Archaeological Experience

During the summer of 1998 I was an assistant trench supervisor at the Poggio Colla Excavations in Mugello (Florence), Italy, led by Greg Warden from Southern Methodist University. That summer I supervised, directed, and taught field methods to 30 graduate and undergraduate students as well as performed and documented excavation.

From 1997-1998 I performed an independent remote sensing project at Fort Bellefontaine, St. Louis Missouri, the first military fort established west of the Mississippi River. Using magnetometry, the purpose of this project was to determine contours of the original fort walls without excavation and to ascertain hidden features on excavated and non-excavated areas of the site. I worked closely with the site archaeologist to understand and interpret the remote sensing data that I collected along with geophysics students.  While the results did not lead to an exact placement of the walls themselves, the technique yielded other valuable information about the site.

In the fall of 1997, as an undergraduate student at Washington University, I participated in experiments at Folsom, New Mexico led by David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University. We used remote sensing to measure the contours of the site. I collected and interpreted the remote sensing data from several techniques performed at the site, along with geophysics students. The technique and data derived were used to evaluate current hypotheses surrounding the archaeological evidence found there.

In the summer of 1997 I was an excavator at the Bioarchaeological Field School in Sa’ad, Jordan, sponsored by the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan. This site dates to the late Roman and early Byzantine period and the excavation was under the direction of Jerome Rose. I gained experience in excavating a necropolis site, wrote comprehensive reports on excavated materials, and drew maps of sites by hand and by using global positioning systems (GPS).

In the summer of 1996, I participated in the Athenian Agora Excavations sponsored by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens under the direction of John Camp. While there I was an excavator and conservation assistant. My duties included excavating trenches from varying contexts and time periods; participating in all aspects of the excavations; creating and implementing a computer database for results of chemical analyses of archaeological samples. This excavation site provided the samples used in my Washington University senior thesis undertaken in 1998-1999.