This morning I started my day by logging into my computer at 9AM; since I was hired as the Archaeological Institute of America’s Marketing and Communications Coordinator in November of 2020 I have only been in the Boston office a handful of times. It’s a little bit lonely working from home, but at least my commute is short!

The first thing I do is check my email. This morning the only thing waiting for me is someone looking to get into contact with one of our lecturers. I forward their email along to Laurel Sparks, who runs our lecture program among other things, and then I open up the AIA social media feeds.

One of my favorite parts of the job is getting to repost interesting stories to our social media feeds. I scroll through ARCHAEOLOGY Magazine’s Twitter profile until I find something of interest. This morning, a story about a gold bull’s head rhyton found at Zakros in Crete catches my eye. While I have Twitter and Facebook open, I check our inboxes to see if any messages have popped up overnight. Today there isn’t anything, but we generally get questions about items people have found and are looking to identify. In those cases, I direct the person to contact a local university archaeology/anthropology department, local museum, or their state’s historic preservation office. In the United States, the National Park Service keeps a list of all State Historic Preservation Offices, which is available online.

At 10AM I have my weekly meeting with our Director of Marketing and Professional Services, Kevin Mullen. Since I have been working remotely, it’s nice to have a planned meeting to catch up with him and make sure we are on the same page about various tasks that need to be completed in the upcoming week. Right now, we are working on several large projects, so these weekly check-ins help keep us on track to complete them before the summer ends.

Just before lunch I draft a few social media posts for our upcoming online lecture with author Steven Saylor. On August 11, Saylor will present “Historical Fiction: An End-Product of Archaeology?” The pandemic really changed how the world approached events, and it has allowed the AIA to put together exciting virtual events that are accessible to people all over the world. The upcoming Steven Saylor lecture is a little bit different than our usual programming, as Saylor is a historical fiction author rather than an archaeologist. His talk will discuss how real-life archaeological finds have impacted and inspired his writing. 

After lunch I work on a draft of the 2022 A Year of Archaeology calendar and send it over to Samantha Austin to get her input. The calendar helps raise money for our Site Preservation Program and is full of amazing photos from our yearly photo contest. It is my first year putting together the calendar, and I have so much fun looking through photos of sites around the world.

I wrap up my day by meeting with the Development team. We discuss some upcoming changes to AIA website pages to keep them up to date and make sure our members can access the most current information. I check my email one more time before signing off for the evening after another great day in archaeology!