Campus Connection

Archaeology alum continues to return for annual field school

Kassie Praska marks her calendar every year for the UW-La Crosse Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center’s Public Field School. The annual dig at Norskadalen near Coon Valley brings together community members of all ages to learn about archaeology. “I went to school for archaeology, so it’s fun to teach prospective archaeologists how to do it,” says Praska, a 2011 UWL graduate. The community members learn how to excavate a site by actually doing just that alongside professionals from MVAC. They’ve been hosting the digs for about 20 years. [caption id="attachment_46432" align="aligncenter" width="685"] Participants spend all week in the field, learning and mastering techniques taught by MVAC’s professional archaeologists.[/caption] For the past five of those, Praska has been coming back to take part. “This is one of my passions,” she says. “I love to learn about who we were before modern technology came about and to teach that to kids. It’s a wonderful experience.” A regional draw Preserving a hobby Praska now works at Dynamic Recycling, an electronic recycling company in the Coulee Region. It may not seem like the place to apply what she learned as a student at UWL, but she would argue differently. “Where I work now, we’re still preserving the world we live in,” she says. “Archaeology is preserving our past, now I help preserve the future, so it’s really fulfilling.” With that mindset, she’ll say it’s incredibly important to be at the field school every year. “You can look into the students’ eyes and see the fire that’s in there,” she says. “That gets me excited because they’re our next generation of archaeologists.”