Seattle's ghost shorelines

By Peter Lape, Amir Sheikh, and Don Fels

Someday soon, Seattle’s downtown waterfront will look very different than it does today. The City of Seattle is replacing our crumbling seawall, and perhaps Bertha will resume digging the tunnel to replace the rickety, looming and loud Alaska Way Viaduct, scheduled to be torn down in 2016.

These changes create the potential to reconnect to the Elliot Bay shoreline, a main reason the city was established here in the first place. Planning continues for a re-imagined waterfront, and architects, designers, planners and politicians are starting to share their ideas with Seattlites.

An architectural rendering shows what a Pioneer Square beach at the foot of Washington Street could look like.
Photo: Courtesy of James Corner Field Operations and City of Seattle, Adapted from The Seattle Times’ September 12, 2014 article titled “Seattle’s new waterfront: What it might look like and why.”

Parrington artifacts: A collector's story



Vernon L. Parrington in his office at the University of
Oklahoma, ca. 1905. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Parrington.

Objects in museums hold many stories—often of their makers and users, and also, sometimes, of their collectors.

That's the case with several beautiful Native American artifacts recently donated to the Burke Museum from the family of Vernon Louis Parrington, a longtime English professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the early 1900s.

Parrington was born in Illinois in 1871. He graduated from Harvard College in 1893 and taught English for four years at Emporia College in Kansas before moving on to teach at the University of Oklahoma.

Cairns: Messengers in Stone

A beinakerlingar in Iceland.

By David B. Williams

Cairns – seemingly random man made stacks of rocks – can be surprisingly rich in stories and meaning. For thousands of years, cairns have been used by people to connect to the landscape and communicate with others. But what are they communicating?

The word "cairn" dates back to 16th century Scotland and comes from the Gaelic carn, or “heap of stones.” It refers to stone piles ranging from a simple stack to elaborate mounds totalling hundreds of rocks marking Scottish burial sites - some more than 4,000 years old.

The Sea-Tac sloth

Washington State is home to many amazing fossil discoveries. You may have heard about some finds that sound like tall-tales, like a giant sloth found in an unexpected place. So you ask the Burke Museum:

Q: Is it true that a giant ground sloth was found at Sea-Tac International Airport?

A: Yes! Fifty years ago remains of a giant ground sloth, termed Megalonyx, were unearthed as construction crews were installing a lighting system along a runway at Sea-Tac airport. Nearly two-thirds of the sloths bones were perfectly preserved, with only the skull and some of the neck and limb bones missing. Casts were taken from another Megalonyx specimen and were used to complete the skeleton that you can see on display at the Burke Museum.

Megalonyx and other types of giant sloths roamed North America during the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 12,000 years ago) eating plant materials, roots, and tubers and fending off attacks from saber-toothed cats.

For history buffs, the first Megalonyx fossil discovered in the United States was by the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. He found it in 1796 in a saltpeter mine in what is now West Virginia.

Want to learn more about the Sea-Tac Sloth? Watch this video created by Mary Jean, Kelsie and Rachel, students in the University of Washington’s COM460 class.
 

 

The Burke Museum partners with the Seattle PI's Big Blog to answer commonly asked questions about the natural and cultural history of our region. This post originally appeared on the Big Blog on April 2.

Have a question to Ask the Burke? Send it here!