I had a strange professor when I was pursuing my undergraduate anthropology degree. We'll call him Professor Hagar, though that of course wasn't his name. I took three courses with Professor Hagar, and he didn't teach a single one of them. I don't mean he sat around and played YouTube videos or had a student assistant lead discussions or anything like that. I mean I had three classes (all online) where no work was assigned, no lectures were given, no readings were posted, just... nothing. I'm a bit embarrassed about the fact that I, officially, got As in Anthropological Writing, Archaeology of Mexico, and Primate Ecology despite not learning a single thing in any of those classes.
Professor Hagar didn't teach. We'd receive occasional emails from him, apologizing for the late start to the class, citing this or that excuse, promising he'd properly start the class soon and he just never would. Not once, three times in three different semesters. My fellow students and I were so puzzled as to how he wasn't fired because the students were constantly complaining about him to the higher brass.
Eventually I got a student job because the university was sitting on a sizable repository of archaeological materials: mostly artifacts associated with Chumash, Paiute, Yokut, and Shoshone people, as well as a few pieces of human remains that were collected and taken back to the school in the 1950s-70s. A great deal of those materials were now illegal for the university to store under California's Native American Graves Protection and Reparation Act.
I was hired to help inventory the repository and clean it up so we could get those artifacts back to the tribes and nations to which they belong. Professor Hagar was the guy in charge of the project. The first thing I noticed about him on the first day I met him was his long, blonde, curly wig that looked like it had been designed specifically with early 2000s Sammy Hagar in mind, hence the pseudonym. I was surprised to see him the next day with a suave, chestnut brown, Tucker Carlson-looking wig on. The dude had at least a dozen wigs and would cycle through them every day.
He would constantly show up hours late and walk around campus strumming a guitar after smoking weed in his car. He spent more time trying to get me to play drums in his band than he did directing my work on the repository. It should come as no surprise that the repository did not get sorted out and no artifacts got repatriated that semester and as far as I know it's still in a complete shambles.
However, he was an experienced archaeologist and I was able to learn from him just by sitting in his office and picking his brain about the Great Basin and northern Mexico, his two specialties. He actually ended up informing the way I view archaeology as a whole more than any other anthropology/archaeology professor I had in one small conversation I had with him.
He basically just posed a question to me. Is it worth digging up human remains and running diagnostic tests if you're able to learn something and contribute to archaeology as a science? Learn something about the dietary patterns of someone living in the Coso Mountains a thousand years ago, say, or something in the DNA pattern of a coastal person living 15,000 years ago to help trace early migration? What about someone local, who lived a hundred years ago? Who has living relatives who you will undoubtedly cause pain to by exhuming the body? Where is that line drawn? What amount of knowledge gained makes causing pain to living people worth it?
I've worked as a professional archaeologist for a little over two years now, and I think about those questions regularly. I think I've mostly come to the conclusion that no amount of pain caused to living people will make any amount of scientific learning worth it, at least in the realm of archaeology. If archaeology doesn't serve the living, what's the point? It's a perspective I'm carrying with me as I shift my focus to a Master's degree in history. If history doesn't serve the living, what's the point?
It's a perspective I'm not sure I would have landed on, at least not yet, had it not been for this weird, flaky, middle-aged stoner in his Sammy Hagar wig.