The University of Arkansas Museum collection is about 7.5 million items strong, representing collection efforts since the late 1870s. Those items are housed in the UofA collections facility in the Arkansas Archeological Survey Building near Agri Park in Fayetteville. There are rows and rows and rows of items and cabinets here.
Earlier this week, Laurel Lamb escorted me down one of the corridors.
"So I apologize that you're going to hear this for the millionth time."
"Oh, no. You're good."
"This reminds me of the last scene of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.' Yeah, you've heard that before?"
"Yeah."
"Indiana Jones."
"Yeah."
Laurel Lamb is curator of education and engagement for the University Museum. It's a big week this week for the museum. It was this week that UofA alums Bob and Becky Alexander contributed $1 million to support a planning effort to help shape the future of the collection.
Tomorrow evening, the museum staff will host an open house. It's a chance for the rest of us to see some of the collection, and returning for viewing this year for the open house, a piece first added to the museum collection in the early 20th century.
"Well, we have a cast of a mastodon skull here today, for this was acquired in the early 1900s here at the museum, and it was displayed over the years, today. So this summer our advisory council members and some volunteers got together and they decided to reassemble this cast and help restore it. It's been disassembled for many years, and it was hard to see. And so they all got together and they've done an excellent job getting it together," Laurel says.
On reassembly day, the maneuvering of this large skull took about 10 people. It's a cast, not a real fossil, and it's believed to have been obtained from the American Museum of Natural History.
Being able to have the mastodon skull cast back in front of visitors allows the collection to make a connection with the past. Laurel says there are photographs of public viewing of this item as far back as 1902.
Oh, and it is big, with big teeth you can see from the side. Laurel says mastodons, though biological relatives to mammoths and elephants, had different teeth than those animals.
"Because, I mean, all three of them, they were eating plants, they're eating vegetation, but they're eating different types of vegetation. So the mastodon actually has ridges on their teeth that would have helped with chomping through a very rough vegetation compared to elephants today, where they're grinding their softer vegetation."
And though this is a cast, there are mastodon fossils in the University of Arkansas museum collection.
"We have more mammoths and mastodons here in the collections that are from Arkansas. Mammoths and mastodons fossils have been found in Arkansas. We have an entire skull further back that way that was found near Hazen, Arkansas, which is about a bit east of Little Rock. So, yeah, this is just one of many that we have here."
So this mastodon skull cast is reassembled back on its specially designed wooden stand that can hold its weight, and it's ready for 21st-century viewing. But does it have a name?
"That's a great question. So part of our open house experience is visitors getting a chance to suggest their own names, actually. So at the campus open house on Saturday, you can come out and suggest your own name for the mastodon. Submissions, if you can't make it Saturday, submissions will be open through Oct. 1. You can visit our website to learn more, as well as our social media accounts on Instagram and Facebook."
Nominations for the name are being accepted now, and then this fall, at another open house, votes will be accepted from among the finalists selected from those nominations.
The University of Arkansas Museum Collections open house is tomorrow night from 6 until 8 at the collections facility at 2475 N. Hatch Ave. in Fayetteville. Also tomorrow night, there will be representatives on hand from the University of Arkansas School of Art, the Arkansas Archeological Society, the Arkansas Archeological Survey and the University of Arkansas Herbarium.
And I bet you have a great time.
"I'm just going to geek out on everything."
"Including this. A telephone switchboard from Leslie, Arkansas."
"Yes. We actually have quite an extensive technology collection. Telephones, computers, which sometimes surprises visitors because when you think of a museum, you think of things that are really old, right? And we do have very old artifacts here, but it's all relative, I suppose. We have a lot of more recent technology, including the very first computer here on campus from 1957. So."
"Wow. Very broad time range. And will people be able to see that at the opening?"
"Yes, yes, it's on display around the corner."
For more details about the University of Arkansas museum collection, the as of yet unnamed mastodon skull cast or to schedule a tour, you can go to uamuseum.uark.edu or look for the University of Arkansas Museum on Facebook.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
