Resources

George Grant MacCurdy was born on April 17th, 1863 in Warrensburg, Missouri, where he attended State Normal College.¹ Little is known about his early life, but by age 26 he had risen in the ranks of his local school system and become the superintendent.² He was first introduced to Boston in 1889 as a delegate at a Dwight L. Moody conference³, and in 1891, at the age of 28, he returned to the city for undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology and geology from Harvard College.⁴ 

These studies no doubt laid a foundation for MacCurdy’s later involvement with prehistory, but his introduction to paleolithic archaeology was actually quite random. In his last year of his Master’s degree MacCurdy took a job as a proctor and his name was posted on a list that wound up in the newspaper.⁵ The newspaper made its way to Connecticut where it was read by a woman named Evelyn MacCurdy Salisbury who, along with her husband, was an avid genealogist, and upon reading George’s name, she sent him a questionnaire about his family and ultimately identified him as her distant relative. The Salisburys treated George like their son, and in the summer of 1894, when he was 31 years old, they offered to fund him for a year in Europe.⁶

MacCurdy spent his trip meeting prominent scholars in geology and zoology, and he was surely exposed to paleolithic archaeology in the process.⁷ His interest truly turned to the latter subject, though, in September of 1895, when he witnessed the fossil remains of Pithecanthropus at the International Zoological Conference in Leiden, Netherlands.⁸ He was fascinated by the findings and “determined to devote himself exclusively to anthropology and prehistoric archaeology”.⁹

MacCurdy’s new conviction to study prehistory and continued financial support from the Salisburys led him to spend the next three years studying in European cities including Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. He took classes from leading scholars, attended international conferences, and generally became extremely knowledgeable and well-connected in his field.¹⁰ It was not until the summer of 1898, at the age of 35, that he returned to the United States and began his doctorate studies and an instructorship at Yale.¹¹ He received his PhD in 1905 having completed a dissertation about prehistoric lithic artifacts.¹²

At the time of his graduation, MacCurdy was already an active and influential scholar. He regularly participated in meetings for section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which was the closest one could get at that point to a scholarly community focused exclusively on anthropology.¹³ Recognizing the need for the latter organization, however, MacCurdy helped found the American Anthropological Association in 1902 as part of a group of about 40 other anthropologists.¹⁴

In the early 20th century, much of the prehistoric research taking place in Europe was not effectively reaching audiences on the other side of the Atlantic, and MacCurdy, with his extensive connections to European scholars and wide breadth of prehistoric knowledge, was uniquely poised to bridge this gap.¹⁵ Throughout his career he reviewed many books that had been published in non-English languages, thereby making them accessible to American audiences. The desire to connect American and European scholarship is clear throughout much of his career, and it set a foundation for his creation of the ASPR in 1921. In his autobiography he recounts that a few colleagues had suggested:

When Human Origins, MacCurdy’s nearly 1,000 page magnum opus, was published in 1924, it would have been for many Americans “the richest source of information available on palaeoanthropology, a field for which the primary literature was inaccessible to many”.¹⁷

The American School of Prehistoric Research was officially founded in February 1921,¹⁸ and its first field season began in France on July 2nd of that year.¹⁹ The group stayed there for nearly 3 months, during which time they excavated at La Quina, visited local museums, met with specialists who showed them collections, and attended a meeting of the French Archaeological Society.²⁰ For the next 16 years, at least 116 students participated in the program’s annual European trips.²¹ MacCurdy was the primary director of field seasons until 1931 when, at age 68, he passed the responsibility on to a former ASPR student named Charlotte D. Gower.²²

The tradition of taking American students to Europe to give them first-hand experience in prehistoric archaeology did not survive the second world war. The 15th bulletin, which contains a description of the 1938 summer term, was published in 1939 (see MacCurdy 1939); the next bulletin did not come out until 1948 (see Hencken 1948), and after that point the ASPR field seasons never looked quite the same. The emphasis placed on student education decreased, and one reason for this shift was surely the death of Mr. MacCurdy, which occurred on November 15th, 1947 when he was hit by a car at the age of 85.²³ His wife, Janet MacCurdy, survived him by many years, and in 1983 her will provided additional funds to the ASPR.

The ASPR was born out of a desire to bridge a scholarly gap and reveal the antiquity of humanity to American audiences. As a component of this mission, the School was devoted to training U.S. students in the field of prehistory and giving them unparalleled first-hand access to archaeological sites, museum collections, and the knowledge of local specialists. Nearly a century later, the needs of the field have changed dramatically, but knowing Mr. MacCurdy’s motivations can allow us to move forward with his mission in mind.