In late 1841, Stephens and Catherwood returned to Uxmal to finish their work by taking new daguerreotypes, and they then visited the site of chichén itzá. Once again, they had to clear a site in order to survey it. After Chichén Itzá it was on to Cozumel and Tulum before returning to New York where the two men published another book, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (1843).

Stephens became the promoter and director of a steamship company and then became involved in building railways. Between 1849 and 1851 he helped to survey and prepare for the construction of the Panama railway, where the malaria he had caught during his earlier explorations flared up again and forced him to return in 1852 to New York City, where he died.

Tim Murray

Steward, Julian

(1902–1972)

Born in Washington, D.C., Julian Steward studied zoology and geology at Cornell University. He completed a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1929 at the University of California, Berkeley, and then worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the smithsonian institution.

Steward began his ethnographic career among the western Shoshone Indians, one of the most simple of societies, and moved on to study complex cultures such as those in Puerto Rico. By the end of his career he was managing a cross-cultural, worldwide inquiry into the modernization of peasant societies. In 1943, he became director of the Smithsonian’s Institute of Social Anthropology; from 1946 to 1952, he was professor of anthropology at Columbia University; and from 1952 until he retired in 1970, he was professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois.

Steward is best known for his theories about “cultural ecology,” which held that a society’s environmental resources and available technology determine the kinds of labor used by them and, consequently, inform their entire social system—an ecological, neo-evolutionist, and materialist view of human behavior. He formulated a theory of “multilinear evolution,” which described the ways in which societies progress toward greater complexity.

He was one of the few ethnologists of his time who was interested in archaeological data and its potential for contributing to the study of human behavior over long periods of time, and he had a great impact on the development of archaeology in the United States after World War II. He taught and supported a number of archaeologists, such as robert braidwood and Richard MacNeish, who undertook pioneering multidisciplinary research programs into the origins of food production in the Near East and mesoamerica. And he inspired many others, such as gordon willey, who initiated the use of settlement archaeology in the virú valley in peru.

Tim Murray

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

References

Harris, M. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York: Crowell.

Stična

Stična (or Vir pri Sticni or Stiski cvinger, as it is also called) is an early–Iron Age site in lower Carniola, in slovenia, a center for the Dolenjska (lower Carniola) group of the Hallstatt culture. The hill-fort type of settlement covers an area of more than 21 hectares.

The settlement was intensively excavated between 1967 and 1974 by stane gabrovec and several other collaborators. The excavations were limited to the hill-fort ramparts and revealed three main early–Iron Age occupation phases (contemporary with the nearby barrow cemetery) and a late–la tène phase. The cemetery was partly excavated during the twentieth century by the duchess of Mecklenburg (1905–1914), rajko lozar (1936), jožef kastelic (1946, 1952– 1953), and Gabrovec (1960–1964).

The burial rites are almost exclusively inhumations in earthen barrows. Approximately 125 barrows were documented in an area approximately 15 to 50 meters in diameter. The number of inhumations in a barrow varies from a few graves (e.g., in Mecklenburg’s Glogovica barrow, 3 graves) to more than 150 graves (e.g., barrow 48 has 183 graves). On average there are 20–30 graves per barrow.