ALICE BLYTH CHILD, 79, died November 24, 1997, in Branford, CT, of
heart failure while suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Born on Dongan
Hills, Staten Island, NY, she attended Radcliffe C (1939). Majoring in
anthropology, she had the good fortune to be assigned Clyde Kluckhohn as
her tutor, at a time when that meant weekly individual tutorial conferences
with him over a period of three years. Her interest in witchcraft and supernatural
beliefs dates from this period. As a graduate student in anthropology at
Yale (1939-44), she was influenced by Murdock and Malinowski. She completed
all the requirements for a PhD except a dissertation.
As part of a wartime project sponsored by the coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs through Yale, she took part (1941-42) along with her psychologist
husband Irvin Child in a study of the backgrounds of public opinion in
Costa Rica. She had some hope that material for a dissertation might develop
from this but eventually abandoned the idea.
For some years, Child devoted herself mostly to family but continued
her interest in anthropology, reading extensively in the files of the Human
Relations Area Files and in Yale's library. Her reading eventually came
to be concentrated on religion and magic. Parts of her findings were reported
at several annual meetings of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research.
With a lack of experience in lecturing or other public speaking, Child
always wanted these reports to be presented by her husband as coauthor,
even though the work had been mostly hers. Eventually, with the cooperation
of her husband as junior author she published Religion and Magic in the
Life of Traditional Peoples (1993). The volume reviews the actions, thoughts
and feelings that characterize the religious aspect of life in a worldwide
sample of traditional societies and considers their role in both the individual's
and the group's daily life. Attention is drawn to the basic similarity
between traditional and world religions. Variations in religious beliefs
among traditional societies are presented as related to the differing situations
and histories from which they emerge. It is hypothesized that traditional
religions serve similar functions in diverse societies, with the suggestion
that the great religions of the present day may likewise serve the same
human needs.
It is to be regretted that Child's broad knowledge of the religions
of traditional peoples, her conclusions based on comparative cross cultural
research and her exploration of universal human needs were not presented
to a larger audience in the role of teacher and lecturer. I feel privileged
that she shared them with me. (Beatrice Blyth Whiting)
WILLIAM W ELMENDORF, 85, died October 13, 1997, in Davis, CA. Elmendorf
was born September 10, 1912, in Victoria, BC. His parents were United States
citizens who soon returned to Seattle, where he grew up. Elmendorf entered
the U of Washington in the depression year of 1930. Like many others in
that period, he had to work his way through college, serving as a gasoline
station attendant, disc jockey and, after advancing in anthropology, working
as a reader for Fred Hulse. Taking his BA in 1934, he went immediately
to the Muckleshoot Reservation in western Washington, studying the mythology
of the Duwamish and Puyallup. The next year, he made the first of many
trips to the Twana; he was to become the outstanding authority on that
group and its culture. During that year he also wrote and submitted his
MA thesis "The Soul: Recovery Ceremony among the Indians of the Northwest
Coast" (1935).
Admitted to graduate study in 1938 at U of California, Berkeley, where
he worked with A L Kroeber, and awarded a teaching assistantship in anthropology
in 1940, Elmendorf found himself one of the great age-grade of late-1930s
Berkeley products. Doing research for his doctoral dissertation, he returned
to the Twana in 1939 and 1940. In 1940 he married Eleanor Gerlough, a student
of anthropology at Berkeley; their marriage was a loving, firm and productive
partnership that lasted 57 years. Before Elmendorf could finish his doctorate,
he was swept up in the war. Sent to Japanese language school, he spent
1942-46 as an officer in military intelligence. His wartime experiences
were part of the basis for two reports on the political anthropology of
Okinawa and later a note of Ryukyuan-Japanese linguistic resemblances.
In 1946 he returned to the U of Washington as an instructor. He remained
in that position while finishing his Berkeley degree (1949) with a dissertation
on The Structure of Twana Culture. Kroeber suggested that Elmendorf should
wait for publication until the older man had added comparative notes on
northern California, thus tying that area to the Northwest Coast. In an
evil hour for his chances of promotion, Bill agreed. For the moment, all
was rosy; while Kroeber took up his task, Elmendorf was promoted to assistant
professor at Washington and granted leave to join an innovative social
science group at Northwestern University. During the fall quarter of 1950,
he gave me a cram course in New World anthropology, one for which I have
been ever grateful. I became aware that he read seemingly everything in
the four fields of anthropology relating to all parts of the world. Indeed,
in my experience, only G P Murdock was as widely read in the field.
