John Lawrence Angel

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Lucille St. Hoyme (1924–2001), John Lawrence Angel, and Thomas Dale Stewart hold a seventeen and one half foot long beard found in a North Dakota attic (1967).

John Lawrence Angel (1915–1986) was a British-American

paleodemography
.

Education

His mother, Elizabeth, was an American

Earnest A. Hooton. Hooton had a particular influence on Angel and arranged for him to conduct field work in Greece
early in his career as a graduate student. While in Greece he collected data on archaeological human remains from various sites. These data became the basis of his dissertation and he received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1942.

Career

After completing his degree he taught briefly at the

Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he taught and conducted research until his appointment in 1962 as Curator of Physical (Biological) Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
.

During his career at the Smithsonian he broadened his research emphasis to include forensic anthropology. He was a consultant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation but also assisted many regional police units in identifying human remains from forensic cases. Angel had a major influence on research in biological anthropology in emphasizing the importance of combining cultural and biological data in interpreting human skeletal samples from past human groups. He worked closely with archaeologists in his effort to reconstruct what he called the social biology of archaeological human populations. Although Greece remained the focus of much of his research throughout his life he extended this focus to include archaeological human remains from Turkey. His research on human skeletal paleopathology laid the groundwork for much of the research being conducted in that field of research today.

Death

Angel contracted

coronary bypass surgery
in 1982 and died of that disease in 1986. Throughout his declining health he remained active and completed work on a forensic case shortly before his death.

References

  • Buikstra, Jane E. (1990). "A Life in Science: Papers in Honor of J. Lawrence Angel". Center for American Archeology. Archived from the original on 2009-11-01.
  • Yaşar İşcan, M, John Lawrence Angel, Ph.D., 1915–1986, a Tribute and Remembrance, Journal of Forensic Sciences (JOFS) Volume 32, Issue 5 (September 1987).
  • Ortner, Donald J. and Jennifer O. Kelley "J. Lawrence Angel (1915-1986). American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 145–148 (March 1988).
  • Redman, Samuel. Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2016.

External links

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