Meet our Summer Intern: Miranda

Hi... My name is Miranda. I am going into my senior year at Allen D. Nease High School. I am in the NJROTC and am an Ambassador in Girl Scouts, working on my Gold Award. I have a keen interest in Archaeology and have been lucky enough to get the opportunity to be a part of FPAN this summer, and get a chance to be out in the field with real archaeologists!

Cleaning tombstones at the CRPT Conference.
I was offered an internship with Emily Jane Murray and she has worked out a program that I will be following during my summer. So far, I have attended the CRPT Conference for 2 days, where we got to learn about the preservation of cemeteries, grave sites and tombstones and how to preserve and clean them for the next generations.





In a unit at Bulow!
We also joined Dr. Davidson and his University of Florida students at Bulow Plantation, where we dug at the site of old African-American slave housing. Finding artifacts at this site was both fun and very interesting.






I also got to participate in 3D photogrammetry and printing with Kevin at the FPAN East Central office, located in the historic town of Sanford. I learned how to take picture of artifacts to later make them into 3D images on the computer. I also learned how to create and manipulate a 3D image on the computer from photos we had taken the week before while attending the CRPT Conference. That was cool! I can see how this will become the technology of the future, and can see it being used to help archaeologists study artifacts and potentially reconstruct sites to imagine what they originally looked like. I plan to learn more about 3D photogrammetry and GIS technology as I start my career in archaeology.

Text by Miranda Van Zyl, FPAN Staff, and photos by John Van Zyl.