The March 9 session of the 2017 Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series is a presentation by Darren Tanke, Preparation Technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, entitled “Palaeontologists Can Be Archaeologists: Use of Palaeontological Plaster Jacketing Techniques to Collect an Archaeological Feature from Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta.”
The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology assisted the Royal Alberta Museum on two major archaeological projects in the summer of 2016. The first, near Elk Point, was the recovery of part of a stone hearth from the Fort George trading post from about 1792. The second project, at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Park near Fort Macleod, was the recovery of a 1,300-year-old First Nations roasting pit complete with skeletal remains of an uneaten meal.
Although both archaeologists and palaeontologists dig into the ground for artifacts or specimens, the disciplines differ in many ways in their field extraction techniques.
In his talk, Tanke explains how he trained the archaeologists in dinosaur skeleton collecting techniques and how to make large plaster field jackets to recover large archaeological features — a first for this type of collaboration in Canada. Both projects posed some unique technical challenges that Tanke had to solve on the spot using his nearly forty years of field experience with the Royal Tyrrell Museum.
The Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Speaker Series talks are free and open to the public. They are held every Thursday until April 27 at 11:00 a.m. in the Museum auditorium. Past Speaker Series talks are also available on the Museum’s YouTube channel: youtube.com/user/RoyalTyrrellMuseum
Cutline: Darren Tanke…
to present at Speaker Series
