Laurence Ralph is an American writer, filmmaker and researcher. He is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and the Director of Center on Transnational Policing. Ralph's research interests include urban ethnography, disability studies, social inequality, African American studies, race, policing, theories of violence, popular culture and hip-hop. He authored the books Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland in 2014 and The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence in 2020. He is also writer and director of the animated short film, The Torture Letters.
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Leo Chavez
1951 - Present (73 years)
Leo Ralph Chavez is an American anthropologist, author, and professor, best known for his work in international migration, particularly among Latin American immigrants. Background Chavez was born in New Mexico. He received his bachelor's degree in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974 and his PhD in the same at Stanford University in 1982. He now teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
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Oswald Werner
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Oswald J. Werner , better known as Ossy Werner, was a Czechoslovakian-born American linguist. He was Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics for thirty years at Northwestern University and retired in 1998 as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Linguistics. During this period he researched the Navajo language and culture. Although specializing in their medicine and science, he impacted anthropology, linguistics, ethnography, ethnographic methodology, ethnoscience, and cognitive anthropology.
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Nicholas Thomas
1960 - Present (64 years)
Nicholas Jeremy Thomas is an Australian-born anthropologist, Professor of Historical Anthropology, and Director, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge since 2006, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2007.
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Iain R. Edgar
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Iain Edgar was a social anthropologist at Durham University. He was an expert in the field of dreams and dreaming, and a specialist in altered states of consciousness and mental health. Starting his career in social work, Edgar received a PhD from the University of Keele, where he studied under Ronnie Frankenberg. His thesis Dreamwork, Anthropology and the Caring Professions: A Cultural Approach to Dreamwork discusses a wide range of psychodynamic possibilities and develops a method to work with dreams within a professional care environment.
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Noel B. Salazar
1973 - Present (51 years)
Noel B. Salazar is a sociocultural anthropologist known for his transdisciplinary work on mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of 'Otherness', heritage, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism and endurance.
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Irving Rouse
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Benjamin Irving Rouse was an American archaeologist on the faculty of Yale University best known for his work in the Greater and Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean, especially in Haiti. He also conducted fieldwork in Florida and Venezuela. He made major contributions to the development of archaeological theory, with a special emphasis on taxonomy and classification of archaeological materials and studies of human migration.
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Ulla Vuorela
1945 - 2011 (66 years)
Ulla Vuorela was a Finnish professor of social anthropology. Early years and education Ulla Vuorela was born on 30 August 1945 in Helsinki. She graduated from the University of Helsinki with a major in Finno-Ugric ethnology. At the same time as studying folklore, Vuorela studied at the Sibelius Academy to become a teacher. During her studies, she taught piano at the Helsinki Conservatory between 1973 and 1976.
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Ifi Amadiume
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ifi Amadiume is a Nigerian poet, anthropologist and essayist. She joined the Religion Department of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, US, in 1993. Biography Born in Kaduna to Igbo parents, Ife Amadiume was educated in Nigeria before moving to Britain in 1971. She studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, gaining a BA and PhD in social anthropology respectively. She was a research fellow for a year at the University of Nigeria, Enugu, and taught and lectured in the UK, Canada, US and Senegal. Her fieldwork in Africa resulted in two ethnographic monographs ...
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Ron Crocombe
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Ronald Gordon Crocombe was a Professor of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific. His reputation was such that he was described as the "father of Pacific Studies". Biography Ron Crocombe was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and was raised in Piopio in the King Country, before attending Otahuhu College in Auckland. He later completed a degree from Auckland University. Ron went to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands as Clerk of Works for the New Zealand colonial Government's Public Works Department in 1950. In 1957 he became the Resident Agent "Akavanui" or head of local government on the island of Atiu.
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Moshe Kochavi
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Moshe Kochavi Biography Born in Bucharest, Romania, Kochavi immigrated to Palestine with his parents at the age of 5. Kochavi was drafted by the Palmach in 1947. He served in the Yiftach Brigade and was wounded during Operation Yoav.
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Ben Finney
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Ben Rudolph Finney was an American anthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the social and cultural anthropology of surfing, Polynesian navigation, and canoe sailing, as well as in the cultural and social anthropology of human space colonization. As "surfing's premier historian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century" and "the intellectual mentor, driving force, and international public face" of the Hokulea project, he played a key role in the Hawaiian Renaissance following his construction of the Hokulea precursor Nalehia in the 1960s and his co-...
