Anna C. Roosevelt
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History, University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL
Lecturing/Research: Field Course on Environmental Archaeology in the Lower Amazon, Brazil
Emilio Goeldi Museum, Belem, Brazil; and Federal University of Para, Belem, Brazil
September 2001 - December 2001

Archaeologist Anna C. Roosevelt has trudged through tropical rain forests; dived in snake-infested rivers; portaged through raging rapids; and stood her ground against soldiers, loggers and developers who threatened to disturb her digs. But the toughest part of her Fulbright field course in the Amazon was getting an air compressor on a flight to Brazil after September 11.

Try as she might, she failed to persuade the airlines that her students couldn't dive for submerged artifacts without that suspicious-looking item; she was forced to leave it behind. Desperate, she appealed to reporter John Dorfman from Discover magazine, who was flying down to observe her work, for help. Luckily, he did manage to convince airline officials that it wasn't dangerous and, after paying a mere $86 for excess baggage, he was allowed to bring it with him.

A great-granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and a world-class scholar whose work has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, an Explorers Medal, a Bettendorf Medal from Santarém and the Order of Rio Branco from Brazil, Roosevelt has been studying human evolution and the environment in the tropics since 1973. On a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, she discovered hunter-gatherer remains and cave paintings at Monte Alegre in the Amazon that were established as more than 10,000 years old. Such findings reveal a great deal about the earliest inhabitants, from what kind of tools they made to what they ate. They were not big-game hunters, she determined, disproving the most prevalent theory-and leading The Chicago Tribune to declare, "Anna Roosevelt is transforming her field."

Roosevelt's Fulbright project first took her to a third-stage urban excavation in the Amazonian city of Santarém, Brazil in 2001, then to a wilderness site on the Curua River in the Xingu the following year. "You have to go with the water flow. You can't dive when the water is high and fast; it's too dangerous and you can't see anything," she explains.

Though it may take years of analysis to establish the significance of her latest finds, prehistoric tools and pottery shards, Roosevelt considers the two field seasons successful on several grounds. First, there was considerable local interest in her work. Fifteen Brazilian team members-from post-docs and seniors at the Universidade Federal do Para-Santarém to a local man who had not finished primary school-were easily recruited the first season after her partner, UFPA-Belem, went on strike. Second, the group actually found ancient plant remains and important artifacts at both sites. Finally, they were joyful endeavors for her.

"It was really fun for the students to dig in the middle of Santarém, with bulldozers, taxis, soccer games, and 16-wheelers all around," she says. "And they loved learning to scuba dive; our discovery of a tool in the bed of the Curua River was thrilling."

She is also proud that the experience inspired a local man, whom she describes as a "talented avocational archaeologist," to return to school. Though Roosevelt found her Fulbright project exhilarating, she would like to see grantmaking agencies extend their reach "beyond higher education"- to "bright, hard-working local people like him."

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