Alice Mossie Brues

Alice Mossie Brues (born October 9, 1913 in Boston , Massachusetts , † January 14, 2007 in Louisville , Colorado ) was an American anthropologist . She has taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Colorado .

Life

Brues was born in 1913 as the daughter of entomologist and Harvard professor Charles Thomas Brues and his wife Beirne Barrett Brues. In 1933 Brues received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and psychology from Bryn Mawr College and then studied anthropology at Radcliffe College to graduate with a master’s degree . In 1940 she received her PhD in biological anthropology from Earnest Hooton at Harvard University . Her dissertation dealt with the inheritance of eye color, stature and pigment disorders.

She then worked at the Peabody Museum and advised the US Army Chemical Corps . At the same time, she and Hooton evaluated anthropometric data from members of the US Air Force in order to be able to draw conclusions about body shape and stature. Their analysis should help improve Air Force uniforms and equipment. She continued the project under Wright Field until 1944 and developed breathing masks, among other things. She then briefly worked on gas masks for MIT. In 1946 she became a research associate in human anatomy at the University of Oklahoma. Research here was mainly on the blood groups of the AB0 system . In 1959 he attended the first programming course offered by the university and from then on mainly used computer systems to develop simulation models for genetic changes.

From 1956 to 1965 she was the curator of biological anthropology at the Stovall Museum in Norman, Oklahoma, and from 1954 to 1965 a member of a homicide investigator training seminar. In 1960, Brues became a full professor of anatomy at the University of Oklahoma. In 1965 Brues was a visiting professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for a year before she was appointed full professor at the Department of Anthropology the following year, where she taught and researched until her retirement in 1984. She served four years as the co-editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology , three years on the board of the American Association of Physical Anthropology (AAPA), vice president of AAPA from 1966 to 1968, and president from 1971 to 1973. She was a member of the board of the Human Biology Council and its Vice-President in 1976/77. She was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Institute of Dental Research from 1972 to 1975 .

Fonts

Brues published more than 300 scientific articles and several books, including People and Races (1977). The book was one of the last to be written from the perspective of biological anthropology in the tradition of Carleton Coon . In it she describes biological and genetic differences between populations as geographical phenomena. But Brues became known as early as 1959 with her essay The Spearman and the Archer . In it she describes how different body stature shaped the use of weapons. So muscularly well-trained people mainly use clubs, narrower spears and broad body types with short limbs tend to use bows and arrows. The work was one of the first to attempt to trace human behavior back to biological characteristics. Her most important books include:

• Study of anthropometric data . Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 1945
• San Simon branch: excavations at Cave Creek and in the San Simon Valley II. Skeletal material . Arizona State Museum; University of Arizona, 1946
• with James Ball Shaeffer: Salvage archeology in Oklahoma: papers of the Oklahoma archaeological salvage project . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1960
• People and races . Macmillan, 1977
• with James A Brown: The Spiro Ceremonial Center: the archeology of Arkansas Valley Caddoan culture in eastern Oklahoma . University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1996

Awards and honors

Brues has received prizes from the American Association of Physical Anthropology (AAPA), the Human Biology Association, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences for outstanding scientific achievements .

literature

• Mark K. Sandford, Lynn Kilgore, Diane L. France: Alice Mossie Brues (1913-2007) . In: Jane E. Buikstra, Charlotte (Ed.): The Global History of Paleopathology: Pioneers and Prospects pp. 156–161 ( digitized from Google Books )
• Obituary: Alice Mossie Brues . In: American Journal of Human Biology , Vol. 19, No. 4 (July / August 2007), p. 597 ( doi : 10.1002 / ajhb.20684 )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mary K. Sandford, Lynn Kilgore, Darna L. Dufour, Judith G. Regensteiner: Alice Mossie Brues (1913-2007) . In: American Anthropologist . 110, No. 1, 2008, ISSN  0002-7294 , pp. 157-160. doi : 10.1111 / j.1548-1433.2008.00019_1.x .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ute Gacs et al .: Women anthropologists: selected biographies . Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 23-27 ( digitized from Google Books )
3. ^ The Spearman and the Archer. An Essay on Selection in Body Build. In: American Anthropologist , NS Volume 61, 1959, No. 3, pp. 457-469. ( JSTOR 667210 ).