How far would you go to get something you want or need? Would you make a special trip up a flight of stairs in your house to get new batteries for the remote? Or would you wait until you had to go up for another reason? How about two flights? What if I took away the stairs, and you had to walk up a hill? How far would you go then? Ten feet up? Twenty feet? Thirty feet? What if your prize at the top of the hill wasn’t something you could easily replace from a drawer in your home but instead was the key to a box? A box that contained the answer to a question you’ve asked yourself for more than a decade. Now for the final wrinkle. What if I told you that the key you’re searching for is likely at the top of that 30-foot high hill, but I can’t guarantee it’s there, or if it is there that you’ll even find it. Is your answer still the same as it was at the beginning?

I recently found myself in a situation very similar to this. In the hopes of answering a question that I’ve asked myself for 13 years, I had to collect a lot of rock from a very tall butte in North Dakota. So a small group of us went to a site in the southwest corner of the state. We had to collect a lot of rock because the fossil animals we were looking for are very small, rare, and hard to find. As a result of the small size and scarcity, the bigger the sample size we collected, the more likely we will find what we’re looking for. After all the work was done, we had collected more than 800 pounds of rock from the top of that butte. The rock then had to be carried by hand in buckets down the butte and across the prairie. There is a high probability that the reward will be worth the effort. Maybe I will finally answer that question that has been burning in my mind for more than a decade. If not, I’ll try again and again until I’ve answered my question.

Our quest involved hauling roughly 800 pounds of rock from the collection site to a waiting truck.

This is the quandary faced by scientists all over the world. But in my opinion, not knowing what you’ll find or when you’ll find it just makes the endeavor more exciting. At times, the work paleontologists do can be hot, dirty, and tiring. Nevertheless, for me, the discovery part of science is both fun and rewarding — answering the questions that no one has answered (or even thought to ask) and finding something new that no one has discovered. That is what keeps me coming back for more, and I bet a lot of you feel the same way.

Could the answer to my burning question lie inside one of these buckets?

If you want to join me on the quest for answers, come along on one of our public fossil digs. We hold them every summer. Please keep in mind that while not every dig we offer requires a lot of physical strength, all of them require patience. The fossils we work with are fragile and need a certain amount of care to remove them intact, but you will learn how! Follow us on social media to find out when registration will start. We are on all the major platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), just search for @NDGSpaleo. I hope to see you next summer!

The Archaeology and Historic Preservation (AHP) Division houses more than 12 million artifacts for their long-term care, research, and access for multiple entities. The archaeological collections (artifacts, ecofacts, samples, associated records, etc.) provide a window to the past for thousands of years of occupation in the northern Plains of North America. In this blog, I focus on a major collections project that works to maximize the usability and accessibility of archaeological collections curated at the State Historical Society. As the archaeology collections manager, my task is not only to ensure that collections are preserved and curated according to Federal Curation Standards, but also to make them accessible to a wide audience through research, exhibits, digitization, public education, loans, and interpretation and publications. Many doctoral and master’s degree researchers use archaeological collections for their studies.

Effective user access to collections requires, at the minimum, assembling and organizing information regarding collection acquisition, accessioning, storage locations, etc. Along with me, three additional AHP archaeologists (Fern Swenson, Amy Bleier, Meagan Schoenfelder) are working on a project to increase the usability and public access to collections. We use journey boards (JB) to divide tasks and track our progress (See photo below). The project aims to summarize and document archaeological collections curated here. The summary includes information regarding site numbers, site names, cultural tradition(s), time period/age, ethnic traditions, land ownership, accession numbers, excavation year(s), storage location, general description of collections, number of records in Re:discovery (collections management software), references, and maps at a site level. By maximizing collections utility and increasing access to collections, we aim to reach a wider audience. This, in turn, will advance science when we promote research, interpretation, and publication.

Among other things, the summary document can be used:

• As reference material for researchers to select sites or collections for their research.
• To identify potential collections for instructional purposes (e.g., collections without provenance (origin) information).
• To understand collections by time period/cultural tradition.
• To map the location of sites where our collections come from.
• To organize/reorganize collections in storage (e.g., collections from the same site may be stored in the same room/aisle).
• To track collection recording and digitizing in Re:discovery.

Sample of Summary Document

Journey Board progress (top) and project members. Journey boards are visual project boards that provide feedback and progress information.

In sum, the summary document will provide archaeologists, scholars, interpreters, educators, culturally affiliated groups, and members of the public with better access to the State Historical Society’s collections for research, publications, exhibitions, education, and other forms of interpretive work, and this will provide information relevant for each of these activities.