Henry Farmer Dobyns, Jr. (July 3, 1925 – June 21, 2009) was an anthropologist, author and researcher specializing in the ethnohistory and demography of native peoples in the American hemisphere. He is most well known for his groundbreaking demographic research on the size of indigenous American populations before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Alexander Spoehr (August 23, 1913 – June 11, 1992) was an American anthropologist who served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1965.
Spoehr was born in Tucson, Arizona on August 23, 1913, to parents Herman Augustus Spoehr and Florence Mann. Alexander Spoehr was of German, Danish, and Austrian descent. He was raised in Palo Alto, California, and enrolled at Stanford University, later transferring to the University of Chicago, where he completed an A. B. in economics. Spoehr remained at the University of Chicago for graduate study in anthropology, researching the Seminole in Florida. In January 1940, Spoehr began working at the Field Museum. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, and later joined the Naval Reserve. Spoehr returned to the Field Museum in 1946. He left Chicago for Honolulu in 1953, and worked for the Bishop Museum until 1962. Spoehr had been named leader of the East–West Center in 1961, and served from 1962 until his resignation in 1963 to teach at the University of Pittsburgh. He left Pitt in 1978, and moved to Hawaii. He died at the age of 78 on June 11, 1992, in Honolulu.In 2019, a little girl whom he had photographed on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1947 without recording her name was identified by her son while exploring the museum's Pacific Islander cultural collections, an incident that gained some attention in the media.
Charles E. Dibble (18 August 1909 – 30 November 2002) was an American academic, anthropologist, linguist, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. A former Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, Dibble retired in 1978 after an association with the university as lecturer and researcher spanning four decades. Post-retirement Dibble continued to conduct and publish research in his area of expertise, studies of Mesoamerican historical literature and the historiography of conquest-era Mesoamerican cultures, in particular those of the Aztec and others of the central Mexican altiplano. Among many contributions to the field Dibble is perhaps most recognised for his collaboration with colleague Arthur J.O. Anderson, producing the modern annotated translation into English of the volumes of the Florentine Codex.
Born in Layton, Utah, Dibble attended the University of Utah, obtaining a B.A. in history in 1936. Dibble traveled to Mexico in the year preceding his graduation, and his experiences there shaped the direction of his future career as a Mesoamericanist scholar. Dibble enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City for postgraduate studies, completing a Master's degree in anthropology in 1938. Upon receiving his MA Dibble gained a teaching position at his alma mater in Utah commencing in 1939, where he would be based for the remainder of his long academic career. At the same time he pursued his doctoral studies at UNAM, and was awarded his PhD from UNAM in 1942. Dibble also undertook a year's post-doctoral work at Harvard, in 1943. In 1994, a festschrift entitled Chipping away on earth: studies in prehispanic and colonial Mexico in honor of Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble was published.
Harold Courlander (September 18, 1908 – March 15, 1996) was an American novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist and an expert in the study of Haitian life. The author of 35 books and plays and numerous scholarly articles, Courlander specialized in the study of African, Caribbean, Afro-American, and Native American cultures. He took a special interest in oral literature, cults, and Afro-American cultural connections with Africa.
Buell Halvor Quain (May 31, 1912 – August 2, 1939) was an American ethnologist who, after graduating from University of Wisconsin–Madison and studying as a graduate student at Columbia University, worked with native peoples in Fiji and Brazil. He published a total of four books, three of them posthumously.
In 1938, Quain travelled to Brazil to work with the Kraho people of the Brazilian rainforest, where he also spent time in the Trumai village.
Robert McCormick Adams Jr. (July 23, 1926 – January 27, 2018) was an American anthropologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1984–94). He worked in both the Near East and Mesoamerica. A long time professor of the University of Chicago, he was best known for his research in Iraq.
Symmes Chadwick Oliver (30 March 1928 – 9 August 1993) was an American anthropologist and science fiction and Western writer. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father was a surgeon and his mother a nurse. When he was young he had rheumatic fever and as a result spent considerable time at home, a time during which he became interested in science fiction. He spent most of his life in Austin, Texas where he was twice chairman of the department of anthropology of the University of Texas. He was also one of the founders of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. He first attended the university in 1946 as a student and, apart from a brief sojourn to UCLA to obtain his Ph.D., he remained there in some capacity until his death, 47 years later.
He first had a story published in 1950. His science fiction is generally classified as anthropological science fiction because he often used insights from his professional work to inform his fictional writing.An avid fly fisherman, Professor Oliver supported the Guadalupe River Chapter of Trout Unlimited and the cold water fishery downstream from Canyon Dam. Numerous scenes in his writings made reference to actions and experiences related to fishing in moving water (e.g. wading a river in "Shores of Another Sea").
Froelich Gladstone Rainey (June 18, 1907 – October 11, 1992) was an American anthropologist and Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology from 1947 to 1977. Under his leadership, the Penn Museum announced the Pennsylvania Declaration, ending the purchase system of acquiring antiquities and artifacts that had, in practice, encouraged looting from historical sites.
In the early 1950s, Rainey also devised and hosted the popular "What in the World?" television gameshow, which highlighted the museum's collections and involved notable scholars and celebrities of the day. In 1975, in recognition of his role at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he had served as the university's first professor of anthropology from 1935 to 1942, Rainey's Cabin on the campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Francis Clark Howell (November 27, 1925 – March 10, 2007), generally known as F. Clark Howell, was an American anthropologist.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, F. Clark Howell grew up in Kansas, where he became interested in natural history. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, from 1944 to 1946 in the Pacific Theater. Howell was educated at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees under the tutelage of Sherwood L. Washburn.
Dr. Howell died of metastatic lung cancer on March 10, 2007, at age 81 at his home in Berkeley, California.
Carlos Castañeda (December 25, 1925 – April 27, 1998) was an American writer. Starting in 1968, Castaneda published a series of books that describe a training in shamanism that he received under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named don Juan Matus. While Castaneda's work was accepted as factual by many when the books were first published, the training he described is now generally considered to be fictional.The first three books—The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan—were written while he was an anthropology student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Castaneda was awarded his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles based on the work he described in these books.At the time of his death in 1998, Castaneda's books had sold more than eight million copies and had been published in 17 languages.