Grace Barrentine (Class of 2024)

Grace Barrentine is from a small town called Woodstock, Alabama and received her B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Biology from USA in 2024. During her tenure at South, she volunteered at the Center for Archaeological Studies, sorting artifacts from the I-10 Mobile River Bridge Project. At 23, Barrentine is the youngest member of the team at Wiregrass Archaeology. The cultural resource management firm sends her traveling across the Southeast — some weeks in muddy fields, others in the lab, where she carefully logs and analyzes soil and the occasional fragments of the past embedded in it. At Wiregrass, she conducts Phase I survey work, the foundational assessment that helps determine whether proposed new construction can move forward legally. Her long-term dream is to earn a master’s in maritime archaeology — ideally in Australia — with a focus on shipwrecks. And after that, she hopes to move to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands to work alongside Dr. Alexandra Jones, a renowned archaeologist who confirmed that the islands are in desperate need of professionals like Barrentine.

In her own words: “Take a class that’s off the beaten path. Volunteer. Talk to people on and off campus. That one conversation could change everything. And maybe, just maybe, consider scuba certification. You never know what lies just beneath the surface.”