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Daniel Martin Varisco
1951 - Present (73 years)
Daniel Martin Varisco , is an American anthropologist and historian. Varisco has published on the history of Orientalism, the anthropology of Islam, the history of Islamic agronomy and astronomy, agriculture and water rights in Yemen, and international development and the anthropology of cyberspace. He is the founding editor of CyberOrient, and web master of the blog Tabsir. He was Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. He is currently Research Professor at Qatar University.
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Moshe Shokeid
1936 - Present (88 years)
Moshe Shokeid is a prominent social anthropologist specializing in American and Israeli studies. He has taught in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University since 1968, and has been a visiting scholar at several universities in the U.S. and Europe. Shokeid has conducted research on topics related to both Israeli and U.S. society. He is the author of six books in English, four books in Hebrew , a few editorial books and many professional journal articles. He was a winner of the Ben-Zvi prize, named after Israel’s second President, who spent his life working to protect...
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Eudald Carbonell
1953 - Present (71 years)
Eudald Carbonell i Roura is a Spanish archaeologist, anthropologist and paleontologist. Educated in Girona, Barcelona and Paris, he holds a PhD in geology of the Quaternary from Pierre and Marie Curie University , and one in history from the University of Barcelona .
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J. Stephen Lansing
1950 - Present (74 years)
J. Stephen Lansing is an American anthropologist and complexity scientist. He is especially known from his decades of research on the emergent properties of human-environmental interactions in Bali, Borneo and the Malay Archipelago; social-ecological modeling, and complex adaptive systems. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna; a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford; a visiting scholar at the Hoffman Global Institute for Business and Society at INSEAD Singapore, and emeritus professor of anthr...
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Douglas Kellner
1943 - Present (81 years)
Douglas Kellner is an American academic who works at the intersection of "third-generation" critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, and in cultural studies in the tradition of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or the "Birmingham School". He has argued that these two conflicting philosophies are in fact compatible. He is currently the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Ray Matheny
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Ray T. Matheny was a professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University . Biography Matheny was born in Los Angeles, California. Matheny was in the United States Air Corps during World War II. He was shot down while flying over Germany in January 1944, and spent over a year as a prisoner at Stalag 17-B near Krems, Austria. After the war he was a mechanic for Western Air Lines and then joined the military again to serve in the Korean War. By the time he began his studies at BYU he was a 32-year-old freshman with a wife and four children.
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Neil L. Whitehead
1956 - 2012 (56 years)
Neil L. Whitehead was an English anthropologist, who is best known for his work on the anthropology of violence, dark shamanism , post-human anthropology and the historical anthropology of South America and the Caribbean. From 1997 to 2007 he was the editor of Ethnohistory, Journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Go to ProfileMarina Elliott is a Canadian biological anthropologist, who is known for being one of the six Underground Astronauts of the Rising Star Expedition. Eliott has a Master's degree and PhD in biological anthropology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Elliott has participated in excavations at Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, and at the northernmost archaeological site in the USA: Nuvuk on Point Barrow, Alaska.
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Christy G. Turner II
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Christy G. Turner II was an American anthropologist known for his research on dental anthropology, perimortem taphonomy, and his theories about the populating of the American continent in three migrating waves from Northeast Asia, which received support from genetic research. Turner's work spanned all the fields of Anthropology , and his fieldwork included exploring the interaction between humans and animals during the Ice Age in Siberia and taking dental casts of indigenous peoples in the Aleutian Islands.
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Marie-Claire Foblets
1959 - Present (65 years)
Marie-Claire, Baroness Foblets is a Belgian lawyer and anthropologist, who is currently Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Her research interests are interculturalism, migration and minorities.
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Jon McKenzie
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jon McKenzie is a performance theorist, media maker, and transdisciplinary researcher and teacher at Cornell University. He is founder of the StudioLab pedagogy and former director of DesignLab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. McKenzie's main interests are in new media, performance theory, and the role of art and technology in cultural research, contemporary processes of globalization, and emerging forms of social activism.
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Caroline Moser
1944 - Present (80 years)
Caroline Olivia Nonesi Moser is an academic specializing in social policy and urban social anthropology. She is primarily known for her field-based approach to research on the informal sector generally - but particularly aspects such as poverty, violence, asset vulnerability and strategies for accumulation in the urban setting. Gender analysis is central to her approach. She has looked at many countries, but the Americas have been her main interest. Countries studied closely include Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Jamaica.
