Joseph Birdsell
Joseph Birdsell | |
---|---|
Born | Joseph Benjamin Birdsell March 30, 1908 |
Died | March 5, 1994 | (aged 85)
Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University |
Occupation | anthropologist |
Known for | study of Aboriginal Australians |
Notable work | The Birdsell model |
Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (1946) |
Joseph Benjamin Birdsell (March 30, 1908 – March 5, 1994) of
Early life
Born in South Bend, Indiana, Birdsell earned his degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.[1]
Australian work
After meeting Australian anthropologist
Together with Tindale, in field-work over 1938–39 in the Cairns rainforest, he concluded that the Indigenous "pygmy" peoples there, which they collectively called Barrineans, belonged to a group that were genetically distinct from the majority of Australian Aboriginal peoples, perhaps related to the Aboriginal Tasmanians.[6] A photo exists showing Birdsell, (height 6 feet 1 inch), with a 24-year-old male of the Gungganyji tribe (4 feet, 6 inches), taken at the Mona Mona Mission, near Kuranda[4] (This hypothesis was later debunked, although the myth persists among some even today.[7])
Later career
He completed his doctoral degree at Harvard in 1941.[2]
After teaching briefly at the
He was awarded a
Death and legacy
He died on March 5, 1994, in
The Birdsell model
Early scholars had tended to view the peopling of Australia as the result of three separate waves of immigration, with distinct human types. Birdsell took a biological approach and did extensive work on
In his seminal paper of 1977, "The recalibration of a paradigm for the first peopling of Greater Australia", he examined the standard models for the origins of Aboriginal Australians regarding how human migration from Southeast Asia could cross the Sahul barrier. Birdsell theorized a distinctive model challenging the accepted view, outlining three variants for a northerly model positing a route through Sulawesi, and two for a conduit to the southern continent via Timor.[13]
Publications
His publications included:
- Birdsell, Joseph, B. (1986). "Some predictions for the Pleistocene based on equilibrium systems among recent hunter gatherers". In Lee, Richard & Irven DeVore (ed.). Man the Hunter. Aldine Publishing Co. p. 239.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Birdsell, Joseph 1987. Some reflections on fifty years in biological anthropology in Annual Review of Anthropology 16(1):1-12.
- Norman B. Tindale and Joseph B. Birdsell, "Results of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition, 1938-1939: Tasmanoid Tribes in North Queensland", Records of the South Australian Museum, 7 (1), 1941-3, pp 1–9
- Tindale and Birdsell, "Tasmanoid Tribes in North Queensland"
- Joseph Birdsell, "A preliminary report on the trihybrid origin of the Australian aborigines", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 28 (3), 1941, p 6
- J. B. Birdsell, "Preliminary data on the trihybrid origin of the Australian Aborigines", Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, 2 (2), 1967, pp 100–55;
- Joseph B. Birdsell, "Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia", Oxford University Press, New York, 1993. (Review)
- J. B. Birdsell and W. Boyd, "Blood groups in the Australian Aborigines", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 27, 1940, pp 69–90;
- Joseph Birdsell, "Results of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition, 1938-39: The racial origins of the extinct Tasmanians", Records of the Queen Victoria Museum, II (3), 1949
- J. B. Birdsell, "Human Evolution: An Introduction to the New Physical Anthropology", Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1972) (Amazon, Google books)
- J. B. Birdsell, Stanley M. Garn, "Races: a Study of Race formation in Man" (1950)
See also
Notes
Citations
- ^ a b c d LAT 1994.
- ^ a b c Mai 1994.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-920899-42-4.
- ^ a b Pannell 2009, p. 63.
- ^ Jones, Philip G. (December 1995). "Norman B. Tindale - 12 October 1900 – 19 November 1993 - An Obituary". Records of the South Australian Museum. South Australian Museum. pp. 159–176.
- ^ Dixon 2011, p. 7.
- ^ "Dismantling the Australian pygmy people myth". The Australian Museum. Retrieved June 16, 2020.
- ^ McNiven & Russell 2005, p. 121.
- ^ Clark 1979, pp. 3–4.
- ^ Windschuttle & Gittin 2002.
- ^ McNiven & Russell 2005, p. 90.
- ^ McNiven & Russell 2005, p. 92.
- ^ Allen & O'Connell 2008, pp. 33–34.
Sources
- Allen, Jim; O'Connell, James F. (2008). "Getting from Sunda to Sahel". In Clark, Geoffrey Richard; O'Connor, Sue; Leach, Bryan Foss (eds.). Islands of Inquiry: Colonisation, Seafaring and the Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes. ISBN 978-1-921-31390-5.
- ISBN 978-0-522-84165-7.
- ISBN 978-1-108-02504-1.
- "Joseph Birdsell; UCLA Anthropologist Studied Aborigines". Los Angeles Times. April 9, 1994.
- Mai, Larry L. (1994). Obituary: Joseph Benjamin Birdsell. University of California, Los Angeles.
- McNiven, Ian J.; Russell, Lynette (2005). Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology. ISBN 978-0-759-10907-0.
- Pannell, Sandra (2009). "Aboriginal Cultures in the Wet Tropics". In Stork, Nigel; Turton, Stephen M. (eds.). Living in a Dynamic Tropical Forest Landscape. ISBN 978-1-444-30033-8.
- Windschuttle, Keith; Gittin, Tom (June 2002). "The extinction of the Australian pygmies". Quadrant.