Jason L. Parrish, M.A.

Project Manager

Jason L. Parrish received his A.A. in General Studies from Hinds Community College in the spring of 2000.  In the fall of 2001 he entered the archaeology/anthropology program at Mississippi State University.  As an undergraduate, Mr. Parrish was employed as an archeological field technician for PBS&J during the summer of 2002.  During the summer of 2003 he participated in a ten weeklong archaeological field school, in which many techniques in field survey and excavation were taught.  The excavation portion of the field school focused on the Mississippian mound site of Lyons Bluff in northeast Mississippi.  As an undergraduate, he participated in the development of an online archeological and anthropological archive, from which he published four reviews.  Mr. Parrish graduated from MSU in the fall of 2003 with his B.A. in anthropology.

            Directly following graduation, Mr. Parrish was accepted into the Master of Arts Applied Anthropology graduate program at Mississippi State University.  Being selected by his instructors at Mississippi State University, he attended the 2004 Archaeological Geophysical Prospection Workshop in Fort Smith, Arkansas, hosted by the National Park Service.  This week long workshop focused on geophysical devices and how they can be applied to archaeological research and methods.

            Mr. Parrish participated in a private research project that focused on archaeological predictive modeling.  This project focused on State and Federal operated lands in Mississippi.  The goal of the project was to design a predictive model, using both an inductive and deductive approach, which can be applied to different physiographical regions.

            During the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005, Mr. Parrish participated in a four month internship and a four month assistantship with the USDA Forest Service.  During this internship, he assisted Forest Archaeologist, Kevin Bruce, M.A., in the construction of a GIS database that linked modern land tract records to Depression Era land transaction records.  This project allowed for old home sites to be georeferenced to modern maps.  It also opened up doors for genealogical research.  The following summer, he was again employed by the USDA Forest Service, but as a temporary Field Archaeologist.  Mr. Parrish, along with a two field technicians, surveyed over 3000 acres of National Forest land that summer.

            In summer of 2006, Mr. Parrish received his M.A. in Applied Anthropology from Mississippi State University.  His thesis: An Archaeological Investigation of Four Woodland-Period Sites in the North Central Hills Physiographic Region of Mississippi: 22CH653, 22WI536, 22WI588, and 22WI670, focuses on understanding the amount of variability among archaeological sites in north Mississippi and attempts to determine the main reason for this variability.  For the fieldwork, Mr. Parrish led a crew that consisted of 26 members of the Mississippi State University 2005 archaeological field school.

            In May 2006, Mr. Parrish accepted a position as Project Manager for Earth Search, Inc. (ESI).  He has been involved in several Phase I surveys in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Alabama.  From June to August 2006, he participated in the 147-plus mile Continental Connector Pipeline project in southwestern Arkansas.  Following this project, he served as project manager for the SR 9, SR 15, and SR 601 highway expansion projects in Mississippi, and the St. Martinville Bypass of La 31 in Louisiana.  He currently is serving as project manager for several borrow pit surveys in south Louisiana.  Mr. Parrish is also in the process of writing articles for Mississippi Archaeology and the Journal of Archaeological Science.