DIVISION STUDENT AWARD: EXCAVATION TECHNIQUES OF CW PEALE'S 1801 MASTODON EXHUMATION

American historians, art historians, and historians of science have written extensively about Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) with regard to his democratic zeal and nationalism, his portrait paintings of various American figures, and his natural history museum in Philadelphia. Peale's interests in fossils, specifically those of the American mastodon, have been explored by historians in the framework of his nationalism and his museum collection. However, the contributions of his exhumations to the practices of early American paleontology have not been as thoroughly investigated. In this paper I examine evidence of Peale’s exhumation methods during his 1801 excavation of mastodon fossils in Orange and Ulster Counties, New York, and the reaches of those methods’ influences on following paleontological projects.