At the end of that academic year, Elmendorf was recalled to the colors
because of the Korean War and was assigned to Japan and Okinawa. The loss
of productivity in those two wars was serious because Kroeber's failure
to provide his part of the proposed joint project caused major delay in
the appearance of Elmendorf's dissertation. That work appeared in 1960.
By that time, the Elmendorfs were settled at Washington State, where a
year later he published another monograph, Skokomish and Other Coast Salish
Tales. Now an associate professor, he entered a period of great productivity,
concentrating increasingly on the linguistics of the Salish peoples, including
kinship terminologies, dialect differences, linguistic evidence for Salish
prehistory, word taboo as a factor in lexicostatistical inference and subgrouping.
At this time appeared the first paper on a topic that was to become a major
preoccupation: Yukian.
In 1963 Elmendorf went to the U of Wisconsin as a visitor, in 1965
he was appointed professor of anthropology there, where he remained until
he retired in 1981. He continued to publish on Northwest Coast ethnology
and linguistics. From the relatively close ties among the Salishan languages,
his interest widened to the problems of deep genetic relationships, exemplified
by Yuki and Wappo: their relationship to each other and, possibly, to Siouan
and Hokan. For many years he was a regular participant in the Hokan-Penutian
workshops.
After retirement from Wisconsin, the Elmendorfs settled in Davis, where
he replaced me as visiting professor during parts of 1982-84. Contributing
solidly to the Californian emphasis of our department, he also brought
his extensive knowledge of the Northwest Coast. From 1984, he was research
associate at the U of California, Davis. It was a productive period, capped
by his last great work Twana Narratives: Native Historical Accounts of
a Coast Salish Culture (1993). Even in his final days, he was collaborating
with Alice Shepherd on a paper maintaining his view (contra J O Sawyer)
that the similarities between Wappo and Yuki were due to genetic ties rather
than borrowing. Shepherd has put that work into final form (AL 39:1, spring
1997).
Elmendorf was an accomplished field linguist before he came to Berkeley,
as a result of training by Melville Jacobs at Washington and briefly in
Berkeley by Murray Emeneau. Surely he ranks with Morris Swadesh in his
sure control of the difficult phonologies of the Northwest Coast.
William Elmendorf is survived by his wife Eleanor, and sons William
and Anthony; his legacy to linguistic anthropology comprises many brilliant
analyses of some of the most difficult problems concerning Native American
languages. He is sorely missed by his many colleagues and friends. (D L
Olmsted)
EDWARD I FRY, 73, professor emeritus of anthropology at Southern Methodist
U, died June 17, 1997, in Dallas, TX of complications from multiple sclerosis.
Having edited the deaths column of AN for two years, I know that it
is difficult to write a short note about a person who has influenced you,
your academic discipline and so many others. But I also know that a short
note is perhaps one of the only academic accounts of a scholar's life for
future historians of anthropology to use in the study of the development
of the field. With many major journals no longer publishing obituaries
or considering dropping them in the near future, what a loss that is and
will be.
I first met Fry as a freshman student at the U of Nebraska and have
had the great good fortune of being here with him at SMU for over 25 years.
If I was writing a book on his life, I would have to title it "He Had Guts."
And he did. Over the last 30 years, Fry carried out his academic duties
fighting and winning every day over the ravages of multiple sclerosis until
his death.
Edward Irad Fry was born on January 7, 1924, in Long Branch, NJ. He
lived his early years in New York and Texas and received his BA (1949)
and MA (1950) from U of Texas, Austin, and PhD in anthropology from Harvard
(1958) under E A Hooton and W W Howells. He received two Fulbright fellowships,
one in 1953-54 to Auckland U and the Cook Islands and a second in 1963-64
to Hong Kong. In the 1950s he taught at Harvard, Antioch College, directed
their anthropometric project and began his academic stint at the U of Nebraska,
Lincoln. Here he was involved in teaching, academic advising and his ongoing
research on human growth. Fry was involved in a twin study and worked closely
with the College of Dentistry. From 1966 until his death he was professor
and emeritus professor at SMU. Here he spent much of his time teaching,
advising graduates and undergraduates, writing and with red ink pen in
hand, editing PhD dissertations. His publications may be found in American
Journal of Physical Anthropology, Human Biology, Journal of Tropical Pediatrics,
Plains Anthropologist, Nature and others.
