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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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