Veterans learn valuable job skills curating archaeological finds in north Old Town

Transitioning from military service to civilian life remains daunting for many veterans, but the men and women staffing a north Old Town archaeology laboratory are getting a lift from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Inside the small North St. Asaph Street office a handful of veterans pours through portions of the corps’ massive archaeological collection, updating records, photographing artifacts and storing them in protective containers. During their six-month stint with the Veterans Curation Program, they learn valuable job skills and earn a competitive wage, officials said, preparing them for postwar life.
“These veterans are learning how to manage databases, records management, scanning documents and relearning how to be in a regular office environment,” said Susan Malin-Boyce, VCP director. “A lot of these guys are young guys who thought [the military] was going to be their career and they didn’t know what to do next.”
The program started in 2008 when Malin-Boyce’s colleague Michael “Sonny” Trimble decided to put veterans to work sorting through the corps’ archaeology collection, second to only the Smithsonian Institute in size. Federal law requires the corps send in archaeologists ahead of any public works projects and maintain the collections to specific standards — easier said than done. VCP officials estimate there’s a 30-year backlog of collections needing a little tender, loving care.
Trimble opened the first VCP center in 2009 using $3.5 million from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. By the next year, VCP had three offices in Georgia, Missouri and Washington, D.C. In January the Washington office struck tents and moved south to Alexandria. All the centers run on about $3 million in federal funding annually.
And so on a sunny day in early May Devine Speights is cataloguing the field survey of a Colonial-era plantation in South Carolina, fliping through photos of the property and collecting the landscape’s makeup. At a nearby table, Crystal Bryant works her way through a box of artifacts, taking notes and placing the pieces in fresh containers.
“Sometimes these boxes come in bad condition, so our job is to preserve the artifacts with the information we have about them,” Bryant said.
It’s not exactly a scene from an Indiana Jones film — mostly ceramic dishes, glass fragments, metalwork, rocks and bricks, lots and lots of bricks, Bryant said. She is one of the organization’s many success stories. Nine classes away from an associate degree, Bryant has had little trouble lining up job interviews, as many as three in a day.
At another desk, Nichole Perry ensures the paperwork describing the artifacts matches what’s inside the boxes. Though she once dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, Perry served in the Navy before joining the Army in time to ship out to Iraq as part of the surge.
Now she’s pursuing higher education while working at the VCP center.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be an archaeologist and I thought [this] would be a good experience,” Perry said. “I am pursuing my masters’ degree in business, but I still think this is very interesting.”
When the current crop, Perry included, exits the program, VCP’s three centers will have churned out 100 graduates, Malin-Boyce said. That figure is small due to the limits placed on jobs. VCP tries to keep it to 10 employees and two supervisors per site — squad-sized, she said.
Most go on to pursue a degree or a career, according to Malin-Boyce. Not a bad mark given the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit advocacy group, puts the 2011 unemployment rate average of former soldiers, sailors and airmen at 12.1 percent.
“We look for a veteran we feel are (a) career ready,” Maline Boyce said. “And (b) [someone for whom] this program can do the maximum of good.”


 http://alextimes.com/2012/06/veterans-learn-valuable-job-skills-curating-archaeological-finds-in-north-old-town/