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Abigail Verneuille, who is earning a BA in anthropology along with a GIS certificate, is honored as the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate

In the summer of 2024, following her sophomore year as a University of Colorado Boulder anthropology major, Abigail Verneuille signed up for archaeological field school in the Velarde Valley of northern New Mexico.

The area is stunning with its boundless sky and mosaic of mesas, but summers there are intense—arid and scorchingly hot, plus dusty and buggy.

“We were sleeping on the floor for a month, and despite that and the heat, all the dirt, the bugs, everything, I just had the best time of my life,” she says. “I loved everything about it.”

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Abigail Verneuille (third from left), the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate, with (left to right) Dean of Arts and Humanities John-Michael Rivera, Dean of Social Sciences Sarah Jackson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Daryl Maeda, Dean of Natural Sciences Irene Blair and Interim Associate Dean for Student Success Jennifer Fitzgerald.

Before that summer, she had indistinct ideas about her path following college, but after it she knew that she wanted a career in archaeology and directed the rest of her undergraduate education toward that goal—earning a certificate in geographic information systems (GIS) and computational science and writing a thesis aiming to predict past streamflow heights of the Rio Grande River to identify years of agricultural instability.

In recognition of her innovative research, academic excellence and dedicated work, Verneuille has been named the Spring 2026 College of Arts and Sciences outstanding graduate.

“Verneuille’s perfect academic record tells only part of the story, as she has taken courses ranging from humanities to women and gender studies to biological anthropology to math to astronomy to geographic information systems to computational science, and she has received straight A’s in all of them!” wrote Scott Ortman, professor of anthropology, in recommending her. “She has also conducted archaeological field research in North Macedonia and participated in the anthropology department’s archaeology field school in northern New Mexico. Her honors thesis project emerged from that experience.

“What stands out about Abby’s thesis is not just its organization, clarity and technical sophistication, but the fact that the work is of such significance in its field.”

Hiking into the backcountry

Because the kind of archaeology she wants to do is outdoors and sometimes miles down a dirt road, it helps that Verneuille has always loved to be outside. Growing up in Tennessee, she spent a lot of time hiking and exploring—activities she continued when she moved to Boulder for college.

She majored in anthropology and minored in women and gender studies, which allowed her to study themes of religion and ritual that dovetailed with her archaeological research. She discovered her academic passion, though, near the tiny community of Estaca, New Mexico, where she and her research colleagues opened four two-meter by one-meter rectangles in which they found artifacts that helped describe the people who lived in that area before and after Spanish colonialism.

Another project on which she worked was documenting petroglyphs with the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project. “There would be days where we’d like an hour and a half into the backcountry and spend eight hours recording petroglyphs, then hike an hour and a half back up this mesa, and that was just the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” Verneuille says.

In talking with archaeologists from other universities, though, she realized at field school that she would need technical expertise to accompany her hands-in-the-dirt skills, so in fall 2024 she began pursuing her GIS and computational science certificate. “For that, you’re required to take a semester of statistics in R Studio and then two semesters of coding in Python, and I’d never really thought of myself as a computer kind of person, but I got thrown straight into it,” she says.��

“But once I got into the actual mapping classes, the spatial analytics, all the remote sensing, that’s when I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing, I love this.’”

Amazing work, amazing people

For her thesis, Verneuille sought to tackle a 100-year-old mystery in U.S. Southwest archaeology: When Pueblo ancestors migrated from the Four Corners region into the Rio Grande Valley in the 13th century, why did they initially settle away from the main courses of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama, where most of the water was, only to gravitate toward the rivers about 100 years later?

Verneuille combined river flow data from the Embudo gauge, the oldest river gauge in the United States, with weather station data and tree ring data reflecting precipitation and temperature from the headwaters of the Rio Grande to essentially “predict the past” and understand June flood risk from the present back to 1200 C.E.

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Abigail Verneuille conducts land surveys in northern New Mexico for her archaeological research. (Photo: Abigail Verneuille)

Transitions visible in her model corresponded with the end of a phenomenon called the Medieval Climate Anomaly, an unusually warm and wet period worldwide.

“In a final stroke of brilliance, Verneuille not only showed that this reduction in June flood risk corresponds in time to the concentration of population along the main river channels, but she also considers how Pueblo ancestors would have interpreted this change in the environment by considering depictions of water serpent beings in rock art of the area,” Ortman wrote. “Her work shows that climate change can improve local environments for humans in counterintuitive ways, and that there is a connection between the practical and the spiritual with regard to human adaptation to the environment.”

She notes that while the physical work of archaeology was fascinating, she equally loved the community-building aspect of it, working with people who live in the area and whose ancestors are the Tewa-speaking people she was studying. In March, she and several colleagues gave a presentation to residents in the area on what their research had revealed about things like diet and socioeconomic differences of the people who lived in that area hundreds of years ago.

“They were gracious enough to welcome us into their some, so everyone sat around the dining room table and we had a little projector,” Verneuille says. “This is their livelihood, their community, so they had a lot of questions, and it was such a rewarding experience so see how the technical side of academic work has real-life impacts.”

It’s work that she hopes to continue doing after she graduates Saturday, and she has applied for field technician position with cultural resource management firms. She also is aiming for graduate school in the next five years to continue her archaeology studies.

“It’s amazing work and the most amazing community of people,” she says, “and one that I’d love to continue being a part of.”

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