From Curiosity to Career: A Glimpse Into the Journey So Far

Growing up in Florida, you don’t have to go far to find traces of the past. As a little girl, I was always outdoors—hunting for fossils along the north Florida shoreline, gathering the shiny black triangles of shark teeth that glittered in the sand. I would wonder what stories these bones told about the world that once was.

I wandered through the oldest city in the U.S., St. Augustine, and explored reconstructions of mission forts that seemed magical to my young imagination. I visited sites like Castillo de San Marcos or Fort Caroline, picturing the people who once lived there. I heard about the people who were first in our country, learning how they used the same shells and shark teeth I collected—not as decorations, but as tools: net weights, hammers, drills. I learned they would fish with their families too, like me, but for the people of Florida’s past, fishing wasn’t a pastime, but survival.

Museums only deepened my fascination. I would stand in awe before the bones of mammoths and giant sloths, imagining them alongside the alligators that still slip through Florida’s rivers. To a child with a big imagination, it was a world where the past felt present, lurking just below the surface.

As I grew older, my curiosity never faded. High school biology was a joy, and a rare anthropology elective opened my eyes to the science behind the stories. At university, I found my place among anthropology majors. Fieldwork in the Florida heat—battling bugs, sweating through long days, earning blisters on my hands from hours of shovelling, trowelling, sifting through ancient trash—was all worth it to see what once was. I would stand in the Florida wilderness, knowing it was once a Timucua village, and look up at the bright blue sky framed by palmettos and Spanish moss. I’d find myself wondering if the Timucua ever paused here, gazing up at the very same sky, lost in their own thoughts just as I was.

But it was in the lab, sorting animal bones, that something clicked. Bones are like puzzles: clues to what people ate, how they lived, and how they saw the world around them. I loved that zooarchaeology could bring together art, science, history, and mystery. My summers went from collecting shells, to recording pottery, to reading bones—first in Florida, and now, for my master’s, in the green countryside of York, England.

It’s not always easy. The finish lines keep moving—first a bachelor’s, then a master’s, and, I hope, someday a PhD. There are risks, setbacks, and days when home feels a long way away. But I’ve learned that following your curiosity is its own reward. Each new bone, each new paper, is a step toward understanding both the world’s past and my own place in it.

If the little girl combing the sand for fossils could see me now, I think she’d understand: this journey, with all its twists and turns, is for her.

Little Thalia, first dig site ca. A.D. 2007