Marshall Howard Saville
Marshall Howard Saville (* 1867 in Rockport , Massachusetts , † 1935 ) was an American archaeologist for America .
Life
1889-1894 he studied anthropology at Harvard University and conducted his first field research under the direction of Frederic Ward Putnam . He made important discoveries in southern Ohio . From 1903 he taught American archeology at Columbia University . He also became director of the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation) , whose collection of thousands of artifacts has now been transferred to the National Museum of the American Indian .
Saville directed important archaeological digs in the Yucatan , Honduras , Mexico , Ecuador and Colombia . He named the Olmec culture after a tribe who lived in the region on the Gulf of Mexico at the time of the Aztecs , where the most important sites of the Olmec culture were discovered.
He answered in the affirmative to the question discussed around 1900 whether there had been string instruments in Central America before the arrival of the Europeans. As a justification, he interpreted an unusual illustration of musicians as a “pre-Columbian music group” in an Aztec illuminated manuscript and saw a figure of a musical bow player. After a number of investigations in the period that followed, this view is now considered refuted.
Web links
- Photos of Saville's archaeological sites (English)
- Works by Saville at the American Museum of Natural History
Individual evidence
- ^ MH Saville: The Musical Bow in Ancient Mexico. (PDF; 647 kB) In: The American Anthropologist , Vol. XI, September 1898, pp. 280–284, DOI: 10.1525 / aa.1898.11.9.02a00030
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Saville, Marshall Howard |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American Old Americanist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1867 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rockport , Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1935 |