Elise McIlhaney

My beginning at Carleton marked the beginning of my academic journey into learning how to study the past. I entered Carleton knowing that I wanted to study archaeology, and so my primary interests reflected an interest in exploring material culture.

The first time I participated in the Archaeological Methods course was as a student, during which I learned a variety of techniques including trench excavation and fieldwalking.

My first archaeological field school was at the Battle Hill site in Huntly, Aberdeenshire in Scotland. There, I gained experience performing archaeological techniques at a real dig where we uncovered what the lead archaeologists believed to be a Bronze Age hillfort.

After the field school, I stayed in Scotland for another few months to spend that fall semester at the University of Glasgow, where I took courses about history and archaeology. These included Scotland's Millennium, Archaeology of Scotland, and Celtic Civilization.

The next fall back at Carleton, I participated in the course The Material World of the Anglo-Saxons, where I made a wooden reconstruction of a pair of Anglo-Saxon girdle-keys, led a funeral procession, and gave a eulogy based on research of Anglo-Saxon funerals. 

That summer, I interned at Coranco, Inc./Great Plains Energy, Inc. in my hometown, where I researched methods of geophysical groundwater survey. I wrote explanations of these methods in understandable terms, to be given to SAM Project volunteers. The research I did helped the company secure a grant to search and drill for groundwater for communities in Zambia.

That fall, I took a Geomorphology class at Carleton, where we explored, surveyed, and analyzed landscapes and the ways that they had changed over time in the wake of glaciers or streams. 

That spring, I participated again in the Archaeological Methods course, but this time as a teaching assistant. I helped the students take DGPS points of our excavation and survey sites and process them in ArcGIS, as well as instructed them in the excavation, survey, and artifact processing techniques that I had learned in and out of the course.

In addition, I took part in Carleton's deep mapping project, in which I made a set of deep maps to represent changing attitudes toward distance and the immediate "spatial imaginary" of early settlers of Kenyon, MN.

That summer, I returned to Scotland both to start my COMPS (senior thesis) research and to participate in another archaeological field school, this time at the Castle Dunyvaig site on the isle of Islay. 

That fall, I researched buildings from historical documents for the Witness to the Revolution video game project as part of the Boston Massacre in 3D course. The research that my team and I did will appear as annotations in the final game.

I spent that winter at Carleton writing my COMPS, which pulled together my research from the previous 6 months. My thesis details my analysis of archaeological, folkloric, and historical sources to understand non-elite perspectives of the Scottish witch-hunt by studying popular interactions with holy wells.