Club Meeting – June 13th, 2013

Joe Keiper, Executive Director of VA Museum of Natural History, provided a fascinating program about the Museum and an archaeological dig that occurred on the Graham-White property in Salem in the early 1990’s.  Located in Martinsville, the VA Museum of Natural History is the state’s official natural history museum.  Its collection totals nearly 10 million items.  Dr. Keiper shared some of those artifacts with us, including the bone of a white-tailed deer, passenger pigeon bones and shell fragments.  The Graham-White site is particularly fascinating for archaeologists since it contains artifacts from two distinct periods nearly two centuries apart.  This allows a comparison of the two different cultures and how Native Americans were impacted by the arrival of European settlers in the 17th century.