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Juris Zarins
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Juris Zarins was a German-born American archaeologist and professor at Missouri State University, who specialized in the Middle East. Biography An ethnic Latvian, Juris Zarins was born in Germany at the end of the Second World War, on February 17, 1945. His parents emigrated to the United States soon after he was born. He graduated from high school in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1963 and earned a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Nebraska in 1967. He served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam before completing his Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Archaeology at the University of Chicago in 1974.
Go to ProfileSergei A. Kan is an American anthropologist known for his research with and writings on the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska, focusing on the potlatch and on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Tlingit communities.
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Robert Jaulin
1928 - 1996 (68 years)
Robert Jaulin was a French ethnologist. After several journeys to Chad, between 1954 and 1959, among the Sara people, he published in 1967 La Mort Sara in which he exposed the various initiation rites through which he had passed himself, and closely analyzed Sara geomancy. In La Paix blanche , he redefined the notion of ethnocide in relation to the extermination by the Western world of the Bari culture, located between Venezuela and Colombia. If a genocide designs the physical extermination of a people, an ethnocide refers to the extermination of a culture.
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Virginia Abernethy
1934 - Present (90 years)
Virginia Deane Abernethy is an American anthropologist and activist. She is professor emerita of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She has published research on population demography and immigration. She ran for Vice President of the United States in 2012 alongside Merlin Miller for the American Third Position, a party that promotes white nationalism.
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Brian J. McVeigh
1959 - Present (65 years)
Brian J. McVeigh is a scholar of Asia who specializes in Japanese pop art, education, politics, and history. He is also a theorist of cultural psychology and historical changes in human mentality. He received his doctorate in 1991 from Princeton University's Department of Anthropology. While a graduate student, he studied under Julian Jaynes whose influence is apparent in his research. He taught at the University of Arizona until 2013 and is a licensed mental health counselor. Currently he is researching how a Jaynesian psychology can be developed for therapeutic purposes, as seen in his S...
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Eliécer Silva Celis
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Eliécer Silva Celis was a Colombian anthropologist, archaeologist, professor and writer. He is considered a pioneer in the anthropology of Colombia. Silva Celis is known in Colombia for the reconstruction of the Sun Temple, the most important temple of the Muisca religion.
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Kinji Imanishi
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Kinji Imanishi was a Japanese ecologist and anthropologist. He was the founder of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute and, together with Junichiro Itani, is considered one of the founders of Japanese primatology.
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Erika Bourguignon
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Erika Eichhorn Bourguignon was an Austrian-born American anthropologist known primarily for her work on possession trance and other altered states of consciousness. She was “considered the premier anthropological authority on trance, possession, and altered states of consciousness” and "one of the founders of the field of anthropology of consciousness." She was born in Vienna, Austria, but left with her parents in 1938. After receiving a B.A. from Queens College in 1945, she began graduate studies at Northwestern University, working there under Melville J. Herskovits and Alfred Irving Hallowell.
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José María Bermúdez de Castro
1952 - Present (72 years)
José María Bermúdez de Castro Risueño is a Spanish paleoanthropologist. He is known as the first author of the species description of Homo antecessor from the Gran Dolina at the Archaeological site of Atapuerca. On 16 December 2021 he was elected as member of the Real Academia Española, taking the seat K on 9 October 2022.
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Ian Condry
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ian Condry is a cultural anthropologist and author. He graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a B.A. in Government and received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1999. He is currently a Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Sylvia M. Broadbent
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Sylvia Marguerite Broadbent was an American anthropologist and professor, specializing in Amerindian peoples. Early life Broadbent was born in London. She emigrated with her family in the wake of World War II to Carmel, California, in 1947. Broadbent graduated from Carmel High School in 1948 at the age of 16. Broadbent enrolled at University of California, Berkeley, where she was awarded the Horatio Stebbins scholarship as a junior and earned her Associate of Arts degree in anthropology in 1951. She went on to win a Genevieve McEnerny fellowship and receive her bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1952.
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Peter van der Veer
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter van der Veer is a Dutch academic who is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany. He has taught anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the University of Pennsylvania. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe.
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Kenneth M. Weiss
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kenneth M. Weiss is the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Genetics and Science at the Pennsylvania State University. His research centers on the evolution of complex human traits, particularly disease-related and complex morphological traits. He is a Fellow of the AAAS.