Fry served as secretary (1969-73) and then president (1973-75) of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists, had fellow status in
many other organizations and was president of Section H of AAAS.
Fry's long battle with multiple sclerosis and his ability to go on
as a productive academic was made possible by his willpower and by Peggy
Fry, a lady and wife in the full sense of the terms.
Those wishing to make a contribution to the Ed and Peggy Fry scholarship
fund should send this to the Chair, Dept of Anthropology, SMU, Dallas,
TX 75275. (John F S Phinney)
WESLEY R "WES" HURT, 80, professor emeritus of anthropology at Indiana
U, Bloomington, and founding director of Indiana's Mathers Museum, died
suddenly at his home in Albuquerque, NM, on November 3, 1997. Hurt was
an anthropologist of the "old school," well-versed and interested in the
entire breadth of the discipline, professional qualities that emerged throughout
his distinguished career. Known above all as a pioneering archaeologist
who worked on early human habitation sites throughout the Americas, from
the high plains to Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay, he constantly reviewed
books from all fields, and among dozens of articles and monographs, he
also published significant works in cultural anthropology on religious
movements, conjuring and witchcraft and alcohol use among Native Americans.
His most recent monographs dealt with cultural change in the Hispanic American
community of Manzano (1989) and the historic archaeology of Quarai, a Spanish
colonial mission in New Mexico (1990), in both instances concluding research
begun in 1938 when a master's student at the U of New Mexico and employed
by the WPA.
WWII interrupted Hurt's career, and he served in Europe as a special
agent in Italy and other European fronts before resuming his doctoral work
at Chicago (1946) and finishing under Jimmy Griffin at Michigan (1952).
His wide-ranging archaeological work took him to Lagoa Santa, Brazil (1956),
to lead a reassessment of the (then) earliest known human remains in South
America, confirming Lund's 19th-century conclusions. Later he conducted
similar pioneering work in Colombia where his El Abra rock-shelter site
revealed a time depth of 12,500 BP. Although constantly engaged in research,
Hurt was also a very active teacher at the U of South Dakota and Indiana
U and as a visitor at Berkeley and 5 Brazilian universities (1956-86).
In 1985, Hurt was given the 50th anniversary award for Outstanding Contributions
to American archaeology, by the Society for American Archaeology. One can
appreciate Hurt not only as a superior archaeologist and general anthropologist
but as a congenial and talented person: immensely knowledgeable about and
interested in all kinds of things, a painter and artist of talent, a cabinetmaker,
an avid outdoorsman and, always, a reliable colleague and generous teacher.
With Hurt there was always something new; he embraced new technology and
methods with enthusiasm. One year it was the computer; another, making
"stained glass"; then, using a camcorder. Mary, his wife of 49 years, was
his constant partner in life, research and travel, as were his children
Steven, Rosalind and Teresa. Professionally, Hurt never retired but sought
more knowledge to fuel his desire to uncover the new, as well as the old.
Indeed, up to the moment of his death he continued to work with his research
files, preparing material for publication, studying ethnographic data and
enjoying his beloved New Mexico. (Paul Doughty)
JOHN CHARLES KELLEY, 84, died in El Paso, TX, December 13, 1997, from
a respiratory virus and renal failure. Born in Era, TX, October 9, 1913,
Kelley earned his BA in anthropology from the U of New Mexico (1937) and
PhD from Harvard (1948), where he was awarded Thaw, Hemenway and Winthrop
fellowships. He began fieldwork at Carved Rock Shelter in Texas (1931),
continued at southwestern archaeological sites in the 1930s and 1940s and
included Navajo ethnography (1935-36) and ethnohistoric research on the
Texas-Mexico border area. During WWII he did anthropometric research to
improve gas-mask design and was honorably discharged from the Army (1945).
