In the mist of the early morning, a student with a cup of coffee stands at the loading dock of McElhaney Hall, the location of IUP's Archaeological Services.
This morning, starting at 7 a.m., the campus archaeological team is going on a trip across the state to pick up an archaeological collection from one of Pennsylvania's many archaeological firms.
This first trip will signal the beginning of a four-year contract with IUP's Archaeological Services and PennDOT to round up collections from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey.
Ira Beckerman of the PennDOT Bureau of Design said that the collections that IUP retrieves "are routinely curated at the State Museum at the end of the project. Sometimes this doesn't happen, and the collection is left un-curated," he said.
"This was especially true a number of years ago when there weren't department professional staff available to bird-dog the closing out of a project. We are now going back to these older projects to get them into a curated state."
IUP's Archaeological Services was chosen because they are able to accomplish this immense task "at a modest cost, using student support ... IUP also has credibility with the State Museum on previous projects," Beckerman said.
When the project was given to Archaeological Services, it was put into the hands of Director Beverly Chiarulli, an IUP anthropology professor, and professional archaeologist and supervisor Bruce Manzano.
Chiarulli said this experience fulfills the mission that IUP has for its student staff by providing training for students in archaeological research, cataloguing and curation of artifacts.
PennDOT chose Manzano to head this project because of his experience in working with collections.
"I fit what they needed so I took the position full time ... and feel lucky to get it," Manzano said.
Manzano works exclusively with the incoming collections and the students involved with the project. He said he views the project as a great opportunity to teach students the proper way to deal with collections.
But the project has its problems.
"Some people didn't take adequate notes -- some didn't save the photo negatives. In addition, some of these projects are 20 years old; sometimes funding is stopped and the project wasn't completed," Manzano said, expressing the difficulty of the project for both students and supervisors.
The students working on the project agree that this is a resume-building opportunity, but they also say that it's a difficult way to go about building a resume.
The work can be tedious and mentally demanding, as boxes can contain hundreds of artifacts to be re-counted and checked, Joe Fedor (junior, anthropology) said.
There are three projects being checked over at once. Sara Fortnam (junior, anthropology) and Colleen Dugan (senior, anthropology) are working on the prehistoric Shickshinny project, Christie Weaver (junior, anthropology) is working on the Indiana Bypass project and Fedor is working on the historic State Route 901 project.
Weaver simply said the project is "a lot of detective work." Currently, she is looking at the field notes and trying to create photo logs from that without negatives.
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