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My Thesis Work
Master's Thesis
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Creating a Place: Mulberry Site (38KE12) Interpretation and Exhibition
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This thesis interprets the place and archaeological collections of the Mulberry site (38KE12) through a community-focused lens and applies that interpretation into text for a museum exhibition. Mulberry is a multi-mound Mississippian town in central South Carolina that was likely inhabited by ancestral Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Muscogee (Creek), and/or Catawba Indian Nation peoples. Utilizing entanglement, place-making studies, and Indigenous worldview studies as grounding theory, oral histories and ethnographies are applied to the physical landscape and artifactual remains of the site in an effort to understand the ways that people interacted with objects and the landscape to create meaning-laden spaces. This interpretation coupled with the feedback of American Indian cultural advisors is used to create the text panels and a suggested outline of an exhibit on the site to be displayed in the future.
Thesis Co-Chairs
Undergraduate Research
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An Analysis of the Correlation between Personal Systems of Belief and Views of Death
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This thesis surveyed students and staff from the University of South Carolina to compare personal systems of belief and views on death and the afterlife by utilizing open ended questions. While much of the research on this subject posits that those who believe strongly are less likely to fear death, the conclusion of this 113 person sample size was that those who claimed the strongest beliefs in an organized religion were the most fearful of death.
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Thesis Chair
Dr. Jonathan Leader
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