Matthew Stirling
Matthew Williams Stirling (August 28, 1896 – January 23, 1975)
Stirling began his career with extensive ethnological work in the United States,
Early life and work
Matthew was born in Salinas, California, where his father managed the Southern Pacific Milling Company. Most of his childhood days were spent on his grandfather's ranch where he first developed an interest in antiquity, collecting arrowheads and researching artefacts.
Stirling majored in
Stirling was a teaching fellow at the University of California during 1920–21. He then joined the Smithsonian Institution, as a museum aide and assistant curator in its Division of Ethnology at the National Museum. He worked there until 1925. He located several more Olmec pieces in the museum. During this period, he also obtained his master's degree in Anthropology from the George Washington University. He was later, in 1943, to receive a Doctorate in Science from Tampa University.
He excavated on
He returned to take over as chief of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology in 1928. He retained the position until 1957, his title changing to director in 1947. He went to Ecuador in 1931–32, conducting ethnological studies of the
.In 1931, he met Marion Illig (1911–2001), who took a job as his secretary.[3] They married on December 11, 1933 and worked together for the next forty-two years, until his death. She accompanied him on all but one of his subsequent archaeological expeditions. They had a son and a daughter.[3][2][4] Matthew Stirling wrote that Marion was his "co-explorer, co-author and general co-ordinator."[3]
Stirling was intrigued by Marshall Saville's two 1929 reports, Votive Axes from Ancient Mexico. Subsequent discussions with Saville launched Stirling into a phase of his career which would be focused on what was then beginning to be called Olmec culture.
The Olmec
The Olmec were an ancient Pre-Columbian people living in south-central Mexico, in the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco, from about 1200 BCE to 400 BCE. They are claimed by many to be the mother culture of every primary element common to later Mesoamerican civilizations.
The name "Olmec" means "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. It was the Aztec name for the people who lived in this area at the time of Aztec dominance, referring to them as those who supplied the rubber balls used for games. Early modern explorers applied the name "Olmec" to ruins and art from this area before it was understood that these had been already abandoned more than a thousand years before the time of the people the Aztecs knew as the "Olmec".
Stirling and history of the Olmecs
By 1929, Stirling had begun suspecting that the artifacts emerging out of Mexico belonged to a time much earlier than attributed to the Olmecs. From the BAE, he directed excavations in fringes of the area thought to be Maya. Matthew and Marion Stirling first visited Tres Zapotes in 1938.[3][2] They travelled to the western margin and concentrated on the Tres Zapotes site. He noted the position of the colossal head – surrounded by four mounds – and the presence of a vast mound group in the area. He interested the National Geographic Society enough to be granted funds for excavation. This began a sixteen-year association with the site.
During excavations there in 1939, they discovered
They were proven correct in 1970, when the top half of
He also led the first of several expeditions to San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán (1938), La Venta (1939–40) and Cerro de las Mesas (1940–41). In 1941, Stirling unearthed a large carved stone monument in Izapa, which he labeled Stela 5.
Stirling was unable to return to La Venta until 1942, due to
It would be nearly 15 years before radiocarbon dating finally confirmed that the Olmec pre-dated the Maya. The Olmec culture is generally considered to have lasted from 1400 BCE until 400 BCE.
Other work
Stirling began searching for links between Mesoamerican and South American cultures in Panama, Ecuador, and Costa Rica from 1948 to 1954. He was also the chief organizer of the seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians.
He conducted excavations in the Linea Vieja lowlands of Costa Rica in the 1960s. Concentrating on tombs, he dug at five sites between Siquirres and Guapiles, and published a series of C- 14 dates ranging from 1440 to 1470 CE, and arranged much of the pottery excavated in an approximate chronological sequence.
In the Sierra de Ameca between Ahualulco de Mercado and Ameca, Jalisco, a large number of stone spheres, many of which are almost perfectly spherical, can be found. Their generally spherical shape led people to suspect they were manmade stone balls, called petrospheres, created by an unknown culture. In 1967, Stirling examined these stone spheres in the field. As a result of this examination, he and his colleagues hypothesized that they were of geological origin. A later expedition and subsequent petrographic and other laboratory analyses of samples of the stone balls confirmed this suspicion. Their interpretation of the data collected in both field and laboratory is that these stone balls were formed by high temperature nucleation of glassy material within an ashfall tuff, as a result of tertiary volcanism.[5]
Other positions held
Stirling was president of the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1934–1935 and vice president of the American Anthropological Association in 1935–36. He received the National Geographic Society's Franklyn L. Burr Award for meritorious service in 1939, 1941 (shared with his wife Marion) and 1958. He was also on the Ethnographic Board, which was the Smithsonian's effort to make its scientific research available to the military agencies during World War II.
