Richard Shutler, Jr.

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Richard Shutler, Jr. (born December 8, 1921 in Longmont , Colorado , † June 28, 2007 ), also known as Dick Shutler , was an American archaeologist and anthropologist . His great influence on North American and Pacific archeology is on his personal interaction with other scientists and on his extensive fieldwork in Arizona , Nevada , New Caledonia , Vanuatu , Luzon , Micronesia , Mongoliaand Tonga .

Life

After graduating from Gilroy High School, Shutler earned an Associate of Arts (AA) degree from Salinas Junior College in 1942 . From 1942 to 1946 he served in the US Army , where he worked as a radio operator and mechanic in the Aleutian Islands for 18 months during the Second World War . In 1949 and 1950 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and graduated with a Master of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley . From 1949 to 1958 Shutler was a scientist in the radiocarbon dating laboratory at the University of Arizona . From 1959 to 1965 he was the curator of anthropology at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City . In 1961 he was with the dissertation The Pueblo Indian Occupation of the Southern Great Basin on the western settlement of the Anasazi , led by Emil Haury for Ph.D. PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. Shutler held several professorships from 1966 to 1987, including from 1966 to 1967 at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu , from 1967 to 1968 at San Diego State College , from 1968 to 1972 at the University of Victoria , from 1972 to 1979 at the University of Iowa and from 1979 to 1987 at Simon Fraser University . In 1987 he retired as a professor emeritus .

In 1952 Shutler visited with his first wife Mary Elizabeth Shutler (1929-2018) the archaeological site Lapita in New Caledonia , where they carried out extensive excavations with Edward Winslow Gifford . Lapita is the eponymous site for the Pacific Lapita culture , which dates back to around 1500 BC. BC by Austronesian colonizers and is best known for their ceramics.

In 1962 he was part of a team of scientists who provided evidence that humans existed in Tule Springs , Nevada more than 13,000 years ago in the pre- Clovis period . During four months of 1962, excavators were carried out in the Nevada desert with the help of bulldozers , and the age of the finds was determined in 1963 using radiocarbon dating.

From 1963 to 1971 Shutler devoted himself again to work in the Pacific. He carried out extensive surveys and excavations on the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu ) and the Loyalty Islands and was accompanied and supported by his first wife. His first book, Oceanic Prehistory , was published about this project in 1975 . In the same year Shutler, together with his student Jeff Marck, put forward the now largely accepted hypothesis that Oceania was originally colonized from Southeast Asia by Austronesians who were looking for new places for their crops to settle.

In 1989 Shutler was instrumental in introducing Canadian archaeologist David V. Burley of Simon Fraser University to the study of Pacific archeology, and he was involved in Burley's field projects in the Kingdom of Tonga in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Private

Richard and Mary Elizabeth Shutler married in 1951. This marriage had three children. In 1975 they got divorced. Richard Shutler was married to the Canadian artist Jamie Evrard for the second time.

Dedication names

Trevor H. Worthy and David V. Burley named the extinct pigeon species Ducula shutleri of Tonga in 2019 in honor of Richard Shutler, Jr.

literature

  • Robert D. Craig, Russell T. Clement: Who's Who in Oceania, 1980-1981. Institute for Polynesian Studies, Brigham Young University – Hawaii Campus, 1980 ISBN 978-0-939154-13-5 , p. 177.
  • William R. Dickinson: In Memoriam: Richard Shutler, Jr. 1921-2007. In: The SAA Achaeological Record. The Magazine of the Society for American Archeology Volume 7, No. 5, November 2007, p. 46.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ William Olcott: Man has lived in US longer than we thought In: Paducan Sun-Democrat , Paducah, Kentucky, February 21, 1964, p. 4, accessed November 20, 2019 from newspapers.com.
  2. ^ Richard Shutler, Jr., Jeffrey C. Marck: On the dispersal of the Austronesian horticulturalists. In: Archeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 10, 2, 1975, pp. 81-113.
  3. ^ Trevor H. Worthy, David V. Burley: Prehistoric avifaunas from the Kingdom of Tonga. In: Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society XX, 2019, pp. 1-48.
personal data
SURNAME Shutler, Richard, Jr.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shutler, Dick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Longmont , Colorado
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 2007