Kelley's best-known research in northern Mexico began at La Junta de
los Rios (1936) and continued at Schroeder, La Quemada, Totoate, Alta Vista
and other sites. He was active in both Mesoamerican and Texan archaeology
until shortly before his death. Kelley was a major proponent of northern
Mesoamerican-southwestern interaction, a topic to which he brought his
vast wealth of knowledge from 6 decades of work.
Kelley first taught at (now) Sul Ross State U (1937), where he was
curator of archaeology at the museum. He was an instructor at U of Texas-Austin
(1941-42), assistant professor (1945), associate professor (1949) and became
curator of the Anthropology Museum. He moved to Southern Illinois U-Carbondale
(1950) as professor of anthropology and director of the museum. There he
organized the Anthropology Department and recruited Walter Taylor as chair
(1958), and by the mid-1960s SIU-C was ranked among the best new anthropology
departments. Kelley retired from SIU-C as professor emeritus (1976) and
then was Alfonso Caso Distinguished Visiting Professor at Universidad Nacional
Autonoma de Mexico (1980). Kelley trained dozens of archaeologists while
at SIU-C and served as a mentor to many more. Students and colleagues honored
him with three festschriften.
Kelley received numerous grants from NSF and Wenner-Gren. He chaired
the special committee on "Archaeological Identifications and the Cooperation
of Specialists in Related Disciplines" for the National Research Council
(1955-57), producing The Identification of Non-Artifactual Archaeological
Materials (Walter Taylor, ed, 1958). Kelley's professional publications
include Jumano and Patarabueye: Relations at La Junta de los Rios (1986),
"Mesoamerica and the Southwestern United States" (vol 4, Handbook of Middle
American Indians, 1966), "Archaeology of the Northern Frontier: Zacatecas
and Durango" (vol 11, 1971) and over 25 journal articles, many of which
were coauthored with his wife and professional collaborator Ellen Abbott
Kelley.
Kelley was a first-rate scholar, brilliant teacher, mentor in the best
and fullest sense of the word and a marvelous storyteller. He especially
enjoyed telling stories on himself in a wonderful, wicked and sometimes
self-deprecating manner punctuated by sly grins, winks and his infectious
laugh that started deep in his belly and rolled upward through his chest
and throat. Above all, Kelley was a loving companion and partner to his
wife and a dear friend to those privileged to know and love him. His death
is a terrible loss to American archaeology. He will be sorely missed by
Ellen and by his children Nancy and Kevin. (Jonathan E Reyman; photo courtesy
Victoria Riley Evans)
LITA S OSMUNDSEN, 71, president emerita and longtime director of research
of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, died on January
9, 1998. Osmundsen was born in New York City. She spent her early grade-school
years in Jamaica and completed her precollege education in New York. Osmundsen
discovered anthropology while still a teenager enrolled as an undergraduate
student at Hunter College. She was trained in each of the 4 subdisciplines,
first at Hunter, later in the graduate program at Columbia U and, of great
importance, via interactive, "hands-on" education through her experiences
associated with the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Osmundsen understood and always
appreciated the many facets of anthropology. She especially promoted interest
in connections within and among the subdisciplines and cognate fields.
Osmundsen came to the Wenner-Gren Foundation while still an undergraduate
student. She was proud that over the years she held (and learned from)
every job at the foundation. During the early years she worked in partnership
with Paul Fejos, the foundation's imaginative director of research. After
his death in 1963, Osmundsen became director of research and, eventually,
president. She brought to these positions her commitment to international
anthropology, extensive knowledge of the discipline, expertise in promoting
communication among scholars and practical management and business skills.
She understood when, where and how to invest in the future of anthropology
through support of individuals at critical times in their academic careers,
development of the legendary Wenner-Gren Foundation small conferences and
creation of technical and other programs. Osmundsen took the right kinds
of intellectual risks. She enabled support of established professionals
with exciting ideas at important junctures in their careers. She also provided
opportunities for young scholars to develop their professional lives.
Osmundsen was an innovative thinker and creative problem-solver. She
excelled throughout her career in bringing people and ideas together. The
incomparable combination of her warm personality and organizational skills
allowed the successes of supper conferences during the late 1940s and 1950s
and, later, international conferences at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, and
other conference sites. Expertly facilitated by Osmundsen, these conferences
fostered integration of anthropological subdisciplines and new directions
for research in anthropology and related fields. The conferences provided
a forum for sharing concepts and data and, especially, generating new ways
of thinking and new projects to pursue. Books and resulting new research
enabled by these Wenner-Gren Foundation activities profoundly influenced
the goals and directions of our discipline.
