Madeline Laub is a historical archaeologist focusing on heritage. She graduated from the University of Maryland in 2018 with a BA in Anthropology and a minor in Geographic Information Sciences (GIS). She graduated from the University of Maryland with an MAA in May of 2020. Her experience in the field has been focused primarily in her home state of Pennsylvania and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She worked in Trappe, Pennsylvania at a Pennsylvania German site called The Speaker’s House. This site was the home of the first speaker of the House of Representatives, Frederick Muhlenberg. She also participated in the Archaeology in Annapolis (AiA) field school both as a student and an instructor. This public archaeology field school is in Easton, Maryland and focuses on one of the earliest free African American communities in the country. As part of the AiA project, she has assisted in the lab processing artifacts and managing the collection. For her MAA Internship she aided in the curation of the AiA collection, both the physical and online collections. She facilitated the curation of eleven sites (encapsulated in eighty-six boxes) to the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab) standards. For the online curation of the project, she collected data and prepared it for presentation online both on the new AiA website and for the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM). This included compiling site reports, catalogs, pamphlets, and brochures. The preparation of the data in the catalogs required “decoding” or taking each catalog item with a numerical master code and attaching it to an already standardized English language name for an artifact (like oyster shell or brick or whiteware). This was done in the software R-Studio which allowed the process to be replicable and exported into a Microsoft Excel document (.xls or .xlsx). She has uploaded information on the William Paca Garden on DRUM. She has also updated the information on twenty-three sites on DRUM by making the catalogs for these sites more user friendly. Madeline updated the AiA collections page on DRUM so it provided more information about the project and served as a table of contents for the collections on DRUM. 

Both as an undergraduate and graduate student Madeline gained valuable experience in both historical restoration and museum collection management. While pursing her MAA, Madeline continued her work in public archaeology and expanded the use of technology in her field. She led a field school in 2019 for Archaeology in Annapolis that focused on utilizing a 3-D Laser Scanner. She taught students how to use a terrestrial based LiDAR (FARO Scanner) to scan existing structures. She also instructed students how to process scans using FARO SCENE software and produced videos of the scans using the free software Blender.