Cailey Mullins (B.A. Indiana University, 2013) is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and an archaeological technician/interpretive ranger at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. Cailey is partnering with Crow Canyon to study the impacts of pre-college archaeological education programs on both the field of archaeology and on the students who participate in them.
Cailey is finishing her third year in the Anthropology PhD program at UNC-Chapel Hill, and will be completing her MA this year. Her career in archaeology began just out of high school, when she accepted an internship at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. To this day, she works intermittently at the park in the summers, working partly as an archaeological field technician under Dr. Bret Ruby, and partly as an interpretive ranger, designing and leading educational programs hosted at the park under the supervision of Ranger Susan Knisley. Her research interests encompass both archaeological questions and questions about archaeology. Focusing geographically and temporally on the Hopewell culture of present-day Ohio, Cailey is interested in studying ancient social and ideological networks. She is also interested in assessing the usefulness of pre-college archaeological education programs, community-based archaeology projects, and their social and professional implications. For her dissertation research, Cailey is in the process of designing a high school field school in her home town of Portsmouth, Ohio, under the guise of a community-based research project.