New graduate ‘digs’ study of graves – now she’s planning career in archaeology
By Cindi Brownfield
Photos courtesy of Mindi Seeman ’07
W
hile many enjoyed the lazy days of summer, Mindi Seeman was halfway around the world working long days in an ancient cemetery on an island in Greece. As a History major/Anthropology minor at Stetson University, Seeman developed a fascination with archaeology. She participated in digs over the past three summers, in St. Augustine, Fla., Jacksonville, Fla., and at the Mitrou Archaeology Project in East Lokris, Greece. Through fieldwork, she has become particularly interested in studying graves. Seeman graduated Dec. 15, 2007, and is now preparing for graduate school in the field of Mortuary Archaeology, also known as BioArchaeology. “I love archaeology because nothing’s ever the same. You never know what could be under the next layer of soil,” she said. “Graves can tell you a lot about what’s going on in society. You get a sense of the people. Who were they? What did they look like? What were they like?” Seeman, 23, found out about the Mitrou Archaeology Project in Greece on the Archaeological Institute of America’s online fieldwork database. She was one of four college students worldwide chosen for the project in 2006, then returned last summer as a staff member. The archaeological site is key to understanding the Dark Ages in Greek history. Early each morning, the team trudged through shallow water in the Bay of Euboea to a tiny island where olives are now grown. Seeman specialized in studying graves, including 17 bodies (adults, children and infants). Two of the graves belonged to wealthy people, she said, and the team found rare baby feeders (pots with nipples for feeding babies). “You learn a lot from the graves,” Seeman said. “It gives you a feel for the society. You get to see life – or what once was life.”
Mindi Seeman ’07 and other students look for teeth and bone fragments in soil while working on the Mitrou Archaeology Project in Greece in 2006.
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STETSON UNIVERSITY
“Archaeology gives you the opportunity to travel the world and explore other cultures. I love it. You live in the middle of nowhere. It’s a blast!”
– Mindi Seeman ’07
Seeman holds a rib bone while excavating a Middle Helladic Period (pre-1600 B.C.) child’s grave at the Mitrou site. Also pictured is Nick Herrmann, a faculty member from the University of Tennessee who was the project’s mortuary field school director.
Greece was a long way from where Seeman expected to be when she started at Stetson in 2003. A self-described “theater nut” in high school, she first considered a career as a drama teacher. When she turned toward anthropology instead, her father urged her to do hands-on fieldwork to be sure. Her new direction was put on hold after a serious car accident in 2004 forced Seeman to take a semester off from school. Her hip was fractured, her tailbone shattered, and nine ribs were broken. While she was in a coma in the hospital, Stetson Chaplain Michael Fronk ’74 visited her, and they later got reacquainted when Seeman helped start the university’s Jewish Student Organization (the university’s first chartered Hillel Chapter). Today, Seeman and Fronk are good friends. “She has a great sense of humor and a great personality. She’s so bright and funny,” Fronk said. “Mindi is one of those people you’re grateful you met. She’ll be successful at anything she wants to do.” Seeman’s mentors were Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Kimberly Flint-Hamilton and Associate Professor of History Kimberly Reiter. “They never stopped pushing me to pursue my goals,” she said. “They were always there to listen to me talk about my decisions and give advice about them.” Specialists in archaeology know Flint-Hamilton and speak highly of her, Seeman said, and that gave her a good feeling as her own interest in the field grew.
SPRING/SUMMER 2008
Seeman, at left, explores the island of Mitrou with other archaeologists.
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Seeman and other students and archaeologists take a break while exploring the Fountain of Youth Park site in St. Augustine, Fla., in 2005.
Flint-Hamilton described Seeman as a wonderful student to have in class. “I’ll never forget how excited Mindi was during Physical Anthropology class one day. She had been excavating a site in Florida and identified a skull with ‘shovelshaped incisors’ – a marker of Asian ancestry that hails to Homo erectus,” she said. “I love Mindi’s enthusiasm.” Reiter has a background in classical archaeology and knew Seeman would have to prepare seriously for graduate school, so she pushed her. “I knew Mindi’s chosen career would require intense study and brutal graduate-level criticism in some very competitive areas, so I drilled her, bled her papers with a lot of red ink, and handed back a lot of assignments as ‘chopped cabbage,’” Reiter said. “It was hard on her at first, but her writing abilities responded, as I hoped they would. As a result, her work is now sharp and incisive, which is what she will need to pursue archaeology. So I guess you could say that I had to be the ‘bad cop,’ but she never gave up.” Seeman’s first real archaeological experience was in St. Augustine, where she and seven other students dug at the site where Pedro Menendez landed in 1565 and built a camp near the Timucuan Indian
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village led by Chief Seloy. Working with Kathy Deagan, a professor at the University of Florida and head of the Florida Natural History Museum, and St. Augustine city archaeologist Carl Halbret, the students participated in digs each morning, then went to class each afternoon. The dig was at the site of the Fountain of Youth Park, and they used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps to figure out what area had already been dug. They looked for artifacts, bones, and soil color changes indicating the presence of a structure in the past. At a downtown building where an elevator was being added, the team discovered the forearm and part of the skull of a pre-Menendez Native American. It was the only Native
American body ever found in downtown St. Augustine, she said. Seeman later participated in a dig at the Kingsley Plantation in Jacksonville at the site of a sugar mill plantation. She is now certified in GIS. “Archaeology is not Indiana Jones. It’s a lot of hard work and it can be tedious,” Seeman said. In Greece last summer, the temperature reached 137 degrees. Archaeology is dirty work and starts early in the morning. But Seeman’s hooked – and expects it to be her life’s passion after earning master’s and doctoral degrees. “Archaeology gives you the opportunity to travel the world and explore other cultures,” she said. “I love it. You live in the middle of nowhere. It’s a blast!”
Seeman, at top, excavates a male skeleton in a grave at Mitrou.
STETSON UNIVERSITY