Grace Conrad, who also graduated with Honors earned her B.S. at Kent State University and will pursue a Ph.D. at the Ohio State University. She was also accepted into Yale University’s Archaeological Studies M.A. program.
Archaeology sparked Grace’s interest at an early age. At only 15-years-old, the Medina (Ohio) area native began volunteering at a variety of dig sites led by Brian Redmond, Ph.D., curator of archaeology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH). Several years later, her familiarity with those dig sites helped her land an internship with him while a student at Kent State.
After visiting Kent State, while still in high school, she met Metin Eren for the first time and he gave her a tour of his lab. He was impressed with her knowledge and asked her to come to Kent once a week during her final year of high school and assist some of his graduate students with their thesis projects to see if it was something that she would like. She helped Ashley Rutkoski with processing raw clay so she could make pots for an experiment. After that, Grace was hooked.
“You can really get creative in this lab,” Conrad said. “There is so much to do, and you can work on whatever your heart desires, as long as you come up with a question. Metin and Michelle were great at guiding me and my lab mates and taking those questions and working with us to design our own experiment and having the resources to see that through. The culture in the lab was great and we all get a long really well.”
But, as many experienced, there were setbacks when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
“Unfortunately, Covid happened, so I wasn’t able to work on as many projects as we had planned, but I still think it was a significant amount,” Conrad said. “I wanted to focus on Clovis bone technology, and Metin had a project that he had been wanting to do on this topic.”
Grace began making points made out of bones that would have been similar to the Clovis technology. Eren had a collection of casts to use as a reference and she bought quite a few cow femurs from a local butchery and turned them into projectile points to study.
“We were starting to figure out how we were going to do it. And then, the pandemic hit and so we had to pump the brakes.”
When the pandemic hit, she also had an internship lined up for the semester which was unfortunately canceled.
“I was really concerned because I wanted to do something in my field,” Conrad said. “So, I was talking to Metin and he said, we’ll figure out how to do a remote project. I thought it was cool that he was able to figure out how I could still be productive from home and not have to be in the lab. She participated in Kent State’s Student Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) and measured pictures of points using Adobe software. For this work, she placed first in her category (Anthropology, Geology and Geography) for the SURE program’s Three Minute Thesis Competition.
Luckily, in the summer of 2021, she got to do the internship through the CMNH that was canceled the prior year. She worked as a Cleveland Archaeological Society intern and research assistant at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, working at the Heckelman site on a project directed by Redmond.
“It was kind of a fun, full-circle moment because I got to be all in even though I had already been volunteering there for years,” Conrad said. “So, it was six weeks in the field, five days a week, and just a full excavation of a multi-occupational site, so that was really cool.”
Museum archaeologists spent five field seasons investigating the artifact-rich Heckelman site in Erie County, Ohio. In conjunction with archaeologists from the University of Toledo and the Firelands Archaeological Research Center in Amherst, field survey and excavations uncovered the remains of a ceremonial center dating to 300 B.C., a small Hopewellian hamlet occupied around A.D. 200, a small Late Woodland village from about A.D. 600, and a stockaded Late Prehistoric settlement occupied at A.D. 1400.
Conrad is now enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Ohio State University and is already serving as a field supervisor this summer at an Ohio State site, in Anderson Township, near Cincinnati.
“We’re at a site called Turpin, which is a Fort Ancient site, so we’re looking in two different villages, looking at their houses, and some of the central plaza,” Conrad said. “I’m super interested in Ohio archaeology broadly, but the shift from foraging to farming subsistence patterns in the Ohio Valley is very interesting to me as well. The tools these people were using changed based on how they were getting their food around 1300 AD. The site that we’re working on right now is sort of on the cusp of agriculture.”
When asked about advice to future students, Grace said: “Start early. Don’t be afraid to talk to your professors if you have any interest, whether it is in the archaeology lab or labs in any other department.”
