Past Speakers

Since beginning his career in 1969, Larry Neal, an archaeologist working for the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey in Norman, has made numerous visits to the Museum of the Great Plains. This past year Neal has been researching a particular collection of lithic material. The collection, known as the Brush Creek Cache, was discovered in 1970 along the Red River by amateur archaeologist, Randy Clark, who then made the collection available for research through the Museum of the Great Plains. Such partnerships as this make it possible for scientists like Larry Neal to broaden our understanding of past cultures.

“The work of archaeologists is not just collecting artifacts, it’s about learning as much as we can about the people who once lived here and then sharing that information,” Neal remarked in an interview.

The information obtained from the Brush Creek Cache continues to grow. Neal said that his research is part of a larger study on the caching behavior of prehistoric cultures living on the Plains. A cache is a collection of stone material that has been quarried and slightly “worked” so that packing and transporting the stone material becomes somewhat easier. The stone or lithic material is buried in a location that will be more convenient to the nomadic culture than the site where the raw material was excavated. The Brush Creek Cache is all flint, quarried from the Callahan Divide in Texas, some 200 miles away from the discovery.

Kent Buehler from the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey spoke at our February 24th meeting.

Kent, a native of Missouri, is the Lab Manager and also teaches in Anthropology. Kent has been with the Survey since 1987.

His research interests include Plains prehistory, ecological anthropology, zooarchaeology/faunal analysis, subsistence-settlement systems, forensic anthropology, laboratory procedures and conservation.

While maintaining his involvement with analysis of the 1600 year old Certain Bison kill in Beckham County, which is one of the largest bison kills for this time period on the Southern Plains, Kent is also investigating two dog burials from Oklahoma, intriguing due to the fact that prehistoric domestic dog burials are uncommon in Oklahoma and those that known are both little analyzed and poorly reported.

Kent also serves as an instructor in forensic archaeology for the Oklahoma City Police Department's Technical Investigation School.