Osmundsen retired from the Wenner-Gren Foundation in December 1986.
She maintained an active interest in anthropology. Her legacy is for all
anthropologists, now and for generations to come. She received one of the
first Distinguished Service Awards established by the AAA (1976). The award
highlights the significance of her professional work. She was cited for
her "contribution to the internationalization of anthropology, for her
furtherance of all branches of the field through support of research and
for uniquely creative use of conferences and symposia to further scholarly
integration and development."
Osmundsen is survived by her husband John A Osmundsen, children Jonathan
Osmundsen and Mirjana Dougherty and infant granddaughter Meaghan Kate Dougherty.
They will miss her, and so will we. (Mary Ellen Morbeck)
FRANK T SIEBERT JR, 85, medical pathologist and ethnolinguist, died
January 23, 1998, in Bangor, ME, after a long bout with cancer. Born in
Philadelphia, April 2, 1912, Siebert graduated from Haverford C (1934).
He completed medical training at U of Pennsylvania (1938) and specialized
as a pathologist. But the morbid science of diseases never won Siebert's
love. His true vocation, the study and preservation of threatened North
American Indian languages, began in 1932 when he first visited the Penobscot
reservation on Indian Island, ME. That trip launched a 65-year affaire
de coeur. In 1934, while at medical school, Siebert became acquainted with
anthropologist Frank Speck, whose own Penobscot fieldwork reached back
to 1907. He attended Franz Boas's classes and audited Edward Sapir's lectures.
Impressed by Siebert's linguistic skills, Speck hired him as a teaching
assistant. Beyond sharing a deep interest in Penobscot language and culture,
both men also studied Catawbas, Iroquois, Canadian Munsees and Oklahoma
Delawares, as well as Innu (Montagnais) of Lake St John.
Throughout Siebert's medical career, he devoted much of his personal
capital and free time to ethnohistorical and linguistic research. Upon
retiring in the mid-1970s, he settled near Indian Island in Oldtown to
devote himself to Penobscot studies. Highly opinionated, Siebert did not
suffer fools gladly and could be relentless in his critique of scholars
whom he felt did not measure up to his high standards. Even the admired
Speck was blamed for being a bit careless and hasty, too readily accepting
primary data given him by Native informants. A perfectionist, meticulous
in scholarship, Siebert was unrivaled in his knowledge of Penobscot Indian
history and linguistics. He received a small Guggenheim grant in 1969,
but not until late in life did he acquire more substantial funding (an
NSF grant) for his Penobscot dictionary project.
In addition to his soon-to-be published dictionary (over 15,000 entries),
Siebert's legacy includes a Penobscot language project on CD-ROM, two volumes
of Penobscot legends and almost 30 other publications, some of them seminal.
During the 8-year Maine Indian Land Claims case (settled in 1980), Siebert
provided crucial testimony on behalf of the Penobscot Indian Nation. After
the death of the last fluent Native speaker of Penobscot in 1993, he became
the only living person who knew the tongue well.
With a large pile of unpublished research data, Siebert was not ready
to die. In one of his last letters he lamented, "I look old and beat!!
Depresses me very much. Mentally I feel young but I fear my body is falling
apart: 'sic transit gloria mundi'." As one of the original founders of
the annual Algonquian Conference (1968), Siebert will be duly honored at
its 30th gathering at Harvard next October. Also, his colleagues laud him
in a special issue of the Maine Historical Society Quarterly. Although
the great ethnolinguistic amator died before it appeared in print, we can
well imagine his grumbles about some minor error or missed detail. (Harald
E L Prins)
CLARA LEE FRAPS TANNER, 92, professor emerita at the U of Arizona and
a leading authority on the arts and crafts of Southwestern American Indians,
died at her home in Tucson, AZ, December 22, 1997. Born in Biscoe, NC,
May 28, 1905, her family moved to Arizona two years later. She entered
the U of Arizona intending to major in English, but concentrated on anthropology
after being inspired by the first course she took with Byron Cummings.
