New pastures beckon. Yes, I am retiring from the business of IAC, leaving ownership and management to Jake and Jesse. We have been preparing for this transition since 2014, and it is time now to hand over the keys to the new generation.
I am both sad and excited to step into the next phase of my life. I have been blessed to have worked on so many intriguing and important projects and to have collaborated with many of you as clients, colleagues, reviewers, and friends. My post-IAC life will still encompass archaeology, as I move towards publishing some of my most memorable projects. I have long dreamed about having an open-ended schedule to delve into data, pull evidence apart, and reassemble into a compelling narrative. Contract work does not always permit this academic bent, so I look forward to immersing myself in the details I didn’t have time to explore before.
I will continue as Research Associate at Utica College, where I assist Dr. Thomas Crist in his teaching of a forensic anthropology field school in Albania and Romania. I anticipate travel in my future with Ellen and friends who are inclined to join us. The writer in me who has long lain dormant is waking up now – I have manuscripts going back to a pencil-scrawled story about UFOs written when I was in fourth grade. My subjects today are no less fantastical, leaning now towards dragons and angels and a woman who lives in a painting on a wall.
I will miss the wild range of opportunity that contract archaeology allows, pin balling from one project to another – quarries one day, shiphouses another, watching traffic whizz by on highways on another. I will miss the camaraderie field deprivations engender – cold, heat, nasty-smelling hotels – but most of all, I will miss the spirit of communal problem solving!
There will be a celebration, but at this time, we are busy with the seamless transfer of the business from one set of owners to the next. I will send announcement when we know time and place, where we can sit and raise a glass to our past and our future.

Ellen Marlatt has been a co-owner of IAC since its inception in 1998 and retired in 2018. Ellen’s career focused on historic sites in northern New England, utilizing her training in American & New England Studies from the University of Southern Maine (MA 1996) to analyze and interpret the archaeological puzzle. Her involvement in cultural resource management projects covered all aspects of the archaeological process from project management to report writing. She is especially proud that IAC has been a leader in advancing standards of archaeological excellence as well as her role in promoting professionalism among IAC archaeologists, providing year-round employment and benefits commensurate with other highly educated professionals in similar fields. Ellen is a past Board member of the American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA), an organization that supports these standards on a national level.