Kathryn McKenzie

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology with a minor in Business (2021) from the University of Victoria I applied to the graduate program to continue work on my Honours project.

My MA thesis focuses on broadening the scope and accessibility of the University of Victoria Zooarchaeological Lab (UVicZL) facility’s comparative collection. UVicZL maintains the largest and most representative collection in the region for the identification of fragmented archaeological remains.

Supervised by Dr. Iain McKechnie, and as a member of the Historical Ecology and Coastal Archaeology HECA Lab, I'm combining applied library science and virtual cloud data access (linked open data) to annotate collection specimen data with biodiversity and taxonomic information, Indigenous animal names, and geospatial location data. My research will enhance access, improve discoverability, and expand UVicZL collection data as a citable reference resource. Used by researchers, students, educators, and Indigenous scholars and community members, it is an essential resource used to expand deep time appreciation of how Indigenous peoples sustained themselves and managed their coastal landscapes for millennia. My goal is to improve access, link Indigenous knowledge, expand outreach education, and foster ecological and ethnobiological research.