This summer, McClung Museum Visitor Associate Gabby Puckett’s days began long before sunrise. By 4 am, she was awake and preparing for a full day of archaeological fieldwork. By 5 am, she was on site in northwestern Cyprus, participating in the Makounta Voules Archaeological Project (MVAP), where she helped excavate one of the island’s lesser-studied landscapes.
“I’ve never been a morning person,” Gabby said. “But I will wake up at 4 am every day for the rest of my life if it means I get to experience this again.”
Led by Dr. Kate Grossman of North Carolina State University, MVAP is an international research initiative examining how the exploitation of copper, long-distance trade, agriculture, and social change influenced life in Cyprus. The project focuses on understanding how early communities developed into the island’s first urban centers during the Late Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age, and Middle Bronze Age.
Throughout the summer, Gabby helped recover pottery, stone tools, and other materials that shed light on how people on the island lived, worked, and organized their communities thousands of years ago. For students like Gabby, the project offers a rare, hands-on experience and provides an opportunity to contribute directly to ongoing archaeological research.
A highlight of the summer was
the opportunity to conduct her own research while in Cyprus. “I’ve had some amazing results,” she said. “The motivation for this trip was to get archaeological experience in the region I hope to work in, but it has done so much more for me than I could have imagined.”
As a visitor services associate and former intern at the McClung, Gabby said her time at the museum helped her feel ready for the field school experience. “The museum absolutely helped me prepare, first with making me comfortable in conveying my knowledge to other people, but also my lab work with Dr. Alison Damick in the Laboratory of Environmental Archaeology gave me valuable knowledge I could apply to my own research.”
Gabby’s roles as both a museum intern and visitor services associate gave her valuable experience in how archaeological research is interpreted and shared. Working behind the scenes and with the public helped her connect classroom knowledge to real-world applications and strengthened her foundation heading into the field school.
As the field season draws to a close, Gabby is more certain than ever about her future and her continued studies through the University of Tennessee’s department of Anthropology.
“I have never been more certain that this isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime trip—it is simply the beginning of the rest of my life. A career in archaeology has never been the most financially attractive, but I could never imagine myself being fulfilled in any other career.”