On Tuesday we held our first Graduate Colloquium of the semester. IUP students travel all over the country, and even around the globe, over summer break to do archaeological research. We use the first colloquium to give graduate students the opportunity to share their experiences. This year, we had four presentations on thesis research and field schools.

Isabel Srour, a member of the second-year cohort, was the first presenter of the colloquium. She spent her summer doing research on community mapping for the Tell Hisban site in Jordan. Tell Hisban is a site that has been occupied since the early iron age. Isabel’s research involved interviewing locals and attempting to gauge how accessible the archaeological research is to them. One of the objectives of her thesis is to create a website to share information about the site.

Connor Winslow is in his second year at IUP, and he presented on his thesis research at Camp Security, a Revolutionary War prisoner fort in York County. Connor used ground-penetrating-radar (GPR) to find a continuation of the previously excavated palisade wall that encircled the fort. He was then able to excavate test units and examine the features left behind by the wall. He worked alongside volunteers, many of whom were descended from guards and prisoners that occupied the camp.

Nathan Coughlin and Tyler Fanell, also in their second year of the applied archaeology program, presented on their work at IUP’s Squirrel Hill field school. It was their job to direct the students learning at the field school. Located in Westmoreland County, Squirrel Hill is a site listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it represents one of the largest known Monongahela villages in Pennsylvania. This summer, Nathan and Tyler were able to conduct valuable research there while also training a new generation of archaeologists.

Dakota Dickerson and Ryan Devanny presented on the forensic archaeology field school in Baden-Wurttemburg, Germany. Ryan is in his first year at IUP, and Dakota is in her second. They both worked as graduate assistants for Dr. Palmiotto, who is working with the Department of Defense to locate missing service members. Students learned field methods and were able to use GPR. On the weekends they visited various cities throughout Germany. Ryan’s favorite city was Friedrichshafen because they went boating on a lake and visited a zeppelin museum. This trip was an excellent opportunity for students to train in forensic archaeology, visit a new place, and to do important work for the families of service members back home.

Greetings everyone! My name is Brenden Patterson, and I will be managing the blog this year as the Public Archaeology Graduate Assistant. I am in my first year as a graduate student in the Applied Archaeology program here at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and I am looking forward to sharing everything we have going on in the program as the new Public Archaeology GA. I graduated from Iowa State University (in a far away land) with a B.S. in Anthropology and a minor in Biology. I attended field school at Lakeside Laboratory back in Iowa, where we excavated the area surrounding a late nineteenth century cabin tied to a major conflict with the Dakota in the Spirit Lake area. There, I was able to dip my toes into some historical research in combination with our field efforts. That being said, I am mainly interested in bones of all kinds, and I am generally interested in pre-contact archaeology. I spent the last year and a half working for Iowa’s Office of the State Archaeologist as an embedded consultant with the cultural resources team at the Department of Transportation. I did a variety of field work, interacted with the public, and contributed to the Section 106 consultation process. I hope I can use my background to come up with a variety of interesting topics to explore on the blog this year. We will be sharing some of the research our students are conducting at IUP, as well as other highlights like our graduate colloquiums. IUP students: If you have anything you’re excited about and would like to see featured on the blog, just let me know. Stay tuned for more!

IUP’s Applied Archaeology Master’s program produces a lot of graduates who go on to be successful in the field of archaeology, and Mikala Hardie is no different. I reached out to her to get an update on what her thesis was and what she is doing after graduation to share some of the things IUP graduates do with their degrees. Mikala said:

“My thesis was focused on doing a ground penetrating radar and gradiometer survey on Goucher College’s campus to try and find remnants of the enslaved communities’ housing structures. I was able to ground truth features related to two buildings but there was no evidence linking them to the enslaved community. My first job after grad school was field teching for EDR. I actually defended my thesis in a hotel room while I was doing a project with them. After that, I went to probably my favorite job post-grad which was for Phillips Academy Summer Session where I led a group of middle-schoolers through a formal excavation of the old president’s house on their campus. It was so fun to work with a community of young archaeologists and learn how to teach them in both a classroom and field setting. After that, I was hired by Baltimore Community Archaeology Lab out of Towson University to be their project manager. Two undergrads and I worked on a Phase I survey of a local urban park that has been occupied since 9500 B.C.E.. I also got to revisit the skills I learned for my thesis by doing a few GPR surveys both in the urban park and in other parks around the area. That was a temporary position as well but during it I got to meet someone who recruited me for my current, permanent job as a staff archaeologist at Chronicle Heritage (formerly PaleoWest and Commonwealth). This job is a combination of fieldwork and report writing and I really like it so far!”

It sounds like she has been able to accomplish quite a few things since graduation. Mikala provided a great example of some of the things you can do after graduating from IUP. Thank you Mikala!

Hello everyone and welcome back from Winter Break! This semester we have an exciting lineup of blog posts and colloquiums featuring many students from our graduate program. Throughout the next few weeks, blogs will be posted to highlight students working on their thesis and the work they are doing. There will also be posts checking in with students who recently graduated with an update on where they are now. This semester’s posts will also feature plenty of conferences and the students who attend and present at them. So thank you for reading, and look forward to more content coming next week. Now, to officially kick off this semester, we had a guest speaker who explained her work of Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).

