Students Open "Peopling of the New World" Exhibit at Museum of Anthropology
Utah State University’s Museum of Anthropology, located in the historic Old Main building, room 252, holds a grand opening of the new exhibit “From the Bering Strait to Lake Bonneville: Ice-Age Peopling of the Americas,” Wednesday, Feb. 27, at 5 p.m. Admission and parking are free, refreshments will be served, and museum staffers welcome the public to join the celebration.
The new exhibit features a mural of a life-sized Columbian mammoth like those that roamed the Ice-Age Utah landscape and were sometimes slain by proficient hunters. Alyssa Harper, USU art major, painted the mammoth and several other original works. The exhibit also includes an interactive electronic map depicting three possible colonization routes from the Old World to the New World and interpretation of two nearby cave sites favored by people 11,000 years ago.
“One of the two cave sites we interpret is right here in Cache Valley,” said Bonnie Pitblado, the museum director. “It is not as well known as Danger Cave, the other cave site we interpret, but from what we can infer, the Cache Valley site was occupied for just as long and just as intensively as its Tooele County counterpart.”
In consultation with Pitblado and museum coordinator Sara Lundberg, undergraduate students Erika Blank (political science), Mailee Cook (liberal arts), Shannyn Saxton and Allison Willmore (both anthropology majors) created the exhibit. The team spearheaded every element of exhibit production, including conceiving and carrying out fundraisers to pay for the six-month undertaking and competitively selecting Harper to create original exhibit art. The team conducted extensive research on the subject in order to select artifacts featured in the exhibit and write the accompanying text.
The museum’s free parking is available south of Old Main in the A6 lot. The parking gate opens allowing public access shortly before 5 p.m. For more information on this event, contact museum coordinator Sara Lundberg, (435) 797-7545 or sara.lundberg@usu.edu, or visit the museum Web site.
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Contact: Sara Lundberg (435) 797-7545
Writer: Tiffanie White
Writer: Tiffanie White
A life-sized Columbian mammoth like those that roamed the Ice-Age Utah landscape now appears on the wall at USU's Museum of Anthropology. USU student and art major Alyssa Harper painted the mammoth and several other original works.
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