She earned a BA in archaeology (1927) and MA (1928), joined the faculty
at Arizona as an instructor, and retired as Full Professor in 1978. Tanner
was a Visiting Professor for brief periods at Denver U (1949) and Colorado
College (1980). She did additional graduate work at the National U of Mexico
(1929) and the Oriental Institute of the U of Chicago (1934). The U of
Arizona awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Letters (1983).
In 1936 she married John F Tanner, whose sister Helen was the wife
of anthropologist John Province, then on the Arizona faculty. The Tanners
had one child, Sandra Lee (Elers), and have two grandchildren and three
great-grandchildren.
Tanner taught many different courses in all fields of archaeology and
ethnology; she was living proof that women did have to work harder than
their male colleagues. The centerpiece of her teaching career was an elective
course in Southwest Indian art first taught in 1940. Through this course,
she gave hundreds of undergraduate students with only limited interest
in anthropology an appreciation for the creativity of their American Indian
neighbors. Her own research resulted in the publication of 6 scholarly
books on Southwest Indian painting, craft arts and baskets. Her last major
research effort, a study of Chemehuevi basketry, was not completed because
of declining health.
Tanner wrote scholarly books with the general reader in mind and published
dozens of articles in newspapers and popular magazines. She also gave hundreds
of talks to many different groups, with an almost missionary zeal to introduce
the entire world to the beauty, skill and creativity of Indian artists
and artisans. Tanner supported many groups that promoted Indian art and
she and her husband, an art dealer, were much in demand as judges at Indian
art events. They judged annually at the Gallup Indian ceremonials beginning
in 1941. In 1971 she received the 50th Anniversary Award of the Gallup
Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial Association.
Tanner was honored many times for her work, especially by organizations
that value outreach, writing and women: Arizona Press Women, National Federation
of Press Women, Society of Southwestern Authors, Sharlot Hall Museum (Outstanding
Woman of Arizona, 1985), U of Arizona Alumni Association (Faculty Achievement
Award, 1974), and National Museum of Women in the Arts (National Lifetime
Achievement in the Craft Arts, 1993). In 1992 the U of Arizona Press established
the Clara Lee Tanner Fund to support publication of the work of young anthropologists.
(Raymond H Thompson; photo by Helga Teiwes courtesy of the Arizona State
Museum, U of Arizona.)
DENNIS MICHAEL WARREN, 56, University Professor of anthropology at Iowa
State U, died December 28, 1997, of an embolism in Osogbo, Nigeria. He
was buried at his country house in Ara, Nigeria, on January 3, 1998.
Warren received his BS in biology from Stanford U (1964) and on graduation
went into the Peace Corps, spending two years in Ghana. On his return he
enrolled in the anthropology program at Indiana U, completing his PhD in
1974. Warren arrived at Iowa State in 1972, was promoted to full professor
in 1980 and last year was appointed University Professor in recognition
of his longtime service and accomplishments at ISU.
During his early period at Iowa State, Warren spent two years (1977-79)
on a United States Agency for International Development project in Ghana.
In part, it was this experience that convinced him of the value of local-level
input in social-change programs. If his experience in the Peace Corps had
taught him that local farmers possessed an often untapped wealth of knowledge
about the environment, working with USAID convinced him of the importance
of incorporating these peasant farmers as team players in development schemes.
As recognition of how important his work was at the local level, Warren
wound up being installed as a chief in three Ghanaian and two Nigerian
communities.
In 1987 Warren created the Center for Indigenous Knowledge for Agriculture
and Rural Development (CIKARD). The CIKARD acts as a clearinghouse for
collecting, documenting and disseminating information on local-level agricultural
and rural development knowledge.
The list of professional honors Warren garnered was extremely impressive
and covered a range of topics from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology
to chairing the Anthropology Section of the Iowa Academy of Sciences. Warren's
expertise in the area of international development resulted in more than
50 consultancies, including the US State Department and World Health Organization.
His level of knowledge about matters related to social change made him
a frequent evaluator of research proposals and manuscripts, outside evaluator
for faculty promotions and an external examiner for graduate students.
