He encouraged the development of the discipline of anthropology in Germany by helping to found the National Anthropological Association (1870) at the same time as Germany unified politically and the Berlin Museum für Volkstrachten was founded (1888). He also contibuted to the development of the collections of the Berlin Museum für Volkerkunde (Berlin Museum of Folk Studies) and edited a national journal of ethnology. He excavated in Pomerania and took an interest in the work of heinrich schliemann, traveling to Hisarlik in turkey in 1879 to advise Schliemann on the excavating.

Unlike his student Ernst Haeckel, Virchow was not a Darwinist. He was involved in debates about developments in human paleontology, and he regarded the first Neanderthal discovery at the Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley in Germany as a pathological specimen and not a new species of hominid. He also refused to accept Dutch paleontologist eugene dubois’s discovery of a fossil hominid in Java as evidence of human evolution.

Tim Murray

See also

Kossinna, Gustaf

References

Ackerknecht, E. H. 1953. Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Virú Valley

The small Virú Valley on the coast of peru was the site of a landmark study in the development of archaeological survey methodology. Research in the valley began in 1946 with the cooperation of U.S. and Peruvian scholars, but it was the innovative work of gordon willey in the field of settlement archaeology that lifted the program from being yet another site survey. Although Willey (who was much influenced by anthropologist julian steward) was certainly interested in exploring the ecology of 1,500 years of human settlement in the region, he chose to do so against a background of a detailed analysis of the location and distribution of sites within the region. Using both surface and subsurface survey techniques, Willey was able to chart the distribution of sites in the region over time, and he demonstrated the fact that the environmental (both natural and cultural) context of human settlement was also time-dependent and not simply “read off” from surface indications.

Tim Murray

References

Billman, B., and G. Feinman. 1999. Settlement Pattern Studies in the Americas: Fifty Years since Virú. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Willey, Gordon, ed. 1974. Archaeological Researches in Retrospect. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.