THE OFFICE OF THE STATE ARCHEOLOGIST, IOWA CITY – SUMMER INTERNSHIP

Iowa City, IA

Over the summer of 2012, I worked for project archeologist Cindy Peterson at the Office of the State Archeologist in Iowa City, IA. Cindy had completed a series of excavations in Mills County, IA that spring, and hired me as an intern to help her finish up. I performed a wide range of duties including: data entry and transcription, custom map creation using ArcGIS, historical research on the Mills County area, labeling of artifacts, archival organization, and scaled photography of artifacts.

Though much of my work at the OSA was organizational and archival, I gained experience working in an office environment and learned a lot about databases and their physical counterparts. I also got a taste of the real life of archeology. For each mildly intriguing stone perhaps used as a tool, there were at least seven “fire cracked rocks:” simply rocks charred by a fire long ago. Yet in that one significant stone is the quality that draws us to search the earth for remnants. Even in Mills County, IA, among hundreds of “fire cracked rocks,” Cindy’s team unearthed a spearpoint that might have been used in the ice age.

See the gallery below for some photos of me doing the physical end of archeological database work, and a few photos I took.