Dr. Dirk Van Tuerenhout

Biographical Information

A native of Belgium, Dirk Van Tuerenhout grew up in Malines, a city in Flanders with human presence going back well into prehistoric times. He got interested in history and archaeology because of a sixth grade teacher. He pursued this interest in secondary school when he took courses in ancient Greek and Latin. He attended the Catholic University of Louvain, receiving degrees in Ancient history and Archaeology. This required writing master theses on the early history of Hellenistic Egypt, as well as on the archaeology of one of the largest sites in the New World, the Precolumbian city of Teotihuacan.

While he attended university in Belgium, the US embassy in Brussels convened a meeting on post graduate studies in the US. Because of this, he applied to various universities with strong programs in precolumbian archaeology and was fortunate enough to be accepted by Tulane University in New Orleans. While at Tulane, he worked at the Tulane University jazz archive, meeting musicians who had played with jazz legends like Armstrong. He also noted with “amazement” that the number of “accidental trips to New Orleans” by friends and acquaintances seemed to coincide quite often with events such as Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest.

The anthropology department at Tulane provided a strong four field education, offering courses in archaeology, linguistics and physical and cultural anthropology. Through the Middle American Research Institute, he was able to participate in excavations in Belize, and later in Guatemala. While working on the project in Guatemala, he also met his wife, a native Texan and fellow archaeologist. She was his boss then. She still is.

He graduated from Tulane with an MA and Ph.D. in anthropology. Employment opportunities took him up north to Pennsylvania, where he taught at Shippensburg University in the central portion of the state. When he learned about an opening for an anthropology curator at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, he applied. He has been working in Houston “since the last century,” May 1999 to be exact. At the museum, he is involved in maintaining and expanding the anthropology holdings, organizing temporary exhibits and interfacing with the general public (occasionally dealing with identification requests of dinosaur bones as well…). He has written a book on Aztec culture and is the curator of the Lucy’s Legacy exhibit. For the last seven summers, he has taught an introductory anthropology course at the University of Houston Clear Lake Campus.

He lives in Houston with his wife Rosalinda and daughter Sara, the latter of whom cannot get enough of the museum’s dinosaurs.

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Dr. Dirk Van Tuerenhout