anthropology teaching body farm.

Amber Zambelli 

Amber is a writer and former PhD student in Near Eastern Studies at University of California, Berkeley, where her focus was the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula. Since grad school, most of her work has been academia-adjacent: packaging graduate and faculty research on Western Asia and North Africa for K-14 and public audience consumption and coordinating logistics for an international education nonprofit, as well as students and scholars the world over. She is endlessly fascinated by intellectual history, how we have come to think the things we do, and how, by making research and knowledge more accessible, we can change disciplines for the better. She also manages finances for the show and its initiatives.  

Anna Goldfield

Anna Goldfield has a Ph.D in archaeology, and wrote a dissertation about Neanderthal diet, fire use, and extinction. After seven years of doing that, she decided that actually, science communication and outreach are where it’s at. Now, in addition to hosting The Dirt, Anna is a producer for the Kids’ Podcast team at American Public Media Group. She spends workdays writing scripts about concrete and butts and sweat and robots and stress and sharks, and making silly noises into a microphone. On weekends, she writes scripts about archaeology and anthropology, and makes slightly less silly noises into a microphone with Amber. She also is the artist behind all Dirt graphics and the designs you find in our store.  

 

Amber loves all forms of literacy (as she demonstrates here in Abu Dhabi, UAE by posing behind a sign that says "Read!"), but she loves science literacy most of all. She has possibly never worn a fedora before or since this photo was taken.

The Team

In matters of social media engagement and transcription of our catalog of episodes, we are supported by some phenomenal people who expand The Dirt’s reach further than we could ever hope to do on our own.

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Jenna Hendrick, Producer

Jenna keeps The Dirt moving on social media and assists with logistics and thought partnership on special initiatives.

Photo of a young Indigenous man in a blue t-shirt and glasses with a side part in short hair, smiling for the camera

Elijah Whalen,

Transcriptionist

Elijah is an Anthropology major and Pre-Medical student. Elijah is Choctaw/Chickasaw and Chippewa. His indigenous roots got him interested in anthropology and archaeology. Elijah has previous experience with lab research and field surveys in the Spring and Summer of 2021. He loves anthropology because it opens the door for exploring the unwritten history of all peoples.

Rea Ballard, Transcription

Reagan Ballard is a Hornet at Booker T Washington in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She loves reading and literature, writing, social activism, and all things science. She hopes to major in sociology in college as a pre-medicine candidate. What Reagan loves about anthropology is how it makes science personal- it take the hard facts and applies them with emotion and integrity.

Lauren Jablonski, Transcription

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Jace Hill, Transcriptionist

Jace is an undergraduate student at The University of Oklahoma double majoring in Anthropology and Psychology and minoring in French. Jace’s area of academic interest is in the study of human behavior and he is eager to share his love for anthropology with others.

Photo of a Black woman smiling and leaning against a brick wall, smiling at the camera with her hair in a blond ponytail, wearing tan pants and a knit sweater that says Harvard

Abbey Sempebwa, Transcriptionist

Abbey Sempebwa is a spring '21 graduate from the University of Oklahoma. She graduated with a multidisciplinary studies degree in Museum Anthropology and is a current Museum Studies graduate student at Harvard University. She hopes to also pursue her doctorates in Classics and later become a museum curator or conservator. Abbey loves reading, history (@abbeytheecurator on instagram), language, and studying classical & renaissance archaeology.