Celebrating milestones

It's a week of milestones at the Burke Museum: Saturday is the 25th Annual Dinosaur Day and today marks the 300th post to the Burke Blog! To celebrate, we've compiled some of our favorite entries from the past 100 posts.

Behind the scenes with Ray Troll gave a look at how the Burke Museum prepared for the exhibit Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway.

Q: How does one go about moving 650 pieces of ceramic pottery from the Burke Museum to a new storage facility? A: Very, very carefully detailed how the ethnology department prepared to safely move the ceramic and pottery collection to another storage facility (without breaking anything along the way!).

Favorite New Acquisitions Part 1 and Part 2 listed our curators’ favorite new acquisitions to the collections.

Where can kids dig in Washington? offered parents tips about where their kids can participate in mock archaeological digs around the state.

How can a museum reduce its environmental impact? reflected on the discussions being held around the museum about how to function in the most sustainable way.

Twilight series thrusts Quileute Tribe into spotlight examined the Quileute Tribe’s relationship to the Twilight book and movie series.

The Burke Blog contributors work hard to offer insight into the inner workings of the Pacific Northwest’s only major natural history museum. Thank you for reading the Burke Blog and we look forward to the next 100 posts!

The Case of the Double-Edged Swords

In this behind-the-scenes video, Burke Museum exhibit specialist Arn Slettebak discusses some of his favorite objects in the ethnology collection: a set of pattern-welded steel swords. Arn describes the features of the swords that make them high-quality pieces and talks briefly about each of their histories. Take a look:

Favorite New Acquisitions: Part 2

Yesterday, we posted a blog about some of our curators’ favorite new acquisitions over the last year. In the second part of this mini-series, we look at some of the staff’s favorite prehistoric acquisitions at the Burke in 2009.

Paleobotany curator Caroline Stromberg’s favorite specimens of 2009 are unidentified fossil flowers from the early Middle Eocene (50 million years ago) McAbee Flora, Cache Creek, British Columbia. Fellow paleobotany museum research associates Rick and Tad Dillhoff donated these fossils as part of a larger collection. “These little fragile flowers are among my favorites because they look just like delicate ink drawings on the rock and they give us a rare glimpse of everything in life's history that we don't know about: all the millions and millions of now extinct and unknown species that once lived on this planet.”

Liz Nesbitt, Curator of Paleontology’s pick is a fossil seastar from Olympic National Park that is currently on public view at the Burke. Located in the new acquisitions case as a single display, the seastar is approximately 15-million-years-old, and it is the only fossil we have from that area. This find is particularly significant because seastars are exceptionally rare in the fossil record. The seastar was collected by Olympic Park Scientists and the Burke is keeping the fossil for the park in trust.

Christian Sidor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology’s favorite new acquisition is a 49-million-year-old brontothere skull, belonging to the genus Palaeosyops. A distant relative of tapirs and horses, the skull was found by Bruce Crowley in Southwestern Wyoming in the Bridger Formation.



Why is it his favorite? “It is almost perfectly three-dimensionally preserved, which is quite rare for fossils, and I think it is destined for exhibit at some point.”

We hope you enjoyed learning about a few of the many interesting pieces we have at the Burke. For more information on our collections and research, click here.

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

My Favorite Things

Posted by: Nicole Robert

Hello! I am the newest member of the Communications team here at the Burke Museum and a student in the Museology Graduate Program at the UW. I thought I would tell you about my favorite object on display at the Burke right now. Like me, this object is a new addition. In June, the Burke sponsored a showing of the 1914 vintage film In the Land of the Head Hunters—a restored and re-evaluated version of Edward Curtis’s landmark melodramatic silent film. Head Hunters documents a unique moment of cultural encounter between Curtis and the Kwakwaka’wakw actors, depicting Kwakwaka'wakw artwork, technology, and earlier cultural practices that had been long abandoned.

Several of the objects created for use in this film are Duntsik or “power boards” and are my favorite things on display at the Burke right now. They are constructed so they can appear to grow taller, swaying as they grow, and then to disappear slowly, apparently into the ground. They are said to represent the 3-headed serpent, sisiotl, and were used in the ceremonial performance called hyikhatsayoo (“means of harm”). In 1914, the creation and use of many Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial objects had been banned, so participating in the making of a movie presented a sanctioned way for Kwakwaka’wakw people of the time to create and use these traditional objects.

The Burke was fortunate to receive these Duntsik, along with several other objects used in the film. These are all on display now, a new addition to the Pacific Voices exhibit. I love that these objects tell a story within a story, and symbolize both a sacred tradition and the unique way that Kwakwaka’wakw people found to preserve a symbol of that tradition, even when it was banned.

- Nicole

Photos: (Left) Duntsik or “power boards.” (Right) Display of objects used in In the Land of the Headhunters, now on view at the Burke Museum.