Warren's list of publications and papers was as impressive as other
facets of his professional career. He produced 29 books or manuals, wrote
44 book chapters, generated 51 journal articles (and another 61 book reviews),
pulled together 26 reports and gave more than 60 professional papers. These
publications and papers were in major areas where Warren established himself
as an international authority. They included work in international agriculture,
communications and rural development, alternative health systems, development
planning and cross-cultural understanding.
We will miss Mike Warren's boundless energy, his good sense of humor
and his no-nonsense approach to work. While his earthly remains rest in
his adopted country that he loved so much, his spirit will continue to
reside with all of us who knew him. He is survived by his wife Mary and
daughter Medina. (Michael B Whiteford)
VIOLA G WATERHOUSE, 89, one of the most important figures in the Summer
Institute of Linguistics and the Wycliffe Bible Translators in the 1950s
and 1960s, died in 1997 at her family home in Independence, MO. She had
been in frail health for a number of years but kept actively involved in
linguistic work, coauthoring a paper as recently as 1996.
Born in 1917, Waterhouse worked as a missionary linguist among the
Chontal (Tequistlateco) of Oaxaca (1942-56) and wrote a grammar of Lowland
(Coastal) Chontal as her doctoral dissertation at the U of Michigan (1958).
This study was one of the first full grammatical descriptions in the Tagmemic
model developed by Kenneth L Pike, and Waterhouse went on to become one
of SIL's leading proponents of Tagmemic theory. She served for several
years as SIL's bibliographer/librarian and compiled the 25th anniversary
bibliography of SIL in 1960. She also published several historical and
comparative studies of Chontal, a language isolate that she firmly believed
to be a southern outlier of Hokan.
Waterhouse was one of the founding members of the Society for the Study
of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in 1981. (Excerpted from a
notice in SSILA Bulletin 60, January 30, 1998)
RICHARD P WHEELER, 88, died in a retirement home in Chapel Hill, NC,
on February 17, 1997. The majority of Wheeler's archaeological career was
with the River Basin Surveys and National Park Service, and it is for this
work that he will be most remembered.
Wheeler was born in 1909 in Chicago but spent his early life in Ohio.
He was sent to Philips Exeter Academy and from there entered Harvard College
in what would have been his senior year of preparatory school (1929). After
graduation he spent two years away from school because of illness, but
1934 saw him on Paul Martin's field crew at Lowry Ruin, Colorado. The following
year he worked as a summer fellow for the Museum of North Arizona at Sunset
Crater and Grand Falls and in the great kiva at Wupatki. He returned to
Harvard for a year of graduate work (1935-36); the summers of 1936 and
1937 were spent at Awatovi in northern Arizona with the Peabody Museum
Expedition, where he concentrated on studying the stone, bone and antler
artifacts. For personal reasons he dropped out of archaeology for 10 years,
during which he ran the family farm, married Lucy Pope and moved to Michigan
to run his father-in-law's farm.
By 1948 the pull of archaeology brought Wheeler back, this time to
the Plains, where he worked for the Missouri River Basin Survey until 1950,
when he was appointed to a permanent position. For the next 9 years, every
field season saw him working in reservoir areas: Angostura, Boysen, Keyhole,
Jamestown and Oahe. One final report was published in 1963 (The Stutsman
Focus in the James River Valley, North Dakota, River Basin Surveys 30).
In 1959 he was transferred to the National Park Service, returning to the
Southwest on the staff of the Wetherill Mesa Project, Mesa Verde. There
Wheeler was laboratory supervisor until 1965, working on stone and bone.
In 1965 he was transferred to Washington, DC, where he served as technical
publications editor for the NPS, Division of Archaeology. Wheeler was able
to see many of the Wetherill Mesa reports to publication, as well as several
from the Plains. He also completed the analysis of the animal bone from
Awatovi (1978, Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology Paper 70). At
the end of 1974, he retired but did not end his association with archaeology.
He spent several years as a volunteer in the laboratory at the Alexandria
Archaeological Research Project, carrying out faunal analysis for historic
research projects.
After his wife died, Wheeler moved in 1992 to Chapel Hill to a retirement
community. He was proud to see the publication in 1995 of his Angostura
report as volume 46 of Reprints in Anthropology. Wheeler was a quiet, sensitive
and shy man with a good sense of humor. I am proud to have had him as a
friend. He is survived by his daughters Hanna and Valerie and several grandchildren. |
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