Riding Reindeer and Digging the American West: UW Professor Todd Surovell

"What I love about archaeology is going to a place to study that place- doing systematic excavations and recovering things that humans left there that haven't been touched for thousands of years."

Todd Surovell is a Professor and Department Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Most of his fieldwork has been in Wyoming and Colorado but he has worked throughout the world.

Surovell completed a five year ethnoarchaeological project with Dukha reindeer herders in northern Mongolia. Over a ten year period, he excavated Barger Gulch, Locality B, a Folsom site in Middle Park, Colorado, and is currently focusing his efforts on the La Prele Mammoth site, a Clovis kill and campsite in Converse County, Wyoming. He has published more than 50 articles on Paleoindian archaeology, lithic technology, geoarchaeology, Pleistocene extinctions, ethnoarchaeology, and other topics.

He feels at home in the high plains and mountains of Wyoming where he has now lived for close to 20 years and recently felt it was okay to buy a pair of cowboy boots.