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Alisse Waterston
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alisse Waterston is an American professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her work focuses on how systemic violence and inequality influence society.
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Charles Miller Leslie
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Charles Miller Leslie was an American medical anthropologist, who was an avid contributor of published works in his branch of anthropology. Leslie’s career was influential to the shaping of medical anthropology, as his works have inspired other medical anthropologists to further research and popularize anthropological concepts which includes medical pluralism, social relations of therapy management, the relationship between state and medical systems, and health discourse. Leslie’s main focus within medical anthropology has been the study of Asian medical systems, specifically Ayurvedic, Unani...
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Yasushi Watanabe
1967 - Present (57 years)
Yasushi Watanabe is a Japanese anthropologist and a full professor at Keio University. He earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1997 with a dissertation on "Nurturing A Context: The Logic of Individualism and the Negotiation of the Familial Sphere in the United States." After post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, he joined Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance as well as Faculty of Environment and Information Studies in 1999. He attained the rank of full professor in 2005, and is one of Japan's most prominent experts on ...
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Jean Jamin
1945 - 2022 (77 years)
Jean Jamin was a French ethnologist and anthropologist. Director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, he taught ethnology there from 1993 to 2016. He directed the journal L'Homme from 1996 to 2015 and co-founded the journal Gradhiva in 1986 alongside Michel Leiris. In the mid-1990s, he became a specialist in the study of the relationship between anthropology and literature, as well as between opera, jazz, popular music, and folk music.
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Claudio Lomnitz
1957 - Present (67 years)
Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Lomnitz was a Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School University. He served at different points in time as co-director of the University of Chicago's Mexican Studies Program , Director of the University of Chicago's Latin American Studies Program, and Director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He has also taught at University of Chicago, wh...
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Vincenzo Tusa
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Vincenzo Tusa was an Italian archeologist. Biography Vincenzo Tusa initially studied in Mistretta, and later obtained his degree in literature in Catania in 1944, going on to become an assistant in Archeology. In 1947 he was hired by the Superintendency of Antiquities in Bologna and two years later he was transferred to Palermo. In 1963 he assumed the position of Superintendent for the BBCC of western Sicily.
Go to ProfilePeter W. Van Arsdale is an American academic who retired as director of African Initiatives at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, where he also served as Senior Lecturer. He previously served as a senior researcher for eCrossCulture Corporation, based in Colorado. An applied cultural anthropologist, he has worked in E. Africa, S.E. Asia, the Balkans, Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America, emphasizing community water resources, human rights, refugee resettlement, and humanitarian intervention. He is a noted author, journal editor, and former presid...
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Felicitas Goodman
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Felicitas D. Goodman was an American linguist and anthropologist. She was a highly regarded expert in linguistics and anthropology and researched and explored Ecstatic Trance Postures for many years. She studied the phenomenon of "speaking in tongues" in Pentecostal congregations in Mexico. She is the author of such well-received books as Speaking in Tongues and Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences. Her work has been published mostly in the United States and Germany.
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Katharine Luomala
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Katharine Luomala was an American anthropologist known for her studies of comparative mythology in Oceania. Born in Cloquet, Minnesota and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Luomala began her anthropological studies there by working with the Navajo people in the 1930s, chronicling their changing lives. She earned her AB in 1931, MA in 1933, and PhD in 1936.
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Charles M. Hudson
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Charles Melvin Hudson Jr. was an anthropologist, a professor of anthropology and history at the University of Georgia. He was a leading scholar on the history and culture of Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the present-day United States. He is known for his book mapping the expedition of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in the mid-16th century in the Southeast, based on both the expedition's records and sites identified through archeology and anthropology.
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John Collier Jr.
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
John Collier Jr. was an American anthropologist and an early leader in the fields of visual anthropology and applied anthropology. His emphasis on analysis and use of still photographs in ethnography led him to significant contributions in other subfields of anthropology, especially the applied anthropology of education. His book, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method is one of the earliest textbooks in the field and is still in use today. He is also notable as someone who overcame significant learning and hearing impairments to succeed on a larger stage.
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James M. Adovasio
1944 - Present (80 years)
James M. Adovasio is an American archaeologist and one of the foremost experts in perishable artifacts . He was formerly the Provost, Dean of the Zurn School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, Adovasio is best known for his work at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania and for his subsequent role in the "Clovis First" debate. He has published nearly 400 books, monographs, articles, and papers in his field.
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