I am an American student entering her third year of undergraduate study at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ. My major is Art History Honors, with minors in Archaeology and Classics. My interests center on the ancient world. These are times with less textual remains, making the value of the material record higher and the puzzle of piecing together history more difficult. My favorite fields are those of Ancient Egypt, East Asia, and the Iron/Bronze Age Celtic world. My ultimate goal is to become a museum curator for a collection of Egyptian, Asian, or Celtic objects.
Prior to this internship, I participated in the 2019 Washington College Archaeological Field School, where I spent a month working under Professor Elizabeth Seidel and her colleges on Andelot Farm (Site 18KE25). This was a farm site occupied from 1680-1725 in Chestertown, Maryland. I learned surveying techniques, how to properly dig for and identify artifacts, and how to record my findings through a journal, site maps, artifact/feature reports, and more. Afterwards, during the 2019-2020 school year, I was a curatorial intern for Hampton Mansion National Historic Site, the sister site to Fort McHenry National Shrine in Baltimore, Maryland. Hampton Mansion NPS is a former plantation and home of the influential Ridgely family, with a temporal focus on the late 18th through early 20th Centuries. Under the direction of Head Curator Gregory Weidman, I learned cataloging, event planning, preservation, and research techniques before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Maryland in February 2020..
My goal for my internship this summer was to fill what I felt was a missing piece in my knowledge of the site to museum process. What happens after an artifact is dug up but before it is entered into a museum collection? How do academics study their finds and piece together conclusions for papers and site reports?
I was fortunate enough to gain a position as an intern for the Maski Archaeological Project (MAP), under the direction of McGill Professor Peter Johansen. Maski is a site located in Lingsugur Taluk of the Raichur District in Karnataka, India. First excavated by Robert Bruce Foote in the 19th Century, Maski is famous for its Ashokan rock edict, but was also occupied during the Western Chalukyan Dynasty, the focus of my internship. My job as intern was to sort through and document temple donative inscriptions recorded by colonial officials and later archaeologists from across the Western Chalukyan Empire (modern-day Karnataka). These will be studied by Professor Johansen for his inscriptions project, the effort of which is to create a Western Chalukyan inscription database and to use said inscriptions to discern more about their governmental organization. Johansen’s research on Western Chalukyan politics has a feminist lens, as he looks for evidence of female governors and donors during this period.
The highlight of my internship was having the opportunity to read some of these translated inscriptions myself. This gave me insight into how archaeologists incorporate textual evidence into their analysis of the material record. I also learned what forms of donations were preferred, and the variety of donors involved. This provided a deeper insight into the way in which Hindu and Jain devotees thought of and practiced their religions during the 10th-12th Centuries. However, this internship was largely remote and a bit repetitive in terms of its tasks, meaning that I ascertained how to self-motivate, stay organized, and maintain a strict schedule. I also had some family issues arise during the period of my internship, meaning that I learned how to adjust to such unexpected events.
I will not be receiving academic credit for this internship, nor will I personally be writing a paper on this material. This internship allowed me the opportunity to learn how research is done on the professional academic level versus the student level. This will in turn impact how I do my own research during the remainder of my undergraduate experience and beyond.
I would like to thank Arts Internship Office (AIO) Director Anne Turner for her assistance in facilitating this internship. I would also like to thank the AIO for their award of $4,500 which I used to cover housing and food expenses during the summer in Montreal. Finally, I would like to offer a major thank you to Professor Peter Johansen for giving me this opportunity and for expanding my understanding of world history and archaeology through his classes and this internship. I look forward to staying on this project as a research assistant during the Fall 2022 term.
