Anna Curtenius Roosevelt

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt (* 1946 ) is an American archaeologist and the granddaughter of the American President Theodore Roosevelt .

Life

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt was born in 1946. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in anthropology and received her PhD from Columbia University . As a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1994 to today) and as curator of archeology at the Field Museum of Natural History (1991 to 2002), Curtenius Roosevelt researches early human history and the sustainability of land use in tropical forests in the Amazon and the Congo.

In 1988 she was a MacArthur Fellow . In 1992 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Researches

Roosevelt explored the almost unknown history of the early Indians in South America. Similar to her famous grandfather, who had already carried out expeditions to the Amazon region in 1914, she was concerned with the question of when people had lived in this area. Further studies in Africa led to her theory that the development of early humans, contrary to the more common assumption, could have evolved less from the savannah than from the jungle.

During her research in South America, she mainly dealt with the origins of agriculture. At the invitation of an American archaeologist, she was allowed to carry out research on early corn cultivation in the Orinoco region, Venezuela. Based on finds (plants, bones, ceramics and wood) she discovered that there must have been different ways of life in prehistoric times than those found today. Today's staple food cassava (also: yuca) could not have fed a dense population. It was precisely this general view among scholars that Curtenius Roosevelt wanted to refute. She eventually found other human traces in caves and former garbage dumps, including near Santarém, Brazil: cave paintings, fruits, nuts and turtle shells as well as fish bones. With the help of chemical analyzes of various bone finds, she showed that the basic food was not cassava but corn. This enabled her to prove that there could have been large settlements. She also assumed that the first settlers had already moved around by boat and probably moved from China and Japan and across the Bering Strait to North America.

In Africa she also looked for traces of early settlement, especially in areas with volcanic or tectonic activity. She followed rivers. By comparing her discoveries in Africa with those in South America, she tried to prove that human habitation emerged from the jungle rather than the savannah.

In doing so, she challenged generally accepted theories about the development of human history . She also highlighted the importance of women in early societies. Presumably they had already played an important role in obtaining food.

literature

• Milbry Polk / Mary Tiegreen: Anna Curtenius Roosevelt , in: Women explore the world , Frederking & Thaler Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-89405-220-1 , pp. 207-211.

Web links

• Anna Curtenius Roosevelt (English) ( Memento from January 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive )