Kate McKinney recently received the Elizabeth Bartman Museum Internship Grant from the Archaeological Institute of America
MA Applied Anthropology
Kate McKinney is a second-year MA student in the Applied Anthropology program of the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures. Kate recently received the Elizabeth Bartman Museum Internship Grant from the Archaeological Institute of America to cover the expenses ($2375) associated with undertaking an internship. Kate was one of only two graduate students to win this prestigious grant. It was the first year the grant competition was offered, in honor of the AIA’s former president. Kate was featured in a recent issue of the international magazine Archaeology: http://www.amec.msstate.edu/pdf/getFile.php?id=4312&type=news.
She completed her internship over the summer of 2015 in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History. Under the direction of Dr. Robert Hershler. Kate spent the summer learning how to curate collections for the museum. She mainly worked on inventorying, cataloging, and identifying several large mollusk shell collections that had been donated to the museum. In the process, she learned how to curate for a large museum and furthered her taxonomic knowledge of mussel shells from around the world. This will be especially helpful for her thesis project, under the guidance of her major professor Dr. Evan Peacock, which will involve the identification of mussel shell from archaeological excavations along the Tombigbee River.