In Internships

Interns in Yellowstone’s archeology program were based at Yellowstone’s new Heritage and Research Center (HRC), located near the north entrance to the park, adjacent to Gardiner, Montana. The HRC is an impressive, state-of-the-art collections storage and research facility which contains over 5.3 million items related to the long and rich history of Yellowstone National Park, including many archeological artifacts.  Yellowstone National Park has about 1400 historic and prehistoric archeological sites currently documented in about 2% of the park inventoried.  It is estimated that the park contains about 350,000 sites.

Interns with the park archeology program had various duties which supported the group’s inventory, monitoring, and evaluation of archeological resources within the park.  Field survey was among the most important duties and involved visiting archeological sites with the field team.  Site locations were as close as one mile or as far as 75 miles from the home office, and reaching the sites often required significant time hiking.  Once at the site, interns assisted staff in scanning the surface area for stone flakes, which would indicate the possible presence of tools.  If tools were found, they were collected for cataloguing.  Previous interns found numerous artifacts, including one intern who discovered a long obsidian knife blade estimated to be approximately 9,000 years old.

Another important part of the archeology interns’ duties was lab work.  Lab work involved collecting information for new fieldwork from the maps and site files in the lab, preparing archeological site forms, drafting site maps, and helping with cataloging artifacts.  Lab work also included entering photos and associated data into the archeology lab’s photo database, which includes site pictures for field sites throughout the park.

A third important duty of the archeology interns was resource tracking.  Interns were responsible for tracking resources such as gas, metal detectors, labor costs and site revisits.

During summer 2007, the archeology intern was assigned a special project which involved re-organizing a large portion of the archeology archives.  This project involved becoming familiar with previous project sites in order to verify the presence of specific artifacts, labeling archived boxes for easier identification, and updating the park service database to reflect the current location and status of the artifacts.  Through this process, the intern learned a great deal about the various archeological research projects that had been carried out at Yellowstone during the previous decade.

Dates

This internship was offered in Summers 2007, 2006 and 2005.