The APES student group hosts events ranging from artifact cleaning nights and field trips to social activities such as movie nights and murder mystery parties. “It’s just a really fun community of like-minded people,” said Merchant, who is originally from Rapid City, South Dakota, and is in her senior year at USD.

Her role in leading the group contributed to her receiving the 2024 Justin Runestad Scholarship from the South Dakota Archaeological Society.

“Of all the students I’ve worked with at USD, I think McKenzie has been the most active with promoting archaeology on campus, which makes her a great candidate for this scholarship” said Tony Krus, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology and the society member who nominated Merchant for the award.

The Runestad Scholarship honors a student who has contributed to the field of archaeology in South Dakota and includes a $500 award. Merchant said she will use the money to help pay for trips to two national conferences this year – the Society for America Anthropology in April and the American Association of Biological Anthropology in May.

Merchant said she developed an interest in anthropology and archaeology at an early age. “When I was young, I loved learning about the Ice Age and cave people,” she said. “As I got a little bit older, I started to learn about evolution and Charles Darwin.”

In 2014, as an 11-year-old, the young archaeology buff took part in her first excavation at the South Dakota State Historical Society’s archaeology camp in Pierre.

In summer 2024 – 10 years later and with three years of college studies under her belt – Merchant attended USD’s Susan Tuve Archaeology Field School held near Sturgis, South Dakota. The field school’s dig site, on what is called Soapsuds Row on the Bear Butte Creek Historic Preserve, includes an area where women washed laundry for soldiers at Fort Meade, a major military outpost in the late 1800s and early 1900s. USD students participating in last summer’s field school found artifacts ranging from a toy metal horse to chandelier crystals.

Merchant said one of her finds was a piece of glass bottle bearing the mark of the Adolphus Busch Glass Company. “We were able to date it between 1895 and 1905,” she said.

While on the Vermillion campus, in addition to taking classes, Merchant serves as Krus’ research assistant. Part of her duties are to clean and process artifacts from Soapsuds Row that reside in USD’s archaeological collection. Along with other field school students, she will present a preliminary report on their research on this project at the Society of American Archaeology meeting this April in Denver.

One of her favorite classes at USD was her Anthropology of Vice class taught by Saige Kelmelis, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology, where brewing beer from a 5,000-year-old recipe was part of the curriculum. “We got to do a cross-cultural analysis of vices and deviancy,” she explained. “We dove deep into the history and archaeology of it.”

After graduating this May, Merchant plans to attend graduate school in biological anthropology, which is the study of human biology and behavior from an evolutionary perspective. In a gap year before grad school, she intends to return to Soapsuds Row next summer as a volunteer and add a new field school to her resume – a three-week program in Belize excavating artifacts from the late classical Mayan period.

“It’s really awesome stuff to be studying,” Merchant said.

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