The microartifacts Megan Berry spent her summer hunting were no larger than a grain of rice, and many were far smaller. To find them, she had a pair of tweezers, a set of nested pans and her own eye for a telltale shine.

Berry, a senior in Michigan State University’s Department of Anthropology, spent the summer of 2026 as an undergraduate researcher on a project led by Dr. Phyllis Johnson and funded through the College of Social Science Provost’s Undergraduate Research Initiative (CSS-PURI). The project examined soil samples from sites of the Fort Ancient culture, a group that lived roughly 600 to 800 years ago in the Ohio Valley, including Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and West Virginia. The soil had been collected during earlier excavations in Ohio and Kentucky and held in museum collections, most of it never analyzed.

Dr. Johnson had mentioned in class that she was looking for a paid research assistant, and the job came with travel. “I have always wanted to travel to new places and see more of the world,” Berry says. She got the position, and as summer began, so did the research.

The work took Berry and Dr. Johnson to the Dayton Society of Natural History and the Cincinnati Museum Center, where they subsampled soil from three Fort Ancient sites: the Wegerzyn Garden Site, SunWatch Village and the Hahn Site. They were after microartifacts, fragments of material too small to see without close attention. In this project, that meant anything under 6.3 millimeters. Dr. Johnson’s research centers on one kind in particular: microdebitage, the tiny flakes of stone struck off while a tool is being made. Because those flakes settle into the ground where they fall instead of being carried off like a finished tool, their distribution across a site can point to where people were making tools and what else they were doing in and around a household.

Then came the sorting, which is as painstaking as it sounds and yet somehow more satisfying. “When you are doing the analysis, it is actually quite boring,” Berry says. The soil passes through seven nested pans, each with smaller openings than the last, in a process she likens to panning for gold. Whatever settles out is separated by hand with tweezers, first by eye and then under a microscope when a fragment is uncertain. Berry found she could often pick out a likely piece by its shine or color before it was confirmed. “I just have a good eye for these things,” she says. The payoff, when a sample she had sorted turned out to be something worth keeping, had her feeling “like a kid on Christmas.”

From the museums, the samples traveled with Berry and Dr. Johnson to the Microartifacts Lab at Vanderbilt University, where 170 samples from SunWatch Village were analyzed, and then to the Cultural Resources Lab (CuRL) at MSU, where roughly 400 of them are still being sorted by hand. This fall, Dr. Johnson will use machine learning on the larger dataset to locate where stone tools were being made at SunWatch Village.

Somewhere in that work, Berry turned up a finding of her own. Using geographic information systems (GIS) to map where animal bone appeared in soil from two houses at SunWatch Village, she noticed the fragments were not scattered at random. In her preliminary analysis, larger faunal remains clustered near the doors and edges of each house and smaller microbone toward the hearths and central areas, a pattern that she and Dr. Johnson read as a possible sign of separate spaces for preparing and eating food. That finding is the work she is turning into a poster for the 2027 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) at MSU.

For Berry, the summer pointed somewhere she had not expected. “I always kind of have been interested in bones,” she says, “but after all this, I could consider going into zooarchaeology.” The experience, she says, gave her “a glimpse into what real archaeology is.”