Backstage Pass to North Dakota History

This blog takes you behind the scenes of the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Get a glimpse at a day-in-the-life of the staff, volunteers, and partners who make it all possible. Discover what it takes to preserve North Dakota's natural and cultural history.

Adventures in Archaeology Collections: A Tour of the Big Collections Room

In past blog posts, I gave a sneak peek at the initial processing lab and the main archaeology lab. Today, let’s take a tour of the big archaeological collections storage room.

Comparisons have been made to the warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”—but don’t worry, we have much better finding aids. We want people to be able to find the artifacts in the big archaeological collections storage room and use them for research, exhibits, and educational events.

This room was designed to hold at least 20 years of future incoming collections and related materials, with moveable shelving adding extra storage space. This gives us room to store large, oversized objects not currently on display, like this earthlodge model.

This large model of an unfinished rectangular earthlodge shows how it was constructed.

In this room we keep educational, federal, and state collections as well as accession paperwork and storage supplies.

The archaeological educational collection is one of my favorite collections to show people. You don’t just get to peer at items in this collection from afar—you can touch, hold, and look closely at them.

Some objects in the educational collection are replicas, objects that were made recently but from the same materials people used in the past. Because things like wood, hide, and sinew usually do not last long in North Dakota’s environment, replicas are often the only way to show objects made from these materials. For instance, the wooden paddles that were used to shape pottery.

Replica wooden pottery paddles and pottery sherds from the educational collection.

Sometimes replicas are used for experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeology involves using the same kinds of tools used in the past to learn more about how something was done, such as making stone tools. Replicas are often used so the original artifacts are not damaged or destroyed in the process.

A replica flintknapping kit for making stone tools. From left: a leather pad, a stone abrader, a deer antler tine flaker, a hammerstone, and an elk antler billet.

Other objects in the educational collection are cast replicas. Casts are made from a mold or 3D scan of a real artifact. This is useful for artifacts that are too fragile or rare to handle, or for artifacts that come from places outside of North Dakota. Only North Dakota collections are currently accepted into the archaeology collections. But sometimes it is useful for researchers to have access to comparisons from other places. This projectile point is a synthetic cast of a real Paleoindian projectile point from the Mill Iron site in Montana.

A realistic cast replica of a Goshen Paleoindian projectile point from the Mill Iron site in Montana.

The real artifacts in the educational collection have little or no provenience (i.e., we do not know exactly where they are from or what was found around them). While this means they are not very useful for scientific study, they are still useful for learning about objects and material types. Many of these artifacts are donated.

Examples of real artifacts with low provenience. Even though such artifacts might not be scientifically studied, they are very useful for training volunteers and staff to identify different kinds of materials in collections.

Collections from federal lands in North Dakota are kept in this room. We help curate North Dakota’s federal collections for the U.S.  Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This is just part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s North Dakota collections!

Artifacts from projects on state, county, or municipal lands are also stored here, in addition to donations from private landowners.

These boxes hold artifacts from Fort Abraham Lincoln (32MO141) and are part of North Dakota’s state collections.

Filing cabinets and storage supplies might not be too exciting to look at, but they are important. These are the accession files. Accession files tell us who donated a collection or what federal agency owns the collection and where the artifacts came from.

These accession files might not look exciting, but they hold treasures of information, such as where collections come from and who donated them.

Storage space for supplies means we can continue moving North Dakota’s collections out of old acidic boxes and into better materials to preserve the artifacts for the future.

Archival boxes ready and waiting to be put to good use.

If you would like to schedule an in-person tour of the archaeology collections, please contact us.

A Marvel-ous World of Superheroes Heads to the State Museum

If your Spidey senses are tingling, it may be because Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross is coming to the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum. The traveling exhibition, developed by the Bess Bower Dunn Museum of Lake County, Illinois, will bring the gravity-defying world of Marvel Comic illustrations to Bismarck from March 16 through June 9, 2024.

spiderman

Spider-Man, Marvelocity Cover, 2018

The exhibition includes more than 50 original illustrations, including cover art, storyboards, preliminary drawings, sculptures, and even a set of homemade action figures fashioned by Alex Ross when he was a child in Lubbock, Texas.

Ross is a prolific and award-winning illustrator, writer, and fine artist. He created his first cartoon at age three after seeing a live action Spider-Man sequence on “The Electric Company” television program. As a teenager he carefully studied the visual techniques of comic book and graphic novel artists before following in his mother’s footsteps and studying at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.

In 1990, Ross’ first published comic book illustrations appeared in Now Comics’ “Terminator: The Burning Earth.” His initial Marvel cover art was printed in 1993. Ross’ work in the 1990s was primarily for DC Comics. Beginning in 2000 he became more closely associated with the world of Marvel.

Dr. Strange

Dr. Strange, Marvelocity Cover, 2018 

His work is now synonymous with the images of the Avengers, Captain America, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Guardians of the Galaxy, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and many, many other superheroes.

The fantastical world Ross creates lives outside human parameters, allowing him to push his visual representations of superheroes into a dramatic realm even beyond the limitations of computer-generated imagery (CGI). His characters are monumental and epic in scale, enhanced by exploding compositions that burst from the page. Ross works in the medium of gouache, an opaque watercolor. It allows for layering colors and is popular with commercial artists for its precise control and matte finish.

In 2018, Ross created a new series of cover images as part of a publication project documenting his career with Marvel. These illustrations form the Dunn Museum’s Marvelocity traveling exhibition and feature his signature hyperrealist style and dynamic poses.

Captain America

Captain America, Marvelocity Cover, 2018

So if action is your reward, come get your fill at Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross, on exhibit in the James E. Sperry Gallery at the State Museum, March 16-June 9, 2024. Radioactive spiders not included.