Background
Richard Stockton MacNeish was born on April 29, 1918, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Harris Franklin and Elizabeth (Stockton) MacNeish.
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
In 1940, MacNeish received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, a Master of Arts in 1944, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1949.
Richard Stockton MacNeish was born on April 29, 1918, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Harris Franklin and Elizabeth (Stockton) MacNeish.
In 1940, MacNeish received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, a Master of Arts in 1944, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1949.
Upon graduation, MacNeish was appointed senior archaeologist at the National Museum of Canada. Beginning in 1936 his archaeological fieldwork took him from New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, and California in the U.S., to Manitoba, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories of Canada, as well as to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Peru, and China. In 1946 James B. Griffin invited MacNeish to spend a year at the University of Michigan to “settle the problem of Iroquois origins.”
A similar investigation of the immigration and cultural contact led to MacNeish’s greatest discoveries. The decade of the 1940s was an era when diffusionists sought to explain the Mound Builders of the Southeast United States in terms of migrations from Mesoamerica. Fay-Cooper Cole decided that MacNeish should investigate this explanation for his Ph.D. thesis, so in 1945 he sent Scotty to survey in southern Texas and northern Tamaulipas. MacNeish found no evidence of migration by Mexican groups into Texas, but he did find five intriguing rock shelters in the Cañon Diablo of the Sierra de Tamaulipas. Protected from rain by the cliffs above and desiccated by high evapotranspiration, the caves were chock-full of prehistoric plant remains, twine, basketry, and other normally perishable artifacts.
In retrospect, it seems surprising that it took MacNeish two years to raise enough funds to dig these caves, which were destined to change the course of New World prehistory. Finally, in 1948 a grant from the Viking Fund of the Wenner-Gren Foundation got him back to Tamaulipas for an eight-month season. In January 1949 his crew chief found three tiny, early prehistoric maize cobs at La Perra Cave.
Richard then moved on to the newly established Department of Archaeology at the University of Calgary, where he served as chair from 1964 to 1968. For the next fourteen years, he was director of the Robert S. Peabody Museum at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, out of which he conducted some of his best-known research. He was outspoken in advocating that archaeology should be treated as an independent scientific discipline, separate from anthropology, as is traditional at most U.S. universities. As such, he was appointed a Research Professor at Boston University’s Department of Archaeology from its founding in 1982 until 1986, when he created the Andover Foundation for Archaeological Research (AFAR), whose generous patrons supported his last years of fieldwork.
During the 1990s MacNeish found remnants of cultivated rice paddies that were 9,000 years old along the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) basin. MacNeish’s 1992 discovery in New Mexico of human fingerprints on human-made hearths that were believed as old as 38,000 years led him to discredit a widely held theory that humans first set foot in the Americas about 12,000 years ago by crossing the Bering land bridge from Asia, a hypothesis that raised the hackles of proponents of that theory.
On January 16, 2001, during a tour of Maya ruins in Belize, one of archaeology’s most prolific and colorful practitioners was fatally injured in the crash of his rental car. Having endured for 82 years despite cancer, heart attacks, a near-drowning in the Andes, and double bypass surgery, the seemingly indestructible Scotty MacNeish was taken from us by accident.
As one of the first American archaeologists invited to work in China after the recent warming of cultural relationships with the U.S., he found the remains of rice thought to be 9,000 years old, which would mark the middle Yangtze River region as the locus of its initial domestication.
For MacNeish, the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to a settled, agricultural way of life represented a particularly fascinating era in human cultural evolution, and some of his most enduring research efforts were applied to studying how and why it occurred. His large-scale reconnaissance and excavation project in Tehuacán, carried out between 1960 and 1965 and published with his collaborators in an exhaustive five-volume edited series, stands as a groundbreaking monument to interdisciplinary archaeological research. Subsequently, he attempted to apply the model of agricultural evolution he developed at Tehuacán to highland Peru and lowland Belize, as well as to the birth of rice agriculture in China.
Another of MacNeish’s longstanding interests involved the question of when the first humans came to inhabit the Americas. He was a firm believer in an early entry into the New World, a conviction that engendered heated controversy among the archaeological orthodoxy which argued for the 12,000-year-old Clovis culture as the earliest. Currently, the weight of evidence favors MacNeish’s position, although his claim that a clay fragment from his 1990 excavation at Pendejo Cave, near Orogrande, New Mexico, is impressed with a 38,000-year-old human hand-print has been widely questioned. MacNeish also stressed the timely dissemination of results, in his case manifested in many articles, reports, lectures, and several books.
Appointed to the United States President Advisory Committee on Cultural Properties, since 1992. With Army of the United States, 1942-1943. Member Society American Archaeology (executive council), National Academy Sciences, British Academy, Society American Archaeology (president 1971-1972), American Anthropological Association (AlfredVincent Kidder award 1971), Society for Professional Archaeologists (emerituslife), Sigma Psi, Alpha Tau Omega.
Above all MacNeish considered himself a « dirt archaeologist » Unencumbered for most of his career with the constraints of teaching and other academic obligations, he prided himself at having spent over 6,000 days in the field.
Richard's presence at professional meetings was ubiquitous. Typically, he could be found at the bar, surrounded by colleagues and students, in heated debate over one of his theoretical positions or data interpretations. Although always appearing to relish a good fight in the intellectual ring (while a student at Colgate he also won a Golden Gloves boxing championship), he was not one to harbor a grudge and, typical of his evenhandedness, provided opportunities in his Tehuacán monograph for dissenting interpretations.
MacNeish’s first marriage to the anthropologist, June Helm, ended in divorce, but they remained good friends afterwards. On September 26, 1963, MacNeish married Phyllis Diana Walter. They had two children: Richard Roderick and Alexander Stockton.