Anthropologist Anna Roosevelt Usually Manages to Dig Up a Furor

When she was 28, Anna Roosevelt flew to a remote Venezuelan village with a worried sister, a sack full of shovels and a government permit to dig.

The great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt was looking for carbonized corn. She found it “like crazy”--along with her niche as an anthropologist who created waves in her field.

The ancient corn that she discovered 12 years ago helped her prove South American Indians lived in structured societies that cultivated the land back in 800 BC, countering the established belief that early Indians were root-eating primitives waiting to be civilized by European influence.

“Some people were horrified, some guy threatened to sue,” she reminisced recently of the anthropological furor caused by the publication of her book, “Parmana,” in 1980.

“I was a little scarred by the experience, but, well . . .,” she trailed off. It didn’t stop her.

Roosevelt, 40, is a leading authority on prehistoric Indians. A loner in her field, Roosevelt has secured $361,800 worth of grants from a string of foundations to fund her digs, the most recent on the wild and remote Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil.

“It’s a young field and she is a pioneer,” Irving Rouse, professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale University, said of Roosevelt’s work on ancient South American Indians. “She’s created quite a bit of a debate that’s still going on. She also has always worked for herself, which is unusual.”

In a cavernous room of stored Indian artifacts on the top floor of the American Museum of Natural History, Roosevelt is at work preparing her latest book under the watchful eyes of towering totem poles and giant wooden animals carved by North American Indians.

Two floors below, another cavernous room bears the name of her great-grandfather Theodore, who gave the museum elephant hides, big game trophies and natural history specimens gathered over a lifetime.

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt’s own collection of decorated earthenware pots and charred bone fragments is stored in gray metal cabinets near her work table, waiting to be catalogued, examined and interpreted.

“It’s a very gorgeous island,” she said, leaning over an album of Marajo photographs showing vast tracks of barren, isolated land.

“This is where I drove the Jeep in the mud,” Roosevelt said, tapping a photo.

She describes herself as both “girlish” and a “dirt archeologist” who spends as much time as possible in the field. She said she puts on makeup and clean clothes every evening at Marajo even though there is absolutely no place to go.

Perhaps it is part of her upbringing near Oyster Bay, Long Island, in an aristocratic New York family under the guidance of her artist mother, Frances Webb. Her father, Quentin Roosevelt, died when she and her two sisters were children.

But Roosevelt said she is serious about her profession and views it with a critical, not romantic, eye.

“The ability to interpret and gather data has grown like never before because of the change in technology and computers and mass spectrometry,” she said in an interview at the museum. “There has been a revolution of sorts.

“A lot of people go into arcane subjects because they are considered prestigious and because people believe they are obscure enough to offer no competition.

“That has changed with the introduction of technology. You have to control as many disciplines as possible or you will be left behind. It’s very different now than it once was, I think, and some people (in the field) fight that change.”

She has tackled engineering, climatology, agriculture, chemistry and forensics to better understand the Indians of Marajo who lived on the island 1,000 years ago in brick huts built on earthen mounds.

Roosevelt has spent four months every year since 1982 at Marajo with a team of native workers and occasional visiting scientists who help her with their state-of-the-art technology.

Last year, she and a geophysicist mapped an entire buried Indian settlement by measuring electric impulses in the soil that pinpointed the iron clay of hearths.

“Brick does not conduct electricity,” she explained. “When we did not get a reading, we drew a wall on the map.”

With map in hand, she and her workers methodically uncovered the homes of Indians that lived, one settlement on top of another, from AD 400 to AD 1300.

She believes that related women made up each “hearth,” which included their children and husbands. Together, they farmed corn on the flat muddy river banks and caught small, bony fish.

Their pots, now stored at the American Museum, are etched with fanciful animals and rotund women.

The artistic artifacts are interesting enough, but Roosevelt said it was a carbonized leek that got her interested in anthropology.

“It sounds silly now,” she said, glancing around before plunging into a description of the exciting discovery during an archeology outing as a Stanford University undergraduate.

The leek was in a mound of shells in a California swamp where Indians had lived thousands of years ago. It appeared to have been cooked, which raised all sorts of questions about agriculture and civilization that Roosevelt wanted to answer.

“I realized it wasn’t all perfectly straightforward,” she said.

Carbonized Corn

Roosevelt went on to obtain a degree in history from Stanford and her masters and doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. Eventually she went on to find more carbonized vegetables, this time, corn in Venezuela.

“Corn like crazy,” she said. “It was domesticated. From 800 BC on I found more corn and the races got better. They were improving.”

Her interest in Indian culture led to the position of curator at the Museum of the American Indian in New York and, just this year, to researcher in the anthropology department of the American Museum.

“The more I learn the more, fascinated I become,” she said at the museum, paging through the uncorrected proofs of her book on Marajo. “Anthropologists overlooked the Amazon because they thought nothing happened there. I’d like to prove that wrong.”