Dr. Anneke Janzen is from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Department of Anthropology. She gave us a presentation this past Monday called “New Identificant of Old Bones: Peptide Mass Fingerprinting in Archaeology”. In this talk, she explained what ZooMS is and how it can be used in Zooarchaeology to better identify taxa of animal bones, even when fragmented. This method works by extracting collagen from bone samples using HCl acid, which then has Trypsin added to it. This cleaves the bonds of the proteins in a known pattern, which can then be measured with MALDO-TOF MS. This reading can then be compared with a reference database of known animals, which they are still building.

This technique has many pros, including being extremely time and cost-effective. The entire process only takes around three days to complete and multiple samples can be done at once. It also has a relatively low cost, since it only costs as much as the consumables and the cost to run the samples on the machine, which is low if there is one in-house. It also works really well to get data from old and poorly preserved bone samples. The whole process only needs around 10 grams of bone per sample to work. It can also work when DNA is not present, so it can even work for really degraded samples as is often found in archaeology. This makes this method really good for collections where there are a lot of small and degraded bone fragments that cannot be analyzed morphologically.

This technique also has some cons, as it has issues identifying mammals, where the data cannot always get down to the species level. This means that some mammal species may only get down to something like equine instead of donkey or zebra. However, this also depends on where the work is being done and if there are a lot of closely related species in the region. Since some species are so closely related they may just show up the same. This is also hard to distinguish between domestic and wild animals that are living in the same area. However, for the most part, this is a good method for identifying species from a collection of animal bones.

Dr. Anneke Janzen gave us a fascinating talk on this method of identifying the species of bones from archaeological collections. We thank Dr. Anneke Janzen for making time to give us this talk and look forward to hearing more about this work and its implications for archaeology.

Ethan Kish Welcoming People to Archaeology Day

Last weekend, Saturday, October 28^th, 2023, was Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Archaeology Open House to celebrate International Archaeology Day! This year’s Archaeology Day was a great success with a lot of amazing tables and a huge turnout! Thank you to all the graduate students who helped make the day a success, and to all the people who came to learn about archaeology! This year we had a total of 15 tables that represented different parts of archaeology, from fieldwork to 3D printing.

Connor Winslow at the Welcome/Exit table

The first tables were the entrance/exit tables run by Connor Winslow and Ethan Kish, both first-year graduate students in the Applied Archaeology program here at IUP. They were both set up to draw people in and give information about Archaeology Day to people first coming in or leaving. They also handed out our “passports”, which had the names of all the tables at Archaeology Day that people could get stickers for to get candy at the end. They also had evaluation forms for people to tell us how they thought we did, as well as additional information of archaeology and the anthropology program at IUP as a whole.

Elena Frye and Jennifer Ross at their 3D Printing Table

The next table was the 3D printing table run by Elena Frye and Jennifer Ross, who were there to give examples of the applications of 3D printing in archaeology. Elena had a 3D printer printing running during archaeology day, for people to watch it print a precontact PPK. She also had a variety of other points already printed on the table for people to match to their descriptions and names in an activity. This table was part of Elena’s thesis, which will be on using 3D printing as a teaching tool in archaeology. Jennifer ran the other side of the table, where she had 3D-printed human bones for people to interact with.

The next activity was the Kids Activity Room run by Rae Tuite and Dakota Dickerson. They had several activities for kids to enjoy, including Wampum beading and cave painting! Kids had the opportunity to make a beaded bracelet and put their handprints up on the wall, as well as put paper pieces of an archaeological dig kit together.

Wesley Nelson and Jiahan Liu at the Historic Collections Table

The next table was the Historic Collections table, led by Wesley Nelson and Jiahan Liu. They had out a variety of artifacts from our historic collections, from different types of ceramics to different types of glass bottles and metal artifacts. There was also an activity to reassemble broken ceramics, just as an archaeologist might do to reconstruct an excavated ceramic vessel. They would also explain different aspects of the historic artifacts they had out, as well as what historical archaeology was and what we can learn from it.

The next table was the combined zooarchaeology and hominin tables, run by Ty Linthicum, Emily Sykora, and Crimson Reid. They had out collections of animal skulls, as well as a collection of hominin skulls. People who came to their table would be able to guess the different kinds of animal skulls and learn what different skulls looked like. They would also be able to guess and learn about different hominin skulls. They also each answered questions people had about zooarchaeology and early hominins.

The next table is the precontact collections table run by Emma Kinsinger, who had out a variety of artifacts from our precontact collections. She had information on stone tools and how they were made, as well as what flakes could tell us. She also had a wide range of precontact artifacts she took people through and answered questions on precontact archaeology as a whole.

The next table is the PHAST table run by Elena Vories, who is the GA for the PHAST program, also known as the PennDOT Highway Archaeological Survey Team. She had a poster on PHAST, with pictures from surveys over this past summer and an activity to find all of the PHAST letters within the pictures. She would also explain what PHAST was and go through some of the projects she worked on.

