La Civilizacion Azteca: Origen, Grandeza y Decadencia (Spanish Edition)
(Considerado como un clásico en la bibliografía antropológ...)
Considerado como un clásico en la bibliografía antropológica, el presente trabajo se caracteriza por ser de los más acabados sobre la vida y la pasión del imperio azteca, vistas en cuadro panorámico y desde los ángulos más objetivos que las técnicas arqueológicas e históricas hacían posible.
George Clapp Vaillant was an American anthropologist.
Background
George Clapp Vaillant was born on April 5, 1901, in Boston, Massachusets. He was the only son and second of the three children of George Wightman Vaillant and Alice Vanlora (Clapp) Vaillant.
His father, at that time in the foundry business and later a stockbroker, was a native of Cleveland, Ohio; his mother, of Rockland, Massachussets Forebears on both sides of the family had been early settlers in New England; his paternal great-grandparents were French royalists who had emigrated to the United States after the revolution of 1848.
Education
A Unitarian in religion, George attended Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachussets, and in 1918 entered Harvard, where his interests centered in literature and history.
In the summer of 1919, he accompanied a college friend to Maine on a field expedition headed by the friend's father, the archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead.
While helping excavate an Indian burial site near Waterville, Vaillant unearthed a set of slate spear-points, and on his return to Harvard he began to concentrate in anthropology and archaeology. Graduating cum laude in 1922, he continued his studies at Harvard.
As a student of Prof. Alfred M. Tozzer at Harvard he wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Chronological Significance of Maya Ceramics, " receiving the Ph. D. degree in 1927.
His dissertation, a highly original piece of work, drew together, from both the literature and the museums, the scattered information produced by a half century of exploration, and constructed the first relative chronological framework proposed for the Maya area.
Career
During his years as an undergraduate and graduate student, Vaillant did archaeological field work with Samuel J. Guernsey and Alfred V. Kidder at Indian sites in Arizona and New Mexico, observing at first hand the initial attempts at detailed stratigraphic excavations in the Americas. He also spent one field season with George A. Reisner in Egypt and the Sudan and another with the Carnegie Institution group at Chichen Itza in Yucatun. It was the Mexican research that most attracted him.
In it he demonstrated not only his devotion to scholarship but also his extraordinary feeling for cultural style and his perceptiveness as an archaeologist. In 1927, Vaillant was appointed an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From this post he set out to apply the stratigraphic methods which he had learned from Kidder, using pottery and figurines to determine the sequence of pre-Columbian cultures in the Valley of Mexico.
Over the next three years, he made a series of excavations at Zacatenco, Ticoman, El Arbolillo, and Gualupita which placed Mexican archaeology on a firm scientific footing. His work established that the Archaic or preclassic period, which had first been defined by Manuel Gamio of Mexico and Franz Boas, extended much further back in time and could be subdivided into a series of sequent phases. Within this sequence he demonstrated that an evolution could be traced from one cultural phase to another, ranging from the village farmers of the Archaic period to the urban dwellers of the Teotihuacan civilization.
Mindful of his earlier studies of Maya ceramics, Vaillant also saw the development of the Valley of Mexico as but one part of a larger network of cultural relationships that spread throughout the whole of Middle America. His last excavations in Central Mexico were concerned with the post-Teotihuacan periods and with the Toltecs; in these studies he was able to unite archaeology with history in revealing the story of pre-Columbian Mexico.
Vaillant became associate curator of Mexican archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in 1930 and for the next decade was largely occupied in New York with his curatorial duties, the completion of his Mexican monographs, the preparation of numerous new articles, and part-time teaching duties at Columbia, Yale, and New York universities.
In 1941, he became director of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and moved with his family to Devon, Pennsylvania. He was an able director, but his first love was research the study, he once said, "of the countless permutations of the things made by human hands" and the meaning of these permutations.
When the United States entered World War II, Vaillant tried to obtain military duty but was refused because of his age. He served as senior cultural relations officer in the American embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1943-44. Upon his return the State Department asked him to take a similar post in Spain. He was preparing to leave for this assignment when, for reasons unknown and seemingly without premeditation, he took his own life, at his home in Devon, at the age of forty-four.
Achievements
Vaillant was known for the reconstruction of the early stages of Mexican Culture. His excavations at Zacatenco, Ticomán and El Arbollo established the framework for the Formative or Preclassic period in central Mexico. He was also known for his synthesis of Aztec history, which is also written in Aztecs in Mexico.
He was president of the American Ethnological Society, 1936-39. His major work, The Aztecs of Mexico, was published in 1941 and was the summation of his research career.
Vaillant was a man of consummate charm with a captivating, mercurial intelligence; he was always able to see the old in a new way, stripping away stale concepts and classifications and presenting the conventional in a fresh light. There was little of formality about him and he had a pleasant naivete of manner, yet he was a very complex individual.
Connections
On March 10, 1930, Vaillant married Mary Suzannah Beck, the daughter of an American banker living in Mexico City. They had three children: Joanna Beck, George Eman, and Henry Winchester.
Father:
George Wightman Vaillant
Mother:
Alice Vanlora (Clapp) Vaillant
Wife:
Mary Suzannah Beck
Daughter:
Joanna Beck
Son:
George Eman
Born in 1934.
Is an American psychiatrist and Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of Research for the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital.
