The Extreme History Project: The Dirt on the Past

Join us as we talk with historian Ellen Baumler about her new book, The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State: A History of Montana's Cemeteries. We talk about burial customs, headstone symbolism, the history of cemeteries in the west, boot hills, and cultural identity reflected in western cemeteries. Ellen Baumler was the interpretive historian at the Montana Historical Society from 1992 unt...

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Matthew Bennett, the lead scientist on a recently published article in the Journal Science that examined a set of human footprints preserved on an ancient lakeshore in New Mexico's White Sands National Park that date to between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. We discuss the fossilized human footprints, but we also talk about footprints of other animals including ca...

On this podcast, Crystal and Nancy dig deep into the history of a historic structure in downtown Bozeman. This building is significant because it currently houses Nancy's boutique, Moka, along with three other businesses including Alara Jewelry, Plume Bridal and Visions West Gallery! We explore the history of this building through the historic characters and businesses that have occupied this spac...

Join us as we talk with Anthony Wood about his new book, Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930. Anthony talks with us about his work on the Montana African American Heritage Resources Project and how this inspired him to delve deeper into the history of Montana's Black communities. His book explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and...

Join us for our conversation with Lisabeth During about her recently published book, The Chastity Plot. During tells the story of chastity through time, how it has been honored and despised and how the obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role enforcing patriarchy’s double standards. Chastity is imbedded in Western culture, a myth of gender that has long been contested by f...

Join us for a fascinating discussion with Fiona Greenland about her new book, "Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy." Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Control over its cultural heritage throug...

Join us as we talk with Marsha Small about her work to locate and document Indian boarding school cemeteries. Marsha leads the Indigenous Peoples' Day Montana movement and her work with the preservation and conservation of sacred sites and places using GPR, GPS, and GIS, specifically in boarding school cemeteries is internationally known. Marsha uses ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked gra...

Join us for this thoughtful conversation with Dr. Tiya Miles about her new book, All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. Dr. Miles is a renowned historian who, in this book, traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives. We dive into the book...

Join us this week as we talk with Dr. Mary Murphy, a Distinguished Professor of History at Montana State University Bozeman and the Director of the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West.  She teaches courses in American history with a special focus on gender and the North American West.  Among her books are Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Mo...

This week Nancy interviews co-founders of The Extreme History Project, Marsha Fulton and Crystal Alegria. We discuss the origins of Extreme History, a public history organization dedicated to making history relevant. Marsha and Crystal talk about how Extreme History started and why. Marsha explains the early philosophy of the organization including founding projects and Crystal talks about where t...

Join us for a deep dive into gender and feminism in archaeology with archaeologist, Meg Conkey. Meg is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and is known for introducing feminist perspectives into archaeology. We discuss her early work with Janet Spector, Joan Gero, and others to bring women and gender into the study of archaeology and what it means to do arch...

Join us for our conversation with author Michael Punke on his new book, Ridgeline, a novel that details the story of the Fetterman fight or the Battle of One-Hundred-in-the-Hands. In 1866, with the country still reeling from the Civil War, the U.S. Army established Fort Phil Kearny in the home of the Lakota Nation. In his book, Punke tells the story of the months leading up to this battle between...

Join us for this fascinating conversation with Lara Maiklem who is a mudlark. She searches for lost and forgotten objects on the foreshore of the river Thames in London. She has been mudlarking for almost 20 years, searching and finding lost items including Tudor shoes, medieval pins, Roman pots, Georgian wig curlers and modern wedding rings. We talk with Lara about objects she has found along wit...

Join us as we talk with archaeologist Scott Carpenter about his career, including his time as Chief of Cultural Resources at Yosemite National Park, the excavation of a cache of obsidian artifacts, his work with indigenous communities, and his documentation of a portion of the Lewis and Clark trail.    To learn more: Return the National Parks to the Tribes  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Join us for this lively conversation with Dr. Kelly Dixon, an archaeologist who studies boomtowns, colonization, colonialism, extractive industries, human-environment interactions, landscape transformations, and marginalized populations. We discuss her work excavating the Boston Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada and the resulting book, Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology And History In Virginia City where...

Join us as we talk with archaeologists, Matt Stirn and Rebecca Sgouros about how they have followed their love of archaeology, photography and tea (yes tea) to interpret and bring archaeology to the public. Matt Stirn holds an MSc in Environmental Archaeology and Paleoecology, and specializes in understanding how humans adapted to high elevation landscapes around the world. He has directed several...

Join us as we discuss historic inscriptions, ghost signs, rock art, DStretch, petroglyphs and pictographs. During the 19th and 20th centuries, emigrants on the Northern Plains engaged in a communication behavior that left messages carved, incised, and painted onto the physical landscape. Often mingling with indigenous pictographs and petroglyphs, the emigrants' messages are called "historic inscri...

Join us this week as Crystal interviews Nancy about her research on the history of archaeology in Montana through the lens of three men including amateur archaeologist Oscar Lewis, academic William Mulloy, and advocate Melville Sayre. We discuss their work to bring archaeology to Montana and the significant archaeological sites they excavated in the 1930s and 1940s, including Pictograph Cave and t...

Join us as we take a deep dive into the science of human origins with Dr. William Kimbel, Director of the Institute of Human Origins based at Arizona State University. We discuss Dr. Kimbel's research on human origins, specifically the period between 2.5 and 4 million years ago - during which our own genus Homo emerged from smaller-brained ancestors. We talk specifically about Lucy (Lucy is a homi...

In this episode, we talk with Jerry Williams about a television series he has created called, Bozeman, that features the history of Bozeman's town founder, John Bozeman and his good friend, William McKinzie. We discuss his research in Georgia and Montana, and how this story plays out on the national stage at a critical time in our country's history from the 1860s to the 1870s.   

Join us as we discuss a myriad of topics with Extreme History Project board member, Shane Doyle. Shane is a member of the Crow Nation and is a life-long educator. He's a scholar and an activist, working to bring indigenous knowledge to the forefront in every project he does. We talk about his involvement with the Anzick archaeological site, the peopling of the Americas, and indigenous people in Ye...

Join us for our conversation with Nikki Manning and Kate Gonzales as we discuss urban archaeology in Missoula, Montana. Kate and Nikki have both been involved in recovering artifacts from a vacant lot in the heart of Missoula's red-light district through their capacity as graduate students within the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montana. These artifacts tell us about the women a...

Join us for our fascinating conversation with Jan Zauha, librarian extraordinaire. We discuss the role of libraries in this digital age and how they have changed over time. We dive into the space of archives and talk about issues of accessibility and how these places are becoming more public and welcoming to everyone. We also talk about archival collecting and the push to expand the focus to make...

Join Nancy and Crystal as they delve into women's history month and talk about vice districting during the 1890's in relation to red-light districts and prostitution in the west! They also talk about what's coming up this summer for the Extreme History Project, the new podcast logo, and upcoming podcast interviews.

Join us as we discuss rock art in Montana with archaeologist, Sara Scott. Our conversation revolves around the Hellgate Pictograph Site in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. This rock art site has an extensive area of finger lines, hand prints, geometric designs, dots, and animals such as snakes, turtles, and lizards. There are representations of human-like figures with distended bodies t...