Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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Yesterday Darrel S. brought up the issue of the experience of the lady who seems to be playing the roll of archaeological expert on the Oak Island show. Her name is Dr. Lori Verderame. She makes some questionable, if not ridiculous, statements. It makes her seem much less than a trained archaeologist and certainly not a nautical archaeologist. One statement I saw her make last night was so silly and far-fetched that I decided to look up her qualifications. Below is what Wikipedia says about her.
Education[edit]
A native of New Haven, Connecticut, Verderame graduated from Hamden High School in Hamden, CT. She graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. She has a Master of Arts degree in Liberal Studies with an emphasis in History and Art History from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. She holds the Doctorate (Ph.D.) in the History of Art and Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, PA.[4]
Experience[edit]
Verderame has held directorial and curatorial positions in America including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Allentown Art Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State, and the Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College. She has lectured at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg Russia, the MFA in Boston, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence Italy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Musee de Louvre in Paris France among others. Dr. Lori has also taught art history at Penn State University at University Park, PA, the State University of New York (SUNY) in Cortland, NY, Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT, Southern Connecticut State University in Hamden, CT, Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, and Beaver College (Arcadia University) in Glenside, PA.[citation needed]
Columnist[edit]
Verderame's column entitled "Art & Antiques by Dr. Lori" appears in more than 400 newspapers and magazines around the world.[citation needed] Her Lifetime blogs are entitled "Antiques and Your Home" and "Travel, Shop, Eat by Dr. Lori".
Since 1998, Verderame has presented "Dr. Lori's Antiques Appraisal Comedy Show" to audiences around the world and on cruise ships.[citation needed] The show is presented live and audience members bring their objects for appraisal as part of the unscripted live comedy appraisal stage show. Verderame appraises each object while injecting humor and information about the antique. Verderame estimates that she appraises 20,000 objects each year.
So her academic training is in Art History. She does a blog on antiques and one that seems to have something to do with eating - which it seems she does very well. I'm not surprised she does some comedy work. She has given me a few good laughs. I just didn't think it was intentional.
As we all know, academic training isn't the most important thing. Thomas Edison never took a course in making light bulbs. Bill Gates never took a course in Windows. The people that do really big things, do it before the courses exist.
Nautical archaeology or maritime archaeology is a relatively new discipline. It owes its origin to the guys that do shipwreck salvage. They didn't take courses, but they learned through experience. Eventually the academic disciplines jumped on for the ride and created a new academic discipline.
I'm not criticizing Dr. Lori for not having the right degrees. If she had the professional experience, she wouldn't need any academic degree at all, as far as I'm concerned, abut as it is, lot of people who read this blog are more qualified than she is on some of the items that she comments on. On those subjects, I think she just does the same thing that a lot of you would do - search the internet.
You have to remember that Oak Island is a TV show. The show is more about show business than it is about archaeology. You might say it is about treasure hunting, but you can't leave out the show business aspect.
The casting director found someone who has a doctorate and would seem credible to the average viewer. She had media and TV connections, so that is probably how they found her.
When I saw the spike she showed and talked about, it didn't look to me like the same one that was originally found in the swamp. By chance I happened to see that earlier segment again last night, and I didn't think it looked like the same spike then either. I didn't see it very closely though, and I didn't take the time to do a screen freeze or anything so I could carefully compare them, so I could be wrong. See what you think.
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Bigger surf coming up this weekend.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
