Visiting Restoring an American Treasure is completely free every day, thanks to a grant from PNC Arts Alive. Today, we have an interview with Debbie Marshall, Vice President, Director of Client and Community Relations for PNC Saint Louis, about the PNC Arts Alive program.

Catherine Wood: How did PNC Arts Alive come into being?

Debbie Marshall: PNC Arts Alive was developed to help arts organizations grow their audiences and expand the reach of the art form in the community. This initiative was implemented in collaboration with the Arts and Education Council and the Regional Arts Commission, builds upon the success of PNC Grow Up Great and advances our mission of economic development. The Greater St. Louis Region was selected for this significant investment because of its rich and diverse arts scene and the strong desire of PNC local market leadership to support the arts as a community outreach priority.
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The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley is getting its picture taken! On Monday Jean-Paul Torno, a freelance photographer who has worked with the Saint Louis Art Museum for over a decade, transformed the special exhibition gallery into a temporary photo studio. Using a high-definition mounted camera, he photographs each scene in the panorama one by one, a process that will take two full days (the second day will be August 27).
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A considerable sensation was recently caused in the public mind, both in America and Europe, by the announcement of the discovery of a fossil human bone, so associated with the remains of extinct quadrupeds, in “the Mammoth ravine,” as to prove that man must have co-existed with the megalonyx and its contemporaries.

- Sir Charles Lyell, 1849

While Dickeson was in Natchez, Mississippi, he took a break from excavating Native American mounds to try his hand at paleontology. He was digging in Mammoth Ravine, a site rich with fossils, when he discovered a fossilized human pelvis. What made this find distinctive was that the pelvis (which came to be known as the Natchez Pelvis) was located in a layer of clay below the fossilized remains of several extinct megafauna. Dickeson argued that this order of stratigraphy meant that humans had lived before or at the same time as these extinct animals.
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Scene 23: Mamoth Ravine; Exhuming of Fossil Bones

The most recent scene to go on view at Restoring an American Treasure is Scene 23: Mammoth Ravine; Exhuming of Fossil Bones. In this scene, two gentlemen – one of whom may be Dickeson – watch as African-Americans dig into a river bluff containing prehistoric animal bones. An already-excavated skeleton lies in the foreground.

Although Dickeson’s main interest was amateur archaeology, during his time at Natchez, Mississippi, he dabbled in amateur paleontology as well. It was during these excavations that Dickeson made one of his most important discoveries: the Natchez Pelvis. Check back here tomorrow to learn more about the pelvis and the the controversy it created!

Something like this, but with more turtle doves.

The air would be embalmed with exhalations from the flowers and the plants, and the multitude of turtle doves would fly from tree to tree, without any symptoms of fear at your approach… The calmness of the air, the silence of the night, would add still further to their majesty, and the soil, casting an eye over the ages that have passed away before their unshaken mass, would tremble with involuntary respect… What delightful reflections would pass through the mind from an attentive perusal of these ancient tombs. And the brilliant and fertile imagination, that happy enchantress, would afford an agreeable allusion that would embellish these places with all the measures of poetry. These rural spots would be flowers strewed over the thorny road of life.

- Montroville W. Dickeson, 1948, describing the parks he suggested could be established around earthen mounds