Meet March’s Employee Spotlight, Aaron Whittenburg! Aaron has been a part of the Metcalf family since 2016. He has worked in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, including Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana. In his spare time, you can find him with his trusty barkaeologist, Blaze, at his side.
Heyo!
I first started at Metcalf in fall of 2012 as a lab tech. That spring (or what passes for spring in Bozeman), I was wrapping up my final semester at Montana State and taking a course in CRM archaeology from Craig Lee (remember that course Kim T.? Good times), who approached me after class one day and said something to the effect of “Hey, you have super small handwriting. Want a job?” So, over the 2012-2013 winter, I wrote lots of tiny numbers (well, mostly the same tiny numbers over and over again) on tiny fragments of bone for Jennie Lee in the Bozeman office. After a hiatus for grad school, I was hired in the fall of 2016 as a field tech in Colorado
and have been with Metcalf ever since, being hired full time in the spring of 2017 and moving to the Grand Junction office. I currently serve as a Project Director out of that office.
My journey into archaeology started a bit later than most, or so it seems. Growing up and during high school and the first year of undergrad at MSU, I was dead set on a career in weather, specifically severe and tropical weather, which will surprise no one who has met me. Long story short, that didn’t work out and I found myself in an intro to Anthropology course spring of sophomore year and really connected with the archaeology aspect. I was always interested in history, but it turns out that archaeology is much more fun! I completed my field school in 2012 at the Beaucoup site, a bison kill and stone circle site in northeast Montana, near Saco and the Milk River. After my undergrad, I spent a year in Bozeman working for Metcalf, in the lab at MSU, and Kmart (the career of all careers, can’t believe I gave it up). I then spent 6 weeks wandering around western Europe in early summer 2013, because after a winter of working at Kmart, one needs to get away. I started grad school in the fall of 2013 at Colorado State, where I focused on mountain and alpine prehistoric archaeology, specifically alpine communal hunting sites. I finished my thesis in 2017 (finally) and have been at Metcalf ever since (and a little before).
My archaeological experience spans the Intermountain West and northern plains,from Montana and North Dakota south through Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, though I mostly consider myself a mountain archaeologist. It’s really hard to beat a day hiking around the mountains for “work”. My single most fun project is hard to decide, but I’d probably have to go with summer work during grad school, specifically when we spent a few weeks camping and surveying around the Rollins Pass area in Colorado. Hard to beat camping in the Colorado mountains and 
surveying/recording neat sites while being paid! My favorite project with Metcalf probably has to be a project with the esteemed Ron Rood in the west desert of Utah where we got to spend a considerable time driving ATVs around the desert to specific small survey areas. Great crew, really neat archaeology, and hard to get being able to play (er, work) with an ATV for survey. My favorite find is a metal projectile point from a site in Eagle County, Colorado, while surveying for a project during grad school. Neat site, as it seems to have spanned from at least the Middle Archaic through the Historic period. Quite the spot.
In my spare time, you’re likely to find me outside doing…something, usually with Blaze in tow. I don’t like sitting still for very long. I enjoy hiking, backpacking/camping, snowshoeing, skiing (alpine and cross country), running, playing tennis, gardening, and traveling. The rare times when I’m inside, I’m usually reading, playing board games with friends near and far, or building wooden boat models.
Cheers!
If you are interested in joining the Metcalf team, please visit our careers page for a list of current job openings.