Tyler Fanell and Nathan Coughlin at the Fieldwork Table

The next table is the Fieldwork table run by Tyler Fanell and Nathan Coughlin, both first year graduate students who have worked within CRM for multiple years. Their table had pictures from their various field surveys, as well as the field equipment they would use. They talked to people about CRM and what fieldwork is like. They would also go through different sites they had been to, as well as the field schools that IUP runs every summer. They also answered questions about fieldwork and how archaeological fieldwork is done.

The next table was the Floatation table run by Dion DeGarmo, who is the GA for the float lab this year. This table went through what floatation is and what it is looking for. This includes micro-artifacts and organics that can tell archaeologists things about what people were eating and what they were using different surfaces for. Dion also processed some samples in the floatation lab while people walked through so they could see the process and answered questions about the process.

Shannon Boyne and Isabel Srour at the Mock Excavation Table

The next table was the Geophysics table, run by Emma Lashley and Dr. William Chadwick. They had a variety of geophysical equipment out, such as the ground penetrating radar (GPR) and gradiometer. They also had processed GPR data out on the table from the historical field school, which showed the foundation of the hotel students have been excavating for a few summers. The data was both in vertical orientation, as well as 3D, so people could see what GPR anomalies look like after they are processed.

The next table was the mock excavation table run by Shannon Boyne and Isabel Srour, who had mapping and screening activities for people to try out. They had a mapping activity with a 50cm grid over some artifacts for people to draw onto a mapping form used in excavations. Then they had a screening activity where people could dump dirt into a screen and screen it to find artifacts (little toys) they could then bag and write an artifact tag for. This also taught people stewardship and the importance of properly recording and turning in artifacts.

The next table was flint knapping run by Susanne Haney, an Archaeologist for PennDOT and the manager for PHAST. She ran a flint knapping demonstration throughout archaeology day, as well as had multiple types of precontact artifacts for people to see. She answered questions about flint knapping and precontact technologies.

The Atlatl Throwing Activity

The last table was spear throwing, using an atlatl, run by two members of the community who own several atlatls and have even participated in National Atlatl throwing competitions. They had two targets out and two atlatls for people to try out. This is a type of precontact technology people would have used for hunting. This table was probably the biggest hit of Archaeology Day and a lot of people enjoyed throwing spears.

Overall, we would like to thank everyone who came once again, this day never would have been possible without everyone who helped out and who came willing to learn. Thank you everyone, and see you next year!

Last Wednesday was our first Graduate Colloquium of the semester! IUP students travel all over the country, and even internationally, over summer break to participate in archaeological projects. This first colloquium is meant to highlight the scope of projects IUP archaeology graduate students participated in over the summer break. There were a total of 5 presentations on topics from cultural resource management to field schools.

Laura Broughton, a member of the second-year cohort, was the first presenter of the colloquium. She spent her summer working for Environmental Design and Research (EDR) as an archaeological field technician. Most of her summer was spent on wind and solar farms in upstate New York doing Phase IB surveys. She spent most of her time in corn fields digging round STP’s in a 15-meter grid within the survey areas. While she only found historic ceramic during the entirety of the project, she learned a lot and enjoyed the experience as a whole.

The next presenter was Nate Coughlin, a first-year graduate student who spent the last two years working for different CRM companies around the country. He gave his presentation on a site he worked on in South Dakota this past summer, where they found a lot of Native American effigies. He walked us through the effigies they found, and their interpretations of them, including one that was around 130 meters long and looked like a snake. He also described some of his time working in Vermont for the Northeast Archaeological Research Center.

The third presenter was Emma Lashley, a second-year graduate student and the GA for the Newport Field School at IUP this past summer. First, she went over her time at the Newport field school, which started by doing GPR and STP’s. They then targeted GPR anomalies found around the old hotel in the previous field school. She then took the Advanced Metal Detecting for Archaeologists (AMDA) class, an RPA-certified course run at Ft. Halifax. She used this knowledge to then run a metal detecting survey at the Newport Field School. She then worked for SEARCH for the rest of the summer. She was first sent to Texas during their heat wave, which she described as “very hot the whole time”. Then she was sent to Mississippi, which she described as swampy and mosquitos. Both of these projects were Phase IB surveys for pipelines. Finally, she was sent to Miami, a Phase III project of a large precontact site in downtown Miami. Most of this project was washing buckets of dirt to find all the artifacts and bones.

The next presenter was Elena Vories, a first-year graduate student in charge of the PennDOT Highway Archaeological Survey Team (PHAST), which partners with both IUP and PennDOT to complete Phase I surveys. She is in charge of everything for every Phase I project they do, from background research to artifact cleaning and report writing. She described multiple projects they did and the fun they had along the way.

The last presenters were Emily Sykora and Tyler Fanell, the GAs for the Forensic Archaeology Field School in Germany. Emily is a second-year graduate student and Tyler is a first-year graduate student. They described their mission to recover US service members from a B-17 plane crash from WWII in Germany but mostly went over the trips they went on with students over the course of the field school. They went to places like Heidelberg, the Black Forest, Nuremberg, Munich, and the Bavarian Alps.

Thank you to everyone who presented and attended! We had a great turnout!