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with and supervise the painstaking analysis required by every find at every excavation.
After Louis Leakey’s death in 1972 Mary began to work at the Pliocene site of laetoli, southeast of Olduvai. From 1974 to 1981 she and her collaborators found numbers of new mammalian species, among which, dated to about 3.7 million years ago, were the hominid fossils of what was called Australopithecus afarensis. In 1976 a trail of fossil animal footprints were found, some of which were hominid, and in 1978 two long trails of fossil hominid footprints were uncovered and dated to about 3.5 million years ago. These footprints confirmed what had only been inferred from skeletal remains, that the small-brained Australopithecus hominids were bipedal.
Mary Leakey also contributed to the practice of field archaeology through her paleo-environmental “living floor” work and through her development of field museums, where finds were left in-situ. She also conducted a major study of rock art at Kondoa-rangi in Tanzania, published in her book Africa’s Vanishing Art: the Rock Paintings of Tanzania (1951).
See also
Dart, Raymond Arthur; Africa, East, Prehistory; Africa, South, Prehistory
References
Morrell, V. 1995. Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Excavated by Serbian archaeologist Dragoslav Srejovic’ between 1967 and 1971, Lepinski Vir lies in the Djerdap Gorge of the Danube River in Serbia. Lepinski Vir has an interesting and long sequence of occupations from hunter-gathering/foraging/agricultural societies. Although there are disagreements about the dating of the site, it is generally believed that it was occupied around 7000 b.c. by people foraging in the forests for game and in the river for fish, and that by 5000 b.c., the occupants of the site were managing cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats. Lepinski Vir is also notable for the remains of houses found on the site and the presence of limestone sculptures found in the remains of the houses. There is some speculation that the site was in fact occupied by the local farming Starcero cultures.
(1810–1884)
Lepsius was born in Germany and educated at the universities of Leipzig, Gottingen, and Berlin. After completing his doctorate in Classical archaeology in 1833 Lepsius went to Paris to further his studies. jean françois champollion’s new ancient Egyptian grammar had just been published and Lepsius became interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics. He supported and defended Champollion’s system of decipherment and he contributed to further understanding of ancient Egyptian through his recognition of syllabic signs and their similarities to Coptic.
Lepsius spent many years visiting the European collections of Egyptian antiquities before traveling to Egypt in 1842 with the Prussian Expedition (1842–1845). He was accompanied by a number of Prussian scholars and skilled draftsmen to survey and record monuments and collect antiquities. The expedition sent back more than 15,000 artifacts, papyri, and plaster casts, drawings, plans, and maps to Prussia. Between 1849 and 1859 Lepsius published Monuments in Egypt and Ethiopia, the results of the expedition, in twelve folio volumes. The Swiss Egyptologist edouard naville completed another five volumes in the series after Lepsius’s death.
In 1865 Lepsius became keeper of the Egyptian collections in the Berlin Museum. He returned to Egypt the following year to record the monuments of the eastern Delta and the Suez regions, during which he discovered Tanis, the capital of Egypt during the twenty-first dynasty. Here he excavated the Canopus Decree, a useful linguistic adjunct that helped to prove that the Rosetta Stone was translated correctly. Lepsius edited the principal German journal of Egyptology, which is still published today, for over twenty years and completed over 142 publications on ancient Egypt. His last visit to Egypt was for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
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