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Archaeology
Archaeology undergraduate gains valuable career experience on international field school in Portugal, launches career in CRM
This past June, a cohort of SFU undergraduate students travelled to Portugal for the Forensic Anthropology/Bioarchaeology Field School, a lab-based program focusing on the curation and lab analysis of human remains from both archaeological and forensic contexts.
It was this type of opportunity that drew Diego Barrios-Stewart to study archaeology. So, gaining hands-on experience on an international field school before graduating just made sense.
“The main reason I chose archaeology was to travel, so when I saw the field school was being offered, I decided to hit the ground running and apply,” says Barrios-Stewart.
Students spent three weeks travelling throughout the country gaining training and hands-on experience in the preparation, analysis and interpretation of forensic and archaeological human remains.
Barrios-Stewart explains that students gained the skills needed to identify whole and fragmented bone and how to create a biological profile for an individual – while learning to work as a cohesive team.
“It made me confident that I can learn a topic from essentially scratch in a short amount of time if I’m really interested,” he says.
He credits this training with helping him land a position with Campfire Archaeology working in cultural resource management.
“The field school gave me an edge on being hired because I can now identify human remains from animal remains, or even wood and stones that kind of resemble bones in an archaeological site,” says Barrios-Stewart. “I was also offered the opportunity to potentially do an underwater archaeology stage in Lisbon.”
For Barrios-Stewart, the highlights of the field school extend far beyond his career. He notes that it was the chance to experience the Portuguese culture and the connections to both the people he met on the program and those of the remains they studied, that were among the standouts of his time in Portugal.
“You could break bread with anyone in the program; directors, students and teachers and not be excluded or left out of the conversation, even if it was in Portuguese,” he shares. “Another main takeaway is what it is like to be face to face with an individual who died 1000 years ago, and the internal feelings that that brings up. It's easy to just listen to music or talk to your friend while you’re cleaning the remains and forget about who or what you’re cleaning. It is so imperative to remember you are dealing with human remains and to treat them with the care and respect you would with another living person.”
For students considering taking part in a future international archaeology field school, Barrios-Stewart says to “Go for it!”
“Say yes to the field school and talk to everyone you can. These opportunities are great for international networking,” he says. “My entire life’s trajectory has been altered by saying yes to opportunities like these.”