Cultural Resources Management graduate student Monica Bugbee interns at the Canyon of the Ancients National Monument Museum in Colorado. Photo courtesy of Monica Bugbee
Monica Bugbee spent the summer putting her Cultural Resources Management skills into practice through an internship at Canyons of the Ancients National Monument Visitor Center and Museum in southwest Colorado.
The national monument is administered by the Bureau of Land Management and has the highest-known density of archaeological sites in the United States. The museum is a federal repository for archaeological collections from public lands in southwest Colorado and houses large collections stored in a climate-controlled environment, Bugbee said.
“The Monument was created to help protect these important cultural sites from destruction and vandalism,” she said.
Bugbee spent April through mid-July working in the museum cataloging faunal collections from Haystack Cave, an archaeological and paleontological site in Gunnison County, Colorado.
Deposits in the cave preserve more than 20,000 years of history including archaeological remains in the upper levels of the cave from human uses such as burned bone and chipped stone tools, while the lower levels are paleontological with deposits from plants and animal bones that lived in the region without human influence.
“My goal was to catalog the collections to make them more accessible for researchers interested in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene fauna of Western Colorado,” she said. “I was also able to participate in the annual exhibit inventory to assess the condition of artifacts on display to the public in the museum.”
Animal bones Monica Bugbee cataloged from the Haystack Collection included bones from many animals, including species found in the region today and ones that went extinct during the last Ice Age such as the American cheetah and horse. Photo courtesy of Monica Bugbee
Bugbee is studying in the Cultural Resources Management program at St. Cloud State University as a distance learning student from her home in South Dakota.
“The internship was an excellent complement to my classes, several of which covered the laws and regulations which govern archaeology on public lands, including the Native American Graves Protection and Reparation Act,” she said. “I was able to see the laws I learned about at St. Cloud State in action at the museum and to actively participate in carrying them out.”
Her internship was funded through the National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE).
“It was a wonderful opportunity, and I would highly recommend NCPE internships to other students interested in archaeology and historic preservation,” she said.
An internship is a required feature of the Cultural Resources Management program designed to provide students with experience in a real work environment. Students in the program have interned for federal, tribal, state, private and non-profit organizations throughout North America.
