Partnership brings old objects to new light
Story and Photos by Ann Boucher, Printing Specialist, Montana/Dakotas State Office
Museum, talks about the display he created using
artifacts from the Billings Curation Center
A partnership between the Yellowstone County Museum and BLM Montana/Dakotas has brought out some ancient artifacts for a new display.
Zach Garhart, Assistant at the Yellowstone County Museum, created the exhibit to highlight 12,000 years of pre-history in Montana.
“The overall purpose of the display is for people to understand people were here long before the settlers and they weren’t just here, but that they had a very rich culture, arts, and very diverse peoples. In this display I question how did the people get here? What did they do when they got here? How did they actually survive? The display tries to cover the whole lifestyles of early people to the Americas.”
Locating artifacts from the previous 12,000 years wasn’t easy, but the BLM’s Billings Curation Center provided some key pieces.
square feet of exhibits featuring the natural history and
diverse cultures of the Yellowstone Valley and Northern
Plains.
Located in the Montana/Dakotas State Office in Billings, the Curation Center preserves and catalogs nearly 750,000 artifacts that were found on BLM-managed lands in Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota. The collection is available for scholarly study and frequently loans items for exhibits such as this one.
“David Wade (Curator at the Curation Center) helped us get several artifacts on loan that are very rare and that we had a hard time coming by,” said Garhart. “He also helped fund the creation of the displays and the preservation of the displays and objects.”
The BLM sees the partnership as a win-win.
“Our mission at the Curation Center is to preserve and promote cultural resources, so this opportunity fit right in with our goals,” said Wade. “It was another chance to educate the public about the resources available at the Curation Center with the hope that more people will use them in the future.”
You can see the exhibit at the Yellowstone County Museum at 1950 Terminal Circle, next to Billings Logan International Airport. From the outside, the log cabin entrance appears small, but behind the front door are 5,000 square feet of exhibits dedicated to the natural history and diverse cultures of the Yellowstone Valley and Northern Plains. Despite its large area, not all the museum’s collections can be displayed at once and its exhibits are rotated periodically. This latest exhibit opened early in September and will be on display for at least a couple of years.