Meet the Curator A RealAudio Interview with Dr. David Hurst Thomas, Curator, Division of Anthropology, and organizer of the installation of Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga at the American Museum of Natural History David Hurst Thomas is Curator in the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and the City University of New York. For nearly 30 years, his research interests have focused on aspects of North American archaeology. He has worked to understand human adaptations to the relatively harsh Great Basin area of the western U.S., concentrating geographically on the state of Nevada and temporally on the Holocene post-glacial period. He has conducted excavations in the Desert West and has also led a long-range archaeological study of St. Catherines Island, Georgia, since 1974. His ongoing research on the island has focused on the cultures of the native people in this area before European contact and how the social environment changed with the arrival of Spanish settlers. Recently, he has been exploring the implications of new paleoenvironmental evidence suggesting that two major droughts struck the western U.S. within the last millennium. The RealAudio file below contains a brief interview conducted with the curator, in which he talks about about his work at the Museum and his interest in Vikings. Read the interview transcript Hear the interview If you don't have the Real plug-in, you can download it here. Viking Ship Building A RealVideo montage of the building of a Viking ship for the exhibit Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga at the American Museum of Natural History One of the highlights of this exhibit will be a 40-foot representation of a Viking ocean-going boat (knarr) constructed over several weeks by the Exhibitions staff of the Museum. It is modeled after Skuldelev 1 (now at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark), and the original would have been 54' long. You can view a montage of the ship-building process in Real format. View the video If you don't have the Real plug-in, you can download it here.