Todd Surovell

The Draper Natural History Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West will host a free Thursday lecture featuring Todd Surovell, professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. The program starts at
5:15 p.m. in the Coe Auditorium.

Titled “The First People and the Last Mammoths in Wyoming,” the lecture covers 50 years of studies that examine interactions between the first humans and mammoths in what is now Wyoming. He’ll discuss finding mammoth sites, the behaviors of first people in Wyoming and what he believes caused the extinction of mammoths.

Surovell is a professor and department head at the Department of Anthropology at UW, where he’s worked since 2003. He is the former director of the George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. 

Born and raised in northern Virginia, he received in B.A. in anthropology and zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona. Surovell is an archaeologist with specialization in the Paleoindian period, the first period of New World archaeology.

He is also an expert in stone tool technology, the human colonization of the New World and Pleistocene extinctions. He is the author of one book and more than 50 published articles. His major research efforts include the excavation of the 12,800-year-old Barger Gulch site, a Folsom campsite in Middle Park, Colorado and the Dukha Ethnoarchaeological Project — a study of nomadic reindeer herders in Mongolia. 

Surovell has participated in archaeological fieldwork throughout the American west as well as in Israel and Denmark. He is currently excavating the La Prele and Bishop Mammoth sites in Converse County.