Jay Adams
Director & Curator at Old Fort Western

Jay Adams is the Director & Curator at Old Fort Western, the 1754 National Historic Landmark fort, store, and house museum on the Kennebec River in Augusta.

Emerson "Tad" Baker
Chair of the History Department of Salem State College

Emerson W. Baker is Chair of the History Department of Salem State College. The author of several books and articles on the early history and archaeology of Maine, most recently he has co-authored an award-winning biography of Sir William Phips. A resident of York, Maine, Baker is the director of Old Berwick Historical Society's Chadbourne Archaeology Project. He consults on a variety of historical and archaeological projects, including the PBS series, Colonial House.

Bruce Bourque
Chief Archeologist and Curator of Ethnology, Maine State Museum

Bruce Bourque is Chief Archaeologist for the Maine State Museum and senior lecturer in Anthropology at Bates College. He is the primary author of "Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine" (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), a history of native Mainers from the earliest Paleo-Indians to the natives who greeted the European explorers. The book sums up Bourque's Maine research to date. In 1970 he began an archaeological project on Penobscot Bay's Fox Islands that has surveyed more than 200 sites so far and excavated 35. Dr. Bourque's Ph.D is from Harvard University.

Ed Churchill
Chief Curator, Maine State Museum

Ed Churchill received his PhD at the University of Maine in 1979. He has worked at the Maine State Museum since 1971 where he now is employed as the Chief Curator. He has specialized in early Maine and Northeast American history and Maine-related material culture, especially furniture and metals. Ed has authored books on Maine pained furniture and Britannia and silver-plated wares and has co-edited and contributed to Maine: the Pine Tree State and American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega. He has also written numerous articles. Ed is now developing a major long-term exhibit on Maine Homelife and has a major role in a joint effort by the Maine State Museum and Maine Public Television to create what will be the first multi segment video history of the State of Maine. His longer term projects include histories of Maine-related furniture and silver.

Tom Johnson
Curator Old York Historical Society

Thomas B. Johnson is Curator of the seven museum buildings and extensive collections of the Old York Historical Society in southern Maine. He also serves as the Chair of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, is Chair of the Woodlawn/Black Mansion Advisory Committee in Ellsworth, a member of the Collections Committee of the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, a member of the Preservation Easements Committee of Maine Preservation, and is additionally an advisor or trustee to several non-profit boards and museums in Maine, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C. Tom has researched, lectured, and written on Maine decorative arts and architecture for more than two decades and is currently collaborating with Maine State Museum Curator Ed Churchill in a forthcoming book on three centuries of Maine furniture and with Maine Historic Preservation Commission Director Earle Shettleworth on a study of historic views of Maine interiors. He lives in South Berwick and spends much of his "free time" in the continuing preservation of three historic family homes - built in 1789, 1804, and 1825 respectively - in western Maine.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Early American History Professor at Harvard University

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She is the author of many books and articles on early American history, including A Midwife_s Tale, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1991. Her latest book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of An American Myth focuses on fourteen domestic items from early New England. While a MacArthur Fellow, she assisted in the production of a PBS documentary based on A Midwife's Tale. Her work is also featured on the award-winning website www.dohistory.org.

Alaric "Ric" Faulkner
Professor of Archaeology & Physical Anthropology, University of Maine at Orono

Dr. Alaric Faulkner received his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1972. His specialty is historical archaeology: the archaeology of the spread of Western European culture into the New World and its impact on native peoples. Naturally this includes the colonial archaeology of New England. But in recent years, his research had focused on the archaeology of French Acadian settlement of Maine and the Maritimes, excavating sites along the Penobscot drainage. With the help of graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in the summer field work course, he has excavated two major 17th-century sites in Castine. However, field projects range from the 17th-century cod fisheries to the 19th-century logging industry and the construction of the first road to Canada. Dr. Faulkner has particular interest in the proper identification and analysis of artifacts from Colonial and Early American sites, and also in the application of computers to managing and graphing archaeological data. Dr. Faulkner also manages the Historical Archaeology Master's Option, offered jointly by the History and Anthropology departments. He is on the Advisory Board of Jamestown Rediscovery, and has spent some of the fall of 1995 at the excavations of the 1607-1608 James Fort, long thought to have been eroded into the James River, but now "rediscovered."