Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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HALLAM LEONARD MOVIUS JR.
HALLAM LEONARD MOVIUS JR.
Pages 242-261
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From page 242... ...
.Photograph courtesy Harvard News Office
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From page 243... ...
MOVIUS JR. WAS A Palaeolithic archaeologist, a specialist in the interpretation of human behavior and its environmental context during the latter part of the Old Stone Age, toward the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.1 With broad training and varied field experience in Europe, the Near East, and Southeast Asia, he became in the years after World War II the preeminent spokesman for Palaeolithic archaeology in the United States.
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From page 244... ...
sites in France to which Movius was introduced that summer included ones in Les Eyzies and elsewhere in the Vézère Valley of the Dordogne region; it was to Les Eyzies that he returned to start major field work following World War II. At the end of the American School's study tour in 1931, Movius stayed on in Czechoslovakia to excavate briefly with the Harvard-Penn expedition and then joined MacCurdy on a month-long archaeological reconnaissance trip through Yugoslavia.
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From page 245... ...
This new project was one part of a large interdisciplinary program, the Harvard Irish Survey, which included physical anthropologists (Earnest Hooton, C Wesley Dupertius)
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From page 246... ...
. The main goal of the expedition was to survey the geology, paleontology, and Stone Age archaeology of the Irrawady Valley in Burma and to relate the anticipated new information to the somewhat better known sequences of India, China, and Java.3 The expedition was directed by geologist Helmut de Terra (Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and Carnegie Institution of Washington)
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From page 247... ...
, were pioneering contributions to knowledge of an area of the world whose Stone Age prehistory was virtually unknown. A general conclusion based on the wealth of specific data gathered was that during much of the Early Stone Age the archaeological materials in eastern and southeastern Asia were fundamentally different from those in western Asia, Europe, and Africa.
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From page 248... ...
In his preface to The Irish Stone Age, which was published in 1942, Movius expressed his grateful admiration of the editorial staff, which "carried on with the job" despite the loss of proofs and other materials "due to enemy action." As of 1939 Movius held the title of assistant curator of Palaeolithic archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum, but it was not obvious where his career would go from there. After Hallam's death, Nancy told me that there was a period when he thought that a career in Old World prehistory might not be possible (with many of the areas of interest to him occupied by invading armies)
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From page 249... ...
He served in the Mediterranean theater, primarily in southern Italy, for over three years. He was an intelligence officer attached to a unit whose duties included assessing bombing damage inflicted on Axis industrial plants, tracking the extent to which damage from previous raids was being repaired, and recommending the scheduling of future bombing raids such that the fruitless expenditure of enemy resources would be maximized.
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From page 250... ...
exploring its potential applications in Palaeolithic archaeology, a topic he followed up in the early 1960s with major critical reviews of radiocarbon dates on Upper Palaeolithic sites in Central and Western Europe (1960, 1963)
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From page 251... ...
These excellent examples of Palaeolithic mobiliary art make La Colombière one of the important sites of this age in eastern France. In the summer of 1949, with the archaeological part of the fieldwork at La Colombière having been completed, Movius spent several months in France, mostly in the Dordogne region of the southwest, talking with local prehistorians and looking for a good Upper Palaeolithic site at which to start a major new excavation.
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From page 252... ...
Hallam Movius's Abri Pataud project made several kinds of contributions to Palaeolithic archaeology and European prehistory. First, and most obviously, it answered substantive technical questions about the sequence and radiocarbon dating of Upper Palaeolithic archaeological cultures in southwestern France, a classic region for the understanding of human behavior at the end of the Ice Age.
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From page 253... ...
Movius had benefited from such opportunities in the 1930s as a student with the American School of Prehistoric Research, and he considered them valuable for his own students. Fifth, Movius and several of his graduate students working at the Abri Pataud developed new techniques of subtypological "attribute analysis" for the study of Upper Palaeolithic chipped lithic tools (1969, 1970, 1971)
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From page 254... ...
The site report on the Abri Pataud was planned as a multivolume monograph series to be published by Harvard's Peabody Museum as bulletins of the American School of Prehistoric Research. Movius saw the first two volumes through to publication, in 1975 and 1977, but a series of increasingly debilitating health problems made it more and more difficult for him to take an active part in the publication program.
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From page 255... ...
Vital contributions to knowledge can and often do have the most unlikely origins, quite unrelated to the prominence or professional affiliations of their proponents. In these ways and others, Hallam Movius fulfilled the expectations one has of an eminent university professor, excelling in both scholarly research and teaching.
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From page 256... ...
It began about 2.5 million years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. With this temporal span, the Palaeolithic extended from the end of the Pliocene Epoch to the end of the Pleistocene Epoch of the geologic time scale.
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From page 257... ...
Assemblages and the Noaillian Culture in Western Europe. Harvard University, Peabody Museum, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 37, 1985.
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From page 258... ...
1949 [1] Lower Palaeolithic archaeology in southern Asia and the Far East.
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From page 259... ...
. Harvard University, Peabody Museum, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bulletin 19.
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From page 260... ...
Clay. The Analysis of Certain Major Classes of Upper Palaeolithic Tools, Harvard University, Peabody Museum, American School of Prehistoric Research, Bul letin 26.
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