Wounded U.S. vets work with IU laboratory to learn new skills
By Indiana University
April 28, 2010
In a downtown St. Louis skyscraper a group of wounded U.S. veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are cataloguing projectile points, pottery pieces and other prehistoric remnants from a southern Indiana archaeological dig. In the process, they are learning new and marketable new job skills.
The veterans are part of the Veterans Curation Project, started in 2009 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with $3.5 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. The artifacts being processed in St. Louis are provided by the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology at Indiana University Bloomington. The materials are associated with both prehistoric Native Americans and the historic settlement of Indiana.
Curating archaeological materials may seem unusual on-the-job training, but Tim Baumann, curator of collections at the Glenn Black Lab at IU, says the vets are acquiring useful and widely applicable skills.
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