Undergraduate student Becca Albert (advised by Dr. William Lovis) was honored at the 2017 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting for her paper on pre-contact maize in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Becca was awarded the “Best Undergraduate Student Paper Award” jointly by the Institute for Field Research (IFR) and the SAA. This award, which includes a 1,000 cash prize, acknowledges exceptional scholarly work among undergraduate archaeology students. In Becca’s case, the award committee wrote that “[Rebecca’s paper] employs a methodologically rigorous microbotanical analysis to demonstrate that carbonized residue on pottery from the Winter Site, AMS dated to 100 cal B.C., contains maize phytoliths. This finding pushes back the earliest date for maize in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan 800 years earlier than existing dates.” This is an amazing contribution to archaeology! Congratulations, Rebecca Albert.