AA-2026-85B0A0
On the image
He has the posture of a man who has found something and does not yet know if it is important, which was the entire emotional range of amateur geology in the 1960s. The eroded gullies behind him are the kind of soft, fast-eroding sediment that turns up fossils and petrified wood faster than anyone can catalogue them, and the dark log at his feet has clearly stopped being wood and started being rock, a transformation that takes several million years and draws exactly the sort of khaki-clad hobbyist who cannot resist poking it with something small and metal.
His outfit says field trip, not expedition: pressed slacks, a collared shirt, sunglasses pushed up for close work, nothing that suggests he expected to get dirty. The little tool in his hand is doing careful, deliberate work on the specimen's surface, the universal gesture of someone testing whether a thing is as old as it looks before deciding whether it is worth the trouble of carrying home.
Behind him the badlands do their slow erosion in total indifference to his discovery, having already produced this particular log and several thousand others nobody will ever find. He, on the other hand, believes this one is his.
The historian's note
The scene documents a common form of mid-twentieth-century amateur and academic fieldwork: the identification and examination of petrified wood exposed in eroded sedimentary badlands. Such formations, common across the western and central United States and similar arid terrains worldwide, were frequently studied and collected by university-affiliated geologists, museum field parties, and hobbyist rockhounds throughout the 1960s, a period of active popular interest in earth science following postwar expansions in state park systems and natural history education.
The man's attire and equipment are consistent with a casual field survey rather than an organised excavation, suggesting either a personal collecting trip or a preliminary site assessment ahead of formal study. Petrified wood of this kind forms when buried tree material is replaced by silica-rich groundwater over geologic time, a process that can take several million years and was, by the 1960s, well understood and widely popularised in field guides and roadside geology literature.
No specific location is identified in the available record, though the badland topography is characteristic of exposed mudstone or claystone formations found in several U.S. states known for petrified wood deposits.
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Geologist Examining Petrified Wood in Badlands Terrain, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-85B0A0. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geologist-examining-petrified-wood-in-badlands-terrain-1960s.
@misc{aaAA202685B0A0,
title = {Geologist Examining Petrified Wood in Badlands Terrain, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-85B0A0},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geologist-examining-petrified-wood-in-badlands-terrain-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Geologist Examining Petrified Wood in Badlands Terrain, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-85B0A0 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/geologist-examining-petrified-wood-in-badlands-terrain-1960s ER -
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