I'm a senior at Hillbrook School in Los Gatos, California. I work in archaeology and history, both in the field and in the archives.
I have excavated a fourth-century Roman fortress in Spain and plantation sites in Virginia, restored headstones in Jewish cemeteries in Poland and Lithuania, and added more than 250,000 graves from Eastern European cemeteries to the public record.
I've added more than 250,000 graves to FindAGrave. I find archival grave records, write software to transcribe the spreadsheets from non-Latin alphabets to the Latin alphabet, post the headstone images and descriptions, and build out family trees for descendants.
People write to me. That's the part I didn't expect and can't get over.
Roman, Ancestral Puebloan, colonial, antebellum, Mesolithic, and Jewish heritage sites.
In Gloucester, Virginia, I worked with a team of several archaeologists to excavate the remains of the historic Rosewell Plantation. During the course of the excavation we found remnants of the daily lives of the enslaved people who worked the land there. For many of these people, their names were unknown to us. In an effort to right this, I explored matching persons noted only by their sex and age in historic "Slave Schedules" records with post-bellum death records and census records to attempt to return names.
At the Roman fortress of Pulpon, I participated in the excavation of a fourth-century architectural site. Working through fallen masonry and collapsed rubble, we documented stone structures and small finds to better understand the late Roman Empire's presence in the region.
I started a dig on my own school's campus, on the site of a California state ward school from the early 1900s, mentored by Stanford archaeologist Garret Trask and Foothill professor Sam Connell. What we found suggested many of the children there were sick most of the time.
At the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, I met with staff and a Pueblo elder who introduced me to the history of the Pueblo Revolt. The team trained me in the techniques they use to study Ancestral Puebloan civilization, and I participated in the excavation of what are believed to be the remains of a Puebloan building.
At the Berry Site near Morganton, North Carolina, I got my first taste of archaeology. The site contains the first recorded inland town set up by the Spanish upon arriving in the Americas. During my stay, I was introduced to the core principles of the field, such as the critical difference between looting and ethical archaeological work. In the photographs below, you can see the earthen mounds and traces of the Native Americans who lived there before the Spanish invasion.
In Muge, on the outskirts of Lisbon, lie the Mesolithic shell middens left by some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers in Europe. Working alongside a team of archaeologists, I excavated the site to learn about the diet of its ancient inhabitants, which consisted heavily of mollusks, game, and fish.
A Singer sewing machine welded onto a Schwinn frame, so pedaling drives the needle through a chain of shafts and pulleys. And an Art Deco jukebox in walnut and maple, with steam-bent slats over upholstered grille cloth, every joint cut by hand.
It's the same instinct as the digging, aimed at objects: take something obsolete apart, work out how it ran, put it back together so it runs again.
I'm always glad to hear from people working on cemetery documentation, Holocaust records, or a dig that needs another pair of hands.