7QUESTIONS+PLUS

Dan Joyce, senior curator of Exhibits and Collections for the Kenosha Public Museum. Born in Kassel Germany, Joyce came to the United States as a 6-month-old and developed an interest in history at an early age. His interest in history and archaeology has taken him throughout the world, he’s worked at a handful of museums in the last 30 years and he helped excavate the Schaefer Mammoth on display in Kenosha. Joyce has been married to his wife Ruth for 22 years, the couple has twin 8-year-old girls and he portrays a British Light Infantry soldier during the Revolutionary War period.

Dan Joyce will now take your questions ...

So what's your favorite dinosaur? Being a guy (grunt, grunt) I do like the meat-eaters but Triceratops and Stegosaurus have been favorites since I was a kid. My favorite extinct animal has to be the mammoth. I have been drawn to them since I was a kid and was fortunate enough to excavate one. I recently found out through DNA analysis of my paternal line that my ancestors spent the Ice Age in what is now the Southern Ukraine. This is an area that has amazing mammoth bone houses dating from that time. I guess the attraction to mammoths is genetic!

What area of history interests you most? I have a great interest in military history and archaeology and have degrees in both fields. I do a lot of personal research on the Revolutionary War period. It is a fascinating time of great intellectual change when our country was founded and is largely ignored by most people.

What is your favorite travel destination? I have been in 48 states and several countries and find many of them beautiful and interesting in different ways. Alaska is amazingly beautiful and even more amazingly large. I had the opportunity to work for several summers there doing archaeology. We were working in very remote areas with helicopters and float planes so we had amazing experiences that few people get to have. I was able to live with Yupik Eskimos and Athabaskan Indians while working on archaeological sites.
    The Yukon Territory is up on my list too. Since seeing an early 1970’s National Geographic article about guys building a raft and floating down the Yukon River I wanted to go. I have traveled and worked in the Yukon on three occasions. My favorite was with my wife, Ruth, kayaking down the Yukon River for 703 miles in a folding kayak.
I went to graduate school in New Mexico and love that state too. The barren, wide open spaces appeal to me.

What advice do you have for someone interested in being a museum curator? First decide what interests you the most - history, anthropology/archaeology, or the arts. Many museums are focused around these subjects. Second, read all you can about the subject and also about how museums work (there is a lot more to it than you think!) Third, get a degree in museology and a lot of experience in museum work whether it is through part-time work, volunteering or internships. The more experience, the better. Fourth, get experience in all areas of museum work — exhibits, education, administration, PR, etc. The more varied the experience, the better.

How did you arrive to Kenosha? I had worked in museums over a period of 10 years when I got the job in Kenosha. I had worked at museums in Carbondale, Ill., and Chicago, Portales, N.M., and was doing archaeology in Louisiana when I saw the job ad. It was a nationally-advertised position and I was one of five to be interviewed.

What do you think is Kenosha's best asset? In the last 20 years I have seen Kenosha grow in many ways, most of them for the better (except for the traffic). I have lived in many places in the U.S. from Florida to Alaska and like Kenosha the best as a great place to raise a family. I can’t say enough about the city’s lakeshore with over 80 percent being parks. The location between Chicago and Milwaukee is amazing as well. There is so much more to see and do in town now than there was just a few years ago.

Kenosha already has the public museum, the dinosaur museum and the history museum, and the Civil War museum is on the way? What type of museum do you think Kenosha should have that it doesn't already? Don't forget that we also have some great art centers and galleries in the city. I think that the Kenosha History Center could use more support. Their lighthouse project has a great mass tourist appeal that can’t be beat either. The history of Kenosha is an extremely interesting and varied one. Now that we are the fourth largest city in the state and will probably get to third in a decade or so, our roots become more and more important with the increased influx of new people.

What's your favorite exhibit currently at the Kenosha museums? I love the Potawatomi village. We show four seasons of Potawatomi life as it was in 1830 in the village of Kee=neau=sha=kau=ning (meaning "Pickral's abiding place " or literally "Long-noses abiding place" in Potawatomi). Developing and researching the exhibit with the help of people like Bob Sasso of UW-Parkside was great fun and working with the Forest County Potawatomi was also a great experience.

What is your favorite museum outside of Kenosha? I have to say the Field Museum in Chicago. It was one of the first museums I ever went to when I was about 6 or so. Animals, mammoths, dinosaurs, Native American cultures, shrunken heads, strange rituals. If you have a bit of imagination, who could ask for more! Almost any museum, no matter how small interests me. There is always an interesting gem or something I didn't know before.

