Name: Carey Klopfenstein
Class Year: 2026
Major: Anthropology
Minor: Museum Studies, Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology
 
Internship Organization: Vienna Institute of Archaeological Science
Internship Title:   Intern
Location:  Vienna, Austria
 
What’s happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!  

How I set up bones for taking morphometric analysis photos

I’ve been very lucky to do a variety of things at my internship. With one of my supervisors, Dr. Magdalena Blanz, I mainly worked with goose bones from the site of Mühlacker near the ancient Roman city of Carnuntum. I looked through boxes full of bones from the site and identified the tarsometatarsi and humeri of greylag geese. I then took photos of the tarsometatarsi for morphometric analysis. I also worked on cleaning and preparing samples of bone from people from Bronze Age Austria for isotope analysis. During the second part of my work week, I worked with Dr. Birgit Bühler. We worked with metal artifacts from the Avar culture, an early Medieval culture originally from eastern Central Asia that settled in parts of Central Europe. I was privileged enough to be able to see artifacts from the excavations at Zillingtal which have not yet been published. I started out by presorting the artifacts based on the illustrations done at the excavation in the 1980s and learning more about early Medieval metalworking techniques, and then we looked through some of the most promising boxes to check their preservation and which were most promising for analysis.
 
Why did you apply for this internship?  

The site of Carnuntum including reconstructed Roman buildings

Honestly, a big part of the appeal for me was that I would find out whether or not I got in before the deadlines for other summer internship applications, so I wouldn’t have to go through the exhausting process of applying for all the places I was interested in at the same time. I had applied for the IES Vienna Internship funding last summer and didn’t get in, so I wasn’t very hopeful, but I figured if I didn’t apply again I would always regret it and wonder what if. I chose to apply for Vienna specifically because I’m pursuing Museum Studies and there are so many different museums in the city (over 100!) My focus within my major is Archaeological Anthropology, so when I found out that VIAS was willing to interview me I was thrilled.

Was there anything special about how you found this internship?  

The little goose figurine given to me by my supervisor Magdalena Blanz

Because I was doing an IES internship program, I worked with Nika Protic at IES to find an internship to do with the program. Nika was incredibly kind and helpful every step of the way. I wasn’t aware of VIAS before she mentioned them to me.

What has been your favorite part of this internship?  

There were so many parts of my internship that I loved that it’s hard to choose, but I have to say my favorite part has been the people. I’ve tried to take every opportunity I could to meet people in Vienna’s community of archaeological scholars and everyone has been so warm and welcoming. All of my coworkers were such interesting people. Magdalena’s office is filled with a lush forest of plants and she collects little animal figurines. She’s also part of a brass quintet. Birgit does horseback archery, learned to read Ogham, the ancient Irish script, and travels to watch Orcas. I had so many wonderful conversations both about archaeology and about people’s lives. On my last day, Magdalena gave me a little goose figurine to commemorate my work on the goose bones and I was really touched.     

What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn’t expect?  

I wasn’t expecting just how long Austria has been a diverse place and the role of cultural identity. Even before the Roman conquest, Iron Age Austrians had access to far reaching trade routes. Roman sites such as Carnuntum and Vindobona (where Vienna now stands) were places of interactions between Romans and Celtic peoples. Under Avar rule, genetic evidence suggests that groups of people of various European groups adopted Avar cultural practices. On the other end the remains of a woman have been found which genetic analysis indicates that her ancestry was from modern day Mongolia, but her dress and burial indicate that presented, and perhaps identified, herself, with the culture of the Roman province of Pannonia. I didn’t know that much about ancient and Medieval Austria before this summer, and I was fascinated by the rich history of different cultures and their interactions here. Also, there is a type of Avar earring called a Bommel, a German word for the pompoms on top of winter hats, which I thought was very cute. 

Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you? 

I wasn’t expecting just how long Austria has been a diverse place and the role of cultural identity. Even before the Roman conquest, Iron Age Austrians had access to far reaching trade routes. Roman sites such as Carnuntum and Vindobona (where Vienna now stands) were places of interactions between Romans and Celtic peoples. Under Avar rule, genetic evidence suggests that groups of people of various European groups adopted Avar cultural practices. On the other end the remains of a woman have been found which genetic analysis indicates that her ancestry was from modern day Mongolia, but her dress and burial indicate that presented, and perhaps identified, herself, with the culture of the Roman province of Pannonia. I didn’t know that much about ancient and Medieval Austria before this summer, and I was fascinated by the rich history of different cultures and their interactions here. Also, there is a type of Avar earring called a Bommel, a German word for the pompoms on top of winter hats, which I thought was very cute. 

Can you give us three adjectives and three nouns that describe your internship experience? 

Enriching, welcoming, enlightening  

Practice, gecrets (geese secrets),  bommels  

What is most rewarding about your internship?  

My supervisors talked a lot about how much the stuff I was doing was helping them, and I was really happy to be helping them out. I also found it incredibly cool to be face to face and handling artifacts. Unfortunately, because they’re unpublished, I can’t include images of the Avar metal artifacts, but some of them were incredibly beautiful and well preserved, and I could hardly believe that I was right there holding them. 

Was the internship what you expected it to be? 

I would say that this internship exceeded my expectations. I was excited going into it, but my expectations were vague and I was really happy with how it turned out.