After his retirement, Stirling was a Smithsonian research associate, a National Park Service collaborator, and member of the National Geographic Committee on Research and Exploration.
Stirling died in 1975, aged 78, after a period of illness associated with cancer.
Book collection
Marion Stirling donated around 5000 volumes from the Stirlings' library to the Boundary End Archaeology Research Center (earlier the Center for Maya Research).[6] They include a collection of scholarly pamphlets and reprints from the mid-19th century on, complete runs of the American Anthropologist (1881– ); American Antiquity (1935– ), Bulletins 1–200 and Annual Reports 1–48 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and all the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History.
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
The museum, in the University of California, Berkeley, displays 165 Dyak and Papuan objects, including steel axes, basketry, arrows and wooden boxes, from Borneo, donated by Stirling.
Films by Stirling
Preserved at the
- Exploring Hidden Mexico – Documents excavations at La Venta and Cerro de las Mesas.
- Hunting Prehistory on Panama’s Unknown North Coast – Documents the 1952 excavations of sites in Northern Panama.
- Aboriginal Darien : Past and Present – Documents the flora, fauna and ethnography of parts of Panama through a journey in 1954.
- On the Trail of Prehistoric America – Documents an Ecuador expedition in 1957, along with brief ethnographic footage of the Colorado Indians.
- Mexico in Fiesta Masks
- Uncovering an Ancient Mexican Temple
- Exploring Panama’s Prehistoric Past
- Uncovering Mexico’s Forgotten Treasures
Bibliography
- America's First Settlers, the Indians National Geographic, 1937
- Great Stone Faces of the Mexican Jungle National Geographic, 1940
- An Initial Series from Tres Zapotes Mexican Archaeology Series, National Geographic, 1942
- Origin myth of Acoma and other records BAE Bulletin 135, 1942
- Finding Jewels of Jade in a Mexican Swamp (with Marion Stirling) National Geographic, 1942
- La Venta’s Green Stone Tigers National Geographic, 1943
- Stone Monuments of Southern Mexico BAE Bulletin 138, 1943
- Indians of the Southeastern United States National Geographic, 1946
- On the Trail of La Venta Man National Geographic, 1947
- Haunting Heart of the Everglades/Indians of the Far West (with A. H. Brown) National Geographic, 1948
- Stone Monuments of the Río Chiquito BAE Bulletin 157, 1955
- Indians of the Americas National Geographic Society, 1955
- The use of the atlatl on Lake Patzcuaro, Michoacan BAE Bulletin 173, 1960
- Electronics and Archaeology (with F. Rainey and M. W. Stirling Jr) Expedition Magazine, 1960
- Monumental Sculpture of Southern Veracruz and Tabasco Handbook of Middle American Indians, 1965
- Early History of the Olmec Problem Dumbarton Oaks Conference on the Olmec, 1967
- Solving the mystery of Mexico's Great Stone Spheres National Geographic, 1969
- Historical and ethnographical material on the Jivaro Indians BAE Bulletin 117
- An archeological reconnaissance in Southeastern Mexico BAE Bulletin 164
- Tarquí, an early site in Manabí Province, Ecuador (with Marion Stirling) BAE Bulletin 186
- Archaeological notes on Almirante Bay, Panama (with Marion Stirling) BAE Bulletin 191
- Archaeology of Taboga, Urabá, and Taboguilla Islands, Panama (with Marion Stirling) BAE Bulletin 191
- El Limón, an early tomb site in Coclé Province Panama (with Marion Stirling) BAE Bulletin 191
Notes
- ^ Date information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF). Retrieved on 2008-05-15.
- ^ a b c d "Matthew Williams Stirling and Marion Stirling Pugh papers". Smithsonian Institution.
The Matthew Williams Stirling and Marion Stirling Pugh papers, 1876-2004 (bulk 1921-1975), document the professional and personal lives of Matthew Stirling, Smithsonian archaeologist and Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1928-1957), and his wife and constant collaborator, Marion Stirling Pugh.
- ^ a b c d e Conroy, Sarah Booth (July 8, 1996). "ARCHAEOLOGIST MARION PUGH, DIGGING UP MEMORIES". The Washington Post. Retrieved 4 February 2020.
- ^ "Marion Stirling Pugh, 89". The Washington Post. May 11, 2001. Retrieved 4 February 2020.
- ^ Stirling, M.W., 1969, An Occurrence of Great Stone Spheres in Jalisco State, Mexico. National Geographic Research Reports. v. 7, pp. 283–286.
- ^ Stuart, George. "Boundary End Archaeology Research Center". Retrieved 2006-08-29.