Who in history most fascinates you? There are so many people to choose from that it is hard. All great people through history, no matter how great they are, are just people - warts and all. I am really more interested in the life of everyday people through time. After all, most of us are everyday people! I read journals, memoirs, old letters and newspapers. They give me a bit of insight into the minds of the time and how they worked. Although we share the same emotions and basic life experiences as our ancestors, it was all filtered through the norms of the times. A better understanding of every day life comes about through the study of everyday people and their perceptions.

Of your expeditions, which one stands out and why? In terms of raw experience and emotion, it was the first year I worked in Alaska on the Bering Sea coast. There your life was ruled by the Bering Sea and its weather. That summer I even photographed a tornado in Alaska, even though they say that they do not occur there. I lived in a tent camp at the edge of a Yupik Eskimo village (yes, here they are Eskimo and not Inuit!). It was a very traditional village where we were welcomed. We saw and participated in many rituals and subsistence hunts. We flew in float planes to archaeological sites all up and down the coast. Later we had a helicopter which allowed us to drop down anywhere and do some amazing fishing too! The grayling, salmon, arctic char and beautiful rainbow trout spoiled me for fishing in the lower 48, except for fishing Lake Michigan off Kenosha. I found a letter from a fur trader saying that even when it was a Potawatomi village Kenosha was kown as having the best fishing on Lake Michigan.
In terms of a rare and important experience, it was excavating the Schaefer Mammoth. There have been only 26 mammoth kill sites discovered in North America and being a part of finding another was rare in and of itself. It being a thousand years older than any other mammoth kill site in North America and showing that people were in North America a thousand years earlier than the text books said was the important.

How long have you known you were going to be an archaeologist? I went to Europe with my mother when I was 7, went to many museums and thought that they were great. By the time I was nine I figured out that people actually worked at museums (I was a little slow on the uptake) and that was what I wanted to do. My interest in archaeology started about the same time. Seeing paintings by Kenosha’s own Peter Bianchi in National Geographic (and now in our museum!) inspired a deep interest in archaeology but being a military brat, I started working more on delving into military history thanks to an encouraging neighbor. This led to a degree in museums and the military history of the post Civil War frontier. Looking at the Native American side of the frontier issue led me back into anthropology and archaeology, a degree which I later pursued. That led me back to mammoths when I worked in New Mexico and then here.

What would you be doing if you weren't a curator in Kenosha? If I was not a curator anywhere, then I would be a full-time archaeologist. I enjoy being outdoors and in the middle of the wilderness, so I would probably be someplace like Alaska. I love archaeology. It is like a mystery. You work hard interpreting the evidence to see what happened at a particular site and how it fills in the picture of a culture that is long gone.

Do you tend to watch history movies more than other genres? What is your favorite movie? I do often watch history based movies, but I like all types. Even some horrible ones are good in their own way. Movies are great escapist fun and I watch some of the same Halloween and Christmas themed ones with my family every year. I tend to get wrapped up in movies, lose myself and get emotional… Some of my favorites: Das Boot, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Enemy Below, Master and Commander, White Christmas, Pirates of the Caribbean, Stripes, Last of the Mohicans, The Mummy, A Christmas Carol, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Some Like It Hot, Dracula, Spinal Tap, Young Frankenstein, Zulu - the list goes on…
    I saw the first Raiders movie in Anchorage with a bunch of other archaeologists just before we went into the bush. We all thought that it was great but unrealistic fun. That summer I went through three small float plane crashes, a helicopter engine failure, participated in interesting rituals, had some interesting experiences with human remains, had a knife pulled on me and had a .45 pulled on me. Maybe the “adventure” part of the movie wasn’t so far off after all!

What makes old bones so interesting? What makes old bones and archaeology interesting is that we were doing CSI long before most people knew what CSI meant. What the bones and associated artifacts tell you is a fascinating story, but only if you know how to read them. Again, it is all a mystery waiting to be solved!

This is “Seven Questions” where each week we ask you to submit questions for a person of interest in Kenosha County. Then, we interview the person and publish their answers. Next week, we’ll feature Laura Larson, the president of Lakeside Players. For past ‘7 Questions’ features and more of Dan Joyce’s answers, go to www.kenoshanews.com and click on “Seven Questions.”