Mammoth Updates
The Mammoth Site is a hub of research centering on and around the Black Hills and its Ice Age past. We have three main objectives to our organization: research, education, tourism. As one can understand, these three are interlinking at all phases.
Well we are still rolling through with various changes throughout The Mammoth Site. The below is an update about the last half of 2018 and early half of 2019. I am not sure just what you already know about changes here, so I will just list them in a more staccato format:
· Monica Bugbee finished her job here as Preparator this February and is moving on to earn a Ph.D.
· I hired Mary Carpenter to finish preparing the Larramendy mammoth skull from Channel Islands NP…a temporary position. Mary was here many years ago both as a digger and field crew member…several years in a row. She was the preparator at Hagerman Fossil Beds Natl Mon for 4 years and has been the preparator at Badlands NP each summer for several years lately.
· Dr. Sharon Holte is our Director of Education division (for just over a year now) and is making great headway at redirecting our education and outreach programs. She and I created the new Mammoth Site Geospatial Center which is situated within the Division of Education. This is a high-tech lab that continues our site mapping but will input a 3D aspect to it. In addition, it has two 3D scanners and a 3D printer. These will be used both for research and for education – both of teachers and kids. This center and its functions are greatly expanding.
· Justin Wilkiins is now part of The Mammoth Site’s Geospatial Center – still will do our site mapping and still works on secondary education. Dr. Holte and Justin are organizing and expanding the role of education outreach from the Site.
· I hired Ellen Starck as our new Conservator position, which begins May 13. This position will also expand and move the site into some new areas of research and education outreach.
· All exhibits are a combination effort between divisions of Research and Education.
· Since May 2018 we have had a large section in our Exhibit Hall that promotes the evolution of bison.
· May 5-11, 2019, we will take a crew of about 16 to the Snake River Fossil Site (MN) to determine if there are two layers of bison there, one late Pleistocene and one latest Pleistocene-early Holocene. It appears so far that the bison are just a little larger than our bison today. Crew members will be some of our regular Mammoth Diggers, staff, colleagues from University of TX A&M, and Univ of AZ. We will have an entire day devoted to school kids’ education at the site. Should be a blast!!
· To make The Mammoth Site more accessible we added an elevator near the upper stairs in the Bonebed so that those folks who need or want to use it instead of the stairs can just ride down to the main level at the east end of the Bonebed.
· The Bonebed stairs have been removed and widened so that the steps are easier to use (higher step) and two adults can be side-by-side in using the stairs – basically we widened the stairs….safer and better people-flow.
· The southwest corner of the Bonebed was filled in with sediments, concrete slab-filled, fence removed, and short-faced bear display and other things displayed. Sandy Swift produced a temporary section which has many photos of The Mammoth Site from the many years of excavation. Hhhhmmm I seem to have been younger then…. but I am having more fun now!
· Sandy, Chris Jass, Sharon Holte, and I are working hard and consistently on the Persistence Cave and a new cave project excavations and analysis. The caves are interestingly different!!
· Sandy and I expanded the use of the Microfaunal Lab at The Mammoth Site. There is more room to use my library there, a room devoted to work on mollusks (two small projects from northern Mexico regarding snails), space for storage, and space for visiting researchers.
· We built a shed down by the screen washing area to store all the new washing and cave excavation equipment.
· Dr. Steve Emslie (paleontologist at University of North Carolina Wilmington) is spearheading our new project on late Pleistocene faunas from the central Great Basin – mainly the Snake Range and Schell Creek Range. Steve and I worked various caves out there back in the late 70s and 80s. We also did a 40-day excavation of various caves in the eastern Grand Canyon in the early 80s. Last year the US Natl Forest Service asked us to help them work out more new finds from caves in their NV mountains. The project is centered here at The Mammoth Site. Chris Jass did his dissertation on a cave fauna that I located in 1978 in the Snake Range, so he too will work on various aspects of this project.
· I have some smaller new projects in dry rock shelters in the TransPecos Texas region. Archaeologists are recovering dry-preserved dung from their shelters – Late Pleistocene. Hhhhmmm they see dung and think of me!?!?! Bighorn sheep, sloth, etc.
· I am approaching the sediments in the Bonebed with the idea that all things uncovered, discovered, or removed are tied to the stratigraphy that will tie to the OSL dating chronology. The very top is little less than 140,000 years old, the bottom of the excavated area about 190,000 years old, and I estimate that the bottom of the sink hole is well more than 200,000 years old! All will be tied/linked to the global climate record. The top of the site is edging into an interglacial while most of the site’s deposition is during a glacial age, but it appears the lowest might well be yet another previous interglacial. Lots to figure out yet.
· A number of us are going to produce a long-term plan for exhibit changes…. have yet to do this conclusively. The Exhibit Hall could have a second-story riming the room so more displays up there yet can look down into the main room.
· Presston Gabel (Mammoth Site budget manager) and I are moving head on developing our Field Station – it will go to the west of our staff parking lot. We so need this for our education-outreach expansion and to have a place where researchers and college student studying whatever they are studying here in the Black Hills to have a base camp with residency hall and lab/classroom.
· I am beginning to develop our education and outreach about keystone species (bison, prairie-dogs, mammoths) and climate change in the Black Hills and surrounding prairie through the Ice Age up to today.
The Mammoth Site is really a fun place to work – there is so much here and around it to either research or watch/listen to others do their research. I am sure glad that we have a good coffee machine to keep my energy up!
-Dr. Jim Mead
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