Five graduate students from the Applied Archaeology MA program attended the American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA) annual meeting in Alexandria Virginia from September 9 through 12, 2021.
Graduate students Amanda Filmyer, Brandon Garcia, Ashley Nagle, Robert Szczotka, and Stephanie Zellers accompanied William Chadwick from the IUP Applied Archaeology MA Program to the annual ACRA meeting that brings together Cultural Resource Management practitioners from federal, state, and local agencies and private companies and those in related fields. The annual meeting is a prime venue where ideas and best practices are exchanged and where students can meet owners and senior staff from companies who may become their new colleagues. All the graduate students had the opportunity to participate in the “Take a Student to Lunch” event, where each student was taken to lunch by at least two CRM professionals to discuss future careers and the multi-billion-dollar CRM industry.
“ACRA is the national trade association supporting and promoting the common interests of cultural resource management firms of all sizes, types and specialties.” (ACRA 2021) The member CRM firms undertake much of the legally mandated CRM studies and investigations in the United States. Their clients include federal, state, and local government agencies, private industry, and nonprofit groups. The industry employs thousands of cultural resource management professionals: archaeologists, architectural historians, historians, preservation planners, cultural ethnographers, and an increasingly diverse group of other specialists.
Photo: IUP Applied Archaeology MA students at the 2021 American Cultural Resources Association annual meeting.