Philip Drucker

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Philip Drucker (born January 13, 1911 in Chicago , Illinois , † February 28, 1982 in Lexington , Kentucky ) was an American ethnologist and archaeologist who focused on the Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast ( Nuu-chah-nulth , Kwakwaka'wakw , Gitxsan , Tsimshian ) and the Olmecs in southern Mexico .

life and work

Born in Chicago, he grew up in Colorado . After high school he became a laborer and cowboy , then studied at the Colorado Agricultural College .

In 1930 he participated in a so-called field school for archeology at the University of New Mexico . He decided to change his profession and studied at the University of California at Berkeley , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1932 and his doctorate in 1936 . He learned from Alfred Kroeber , worked for the Tolowa in 1933 and in western Oregon in 1934 . For example, he worked with Willie Simmons, a spokesman for Upper Takelma from southwest Oregon. He did his doctorate on the Nootka (now Nuu-chah-nulth ) on Vancouver Island . In 1937 he worked as a National Research Council fellow in British Columbia . In the area of ​​the Grand Coulee , an old river bed on the Columbia Plateau, he carried out another excavation for the Spokane Historical Society .

In 1940 he became assistant curator at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington , where he worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology from time to time until 1955 . Under the direction of Matthew Williams Stirling , he first dug at Olmec sites in the Mexican province of Veracruz .

During the Second World War he was employed as a lieutenant in the Navy from 1942 to 1945 , and again from 1948 to 1952. During this time he published on the three cultural areas that preoccupied him the most, namely the Pacific Northwest Coast, the Pacific Trust Territory and the Tabasco- Veracruz region of Mexico.

He worked on the excavation sites of Tres Zapotes (1940), Cerro de las Mesas (1941), La Venta (1942) and San Lorenzo (1946). In Tres Zapotes and Cerro de las Mesas he worked on ceramics. In 1947 he made investigations in the highlands and on the coast of Chiapas . In 1953 he was again in Tabasco and Veracruz, in 1955 he worked again in La Venta, together with Robert F. Heizer (since 1952 Professor in Berkeley) and Robert J. Squier. From 1952 to 1953 he stayed in Juneau , Alaska, where he worked on the brotherhoods of the Native Americans. He worked closely with the chief (chief) of the Nisga'a William Beynon (1888-1969), who described the potlatch of the Gitxsan village Gitsegukla.

He then moved to Veracruz and bought a farm to raise cattle. He married Rosaria Gonzalez and published under the pseudonym Paul Record . With his colleague Robert Heizer he wrote about the Olmecs .

In 1967 he returned to the USA and taught at the Universities of California, Santa Cruz , and in 1968 at the University of Colorado . In 1968 he accepted an appointment as a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky (1967, 1968-69). In 1979 he taught at Baylor University . In Kentucky he became professor of anthropology, a position he held until 1978.

He died in Lexington in 1982.

Works

  • The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes , United States Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 144, Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office 1951
  • Indians of the Northwest Coast , Garden City, New York: Natural History Press 1955, 1963
  • The Native Brotherhoods: Modern Intertribal Organization on the Northwest Coast , 1958
  • Philip Drucker, Robert F. Heizer, Robert J. Squier: Excavations at La Venta, Tabasco, 1955 , Washington 1959 ( online ).
  • Cultures of the North Pacific Coast , San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company 1965.
  • McFeat, Tom (Eds.): Indians of the North Pacific Coast: Studies in Selected Topics , Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1966.
  • To Make My Name Good: A Reexamination of the Southern Kwakiutl Potlatch , 1967
  • The Native Brotherhoods: Modern Intertribal Organizations on the Northwest Coast , Washington DC: Government Printing Office United States Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 168, 1958 ( online )

literature

  • Margaret Lantis: 'Philip Drucker 1911-1982', in: American Anthropologist, New Series, 85/4 (1983) 897-902.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Marianne Mithun: The languages ​​of native North America , Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 514.
  2. ↑ Robert Heizer. 1915-1979, Minnesota State University. Archived from the original on June 3, 2010 ; Retrieved January 26, 2014 .
  3. ↑ Margaret Anderson, Marjorie M. Halpin (Eds.): Potlatch at Gitsegukla: William Beynon's 1945 Field Notebooks , University of British Columbia Press 2000, p. 10.
personal data
SURNAME Drucker, Philip
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH February 28, 1982
Place of death Lexington , Kentucky