By Lauren Bussiere
Recently TARL’s staff participated in an annual volunteering tradition: Explore UT day at the university. Each year, UT invites thousands of students of all ages from all over the state to visit the UT campus and participate in educational activities while experiencing a sample of college life. To share our love of archeology with the kids, TARL staff contributes several activity booths to this event every year.

This year, TARL’s activities included cloth button-making, rock art drawing, artifact ID, and of course lots of coloring pages. Additionally, dedicated graduate students from the Department of Anthropology contributed very popular activities including human bone identification, grinding with manos and metates, and learning to write names using Egyptian hieroglyphs. We were also very grateful to have archeologist Chris Ringstaff, a friend of TARL and expert flintknapper, on hand to demonstrate stone tool production. As always, Chris’s demonstrations were a huge hit!

Thank you to the Explore UT team for organizing this great event and giving us the chance to share fun archeology activities with hundreds of students. Thank you also to everyone who volunteered to help make this fun day possible!