Est. June 3, 1961
Experience Life Three Billion Years In The Making April 2018
Raptor Review
Issue 50
A quarterly publication for your information and enjoyment From the Director This 525-year interval is when the modern Indian tribes By Dr. Ken Carpenter of Utah began taking shape. I start with the great news that State Representative Thanks as always for your membership and support of Christine Watkins got $50,000 from the state legislathe museum. ture for the museum. This will finally allow for a major upgrade of the Changing Exhibits Gallery, as well as pay for some basics, like utilities. We plan to cover over the distracting cinder blocks to give the room more visually pleasing wall for the art that often hangs there. That work is scheduled to commence in the fall after the Ancient Skies Through Ancient Eyes photographic exhibit. I have long dreamed of making that room look better and more professional, and Representative Watkins' hard work will make that possible. Elsewhere, work is slowly progress in developing exhibits for the central dinosaur pit. It will feature new material that is not displayed anywhere else in the state, and in few museums worldwide for that matter. This is all in keeping with my plans to give this museum some unique exhibits to keep visitors coming back. As part of this renovation, Sandra has repainted the floor tarps under the dinosaur skeletons to look more like the ground, complete with footprints. Check it out. I decided not to invest in putting in a proper deck under the skeletons at this time because of how difficult and potentially damaging to the skeletons it would be to remove once we move to a new museum. Progress on that also putters along slowly. On the archaeology side, funds have been made available for conservation of artifacts in the collections. We are also planning to submit a National Endowment for the Arts grant to photograph many of the objects on display for an online catalog. Exhibit work in the archaeology gallery is postponed until exhibits are caught up on the paleontology side. Sometime next year, we will probably start on the Numic Indians, i.e., the Indians from after the Fremont & Anasazi to the appearance of the Spanish in Utah in 1776.
Castle Country Cultures By Dr. Tim Riley
Greetings from the Hall of Archaeology! This mild winter has us itching to get back out in the field, but we have had plenty of projects to occupy our time inside the Hall. In the last newsletter, I mentioned the collaborative excavation at the Cottonwood Village pithouse in Nine Mile Canyon. That excavation yielded a number of artifacts, mostly associated with manufacturing beads out of shale. The recovered artifacts were taken to the lab to be analyzed. We had two great groups of students, one from Carbon High School and one from the Salt Lake Center for Science Education, volunteer a Saturday to come in and learn some basic artifact analysis from Jody Patterson (Montgomery Archaeological Consultants) and myself. It was fun seeing the students recognize some of the items they had recovered during the excavation as they washed, labeled, and documented the artifacts.
Student volunteers listen to Jody Patterson explain how to properly document artifacts (photo by Tim Riley)