25251 Annapolis St, Dearborn Heights, MI 48125, United States
Freddy studied at Thorne School.
College/University
Gallery of Frederica De Laguna
1933
Houghton St, Holborn, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
Frederica enrolled at the London School of Economics, thinking she might need to get her a Doctor of Philosophy degree there, and she took courses from C. J. Seligman and Malinowski.
Gallery of Frederica De Laguna
1927
101 N Merion Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010, United States
Frederica de Laguna studied at Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in politics and economics and graduated summa cum laude in 1927.
Gallery of Frederica De Laguna
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Frederica de Laguna attended Columbia University and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in anthropology in 1933.
Career
Gallery of Frederica De Laguna
1937
Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna standing and talking at meeting with Kaj Birket-Smith, where they presented a joint paper on Alaskan ethnology.
Gallery of Frederica De Laguna
1949
Frederica De Laguna in Tlingit dress, Angoon, Alaska, 1949.
Houghton St, Holborn, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
Frederica enrolled at the London School of Economics, thinking she might need to get her a Doctor of Philosophy degree there, and she took courses from C. J. Seligman and Malinowski.
(Wallace Howard, A young ethnologist in the field, becomes...)
Wallace Howard, A young ethnologist in the field, becomes involved in a surprising murder mystery in the Alaskan back country. Old Chief Totemoff, one of the few genuine remaining Eskimos, is found brutally murdered outside of his cabin. The old chief's belt of sea-otter skin, with the mysterious lucky amulets in the pockets, was missing.
Travels Among the Dena: Exploring Alaska's Yukon Valley
(Travels Among the Dena chronicles the expedition from its...)
Travels Among the Dena chronicles the expedition from its outfitting in Seattle and the trip by steamer and railway to Fairbanks and Nenana, through an 80-day journey on skiffs down the Tanana and Yukon rivers to Holy Cross near the coast, with side trips on the Koyukuk, Khotol, and Innoko rivers, before a one-day return flight to Fairbanks with pioneer bush pilot Noel Wien.
American Anthropology, 1888-1920: Papers from the American Anthropologist
(The formative years of American anthropology were charact...)
The formative years of American anthropology were characterized by intellectual energy and excitement, the identification of key interpretive issues, and the beginnings of a prodigious amount of fieldwork and recording.
Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna was an anthropologist and archaeologist best known for her work on the history, prehistory and culture of Arctic peoples. Her most famous works are “The Archaeology of Cook Inlet, Alaska”, “The Prehistory of Northern North America as Seen from the Yukon”, “Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit”, and “Travels Among the Dena: Exploring Alaska's Yukon Valley”.
Background
Ethnicity:
De Laguna’s parents, Theodore Lopez de Leo de Laguna and Grace Mead Andrus, were respectively Spanish-American and in Frederica's own words "Connecticut Yankee". On her father's side she also had French, German, and Italian ancestry.
Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on October 3, 1906, the daughter of Grace Mead Andrus and Theodore Lopez de Leo de Laguna, both of whom spent their entire careers teaching philosophy at Bryn Mawr College.
Education
Often sick as a child, de Laguna was home-schooled by her parents until she was 9. Her family upbringing and her parents’ sabbaticals in Europe, where she was exposed to the brightest British and Continental scholars, gave her an uncommon education.
Freddy excelled as a student, reaping prizes and awards at Thorne School and Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in politics and economics and graduated summa cum laude in 1927. Her graduation prize was a prestigious European fellowship, which she postponed in order to do a year of graduate study in anthropology, linguistics, and folklore at Columbia University with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, from it she earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in anthropology in 1933.
Later, in Paris, Frederica attended lectures given by Breuil and Paul Rivet on Paleolithic art and received instruction in archaeological mapping and artifact illustration. She then returned to England and enrolled in the London School of Economics, thinking she might need to get her a Doctor of Philosophy degree there, and she took courses from C. J. Seligman and Malinowski.
While a graduate student, Frederica de Laguna participated in her first expedition in 1929, traveling to an island off the coast of Greenland. She fell in love with the culture and people there and determined to make a career out of studying the native peoples of the far north.
During the 1930s, de Laguna gained experience as an assistant to the field director at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, as well as at the Department of Agriculture, where she worked in the Soil Conservation Service in Arizona and New Mexico. During this period Freddy began an intensive study of northern museum collections, seeking a more rigorous grounding for theories and reconstructions resulting from new research in northern Eurasia and North America.
In 1935 and 1936, de Laguna worked briefly as an Associate Soil Conservationist, surveying economic and social conditions on the Pima Indian Reservation in Arizona. De Laguna began her long career at Bryn Mawr College in 1938, rising to the post of full professor of anthropology in 1955, she also chaired the archaeology department from 1950. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947-1949; 1972-1976 and at the University of California, Berkeley in 1959-1960, 1972-1973.
During World War II, de Laguna took a leave of absence from Bryn Mawr College to serve in the naval reserve from 1942 to 1945. As a member of WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service), she taught naval history and codes and ciphers to women midshipmen at Smith College.
De Laguna returned to Alaska to work in the Northern Tlingit region in 1950. Her ethnological and archaeological study of the Tlingit Indians brought her back several more times throughout the 1950s. Her comprehensive three-volume monograph is still considered the authoritative work on the Yakutat Tlingit. In 1954, de Laguna turned her focus to the Atna Indians of Copper River, returning to the area in 1958, 1960, and 1968.
By the late 1960s, Frederica had founded the anthropology program and served as President of the American Anthropological Association in 1966-67.
After retiring from Bryn Mawr in 1975 under the college's mandatory retirement policy, Freddy continued to teach as an Adjunct Professor in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and was appointed an Honorary Curator in the Penn Museum’s American Section in 1983. In 1986, she served as a volunteer consultant archaeologist and ethnologist for the U. S. Forest Service in Alaska.
By 2001, de Laguna was legally blind. Nevertheless, she continued working on several projects and established the Frederica de Laguna Northern Books Press. Frederica published numerous books on the subject, including “The Archaeology of Cook Inlet, Alaska” in 1934, “The Prehistory of Northern North America as Seen from the Yukon” in 1947, “The Story of a Tlingit Community” in 1960, “Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit” in 1972 and “Travels among the Dena: Exploring Alaska's Yukon Valley” in 2000. Interestingly, de Laguna also wrote two mystery novels set in the American Southwest that contain archaeological themes “The Arrow Points to Murder” that was published in 1937 and “Fog on the Mountain” in 1938, and a book for children titled “The Thousand March: Adventures of an American Boy with Garibaldi” in 1930.
Frederica de Laguna was a member of numerous organizations such as the American Anthropological Association (president 1966-1967), Arctic Institute North America, National Academy of Sciences, Society for American Archaeology (1949-1950), Northern Studies Association (1991-2004), Philadelphia Anthropology Society (1939-1940), Alaska Anthropological Association, Homer (Alaska) Natural History Society, Before Columbus Foundation.
American Anthropological Association
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United States