Excavations at Parc Safari, a project of the Department of Anthropology and Parc Safari, was born in 2007, in the wake of an invitation by Patrice Deneault, the park's Director, to locate and excavate from the park's burial grounds an elephant.

 

With funding from McGill University's Dean of Arts Development Fund, Dr Andre Costopoulos, Project Director, set up for undergraduates a field school. Since its inception, the archaeological field school has attracted both media and academic attention: At work in the elephant graveyard (Montreal Gazette, 2007); Ashes to Ashes, dust to dung (McGill Reporter, 2007).

 

Now in its third year, the project nurtures interdisciplinary research and inter-departmental relations. In 2008, the project attracted recent Geography hire, Margaret Kalacska. Dr Kalacska specializes in the detection of clandestine mass graves in genocide situations using remote sensing technologies. This has brought to the project a significant new human rights dimension, and has made our results highly relevant to the archaeology of conflict.