Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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WILLIAM WHITE HOWELLS
WILLIAM WHITE HOWELLS
Pages 206-223
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From page 207... ...
From this perspective he helped free physical anthropology from its earlier preoccupation with typological classifications of human races. His work was marked by sophistication in multivariate statistics, a great breadth of knowledge in all subfields of anthropology, and a lucid and direct literary style that engaged the reader in what appeared to be an informal conversation.
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From page 208... ...
Bill's maternal grandfather, Horace White, was a journalist from an abolitionist background; he traveled with Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates and subsequently became an editor and co-owner first of the Chicago Tribune and later of the New York Post. Bill was very close to his aunt Amelia Elizabeth White, who after serving as a nurse in the First World War, moved in the 1920s to Santa Fe, where she became a passionate advocate for the Pueblo, promoting their public health and land rights and establishing a museum of Native American arts.
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From page 209... ...
Hooton's work suffered from a similar typological perspective. He tried to identify distinct elements of racial mixing within skeletal populations, diagnostic traits within series of head shapes of criminals, and reified types in body composition.
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From page 210... ...
He took up his first post (as volunteer assistant) at the American Museum of Natural History back in New York, with fellow Hooton product Harry Shapiro.
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From page 211... ...
Fisher formulated the analysis of variance, discriminant function analysis, and the method of maximum likelihood, as well as a remarkable amount of population genetics theory. Alone in his cohort of American anthropologists, Howells saw he had to master multivariate methods as well as proper statistical design.
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From page 212... ...
He was always a conscientious and thoughtful participant in university affairs. He was a key participant in the development of Wisconsin's Integrated Liberal Studies program, which was a pioneering attempt to bring the interdisciplinary approach to undergraduate teaching.
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From page 213... ...
. He had been elected president of the American Anthropological Association in 1951, had served as editor of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from 1949 to 1954, and was awarded a Viking Fund Medal in 1954.
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From page 214... ...
; one of his general books was on the Pacific Islanders (1973,2) ; and he helped develop the Harvard Solomon Islands project (Friedlaender, 1987)
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From page 215... ...
When a graduate student breathlessly pressed him for details on comparative primate genital sizes and shapes, Bill deadpanned, "We only study the hard parts." Besides his expertise in osteometrics, Howells was a stalwart fieldworker as well. He and Muriel took part in the Harvard-Peabody Museum Solomon Islands project in Malaita in 1968, and he was a member of the 1972 trip to Ulawa and Ontong Java aboard the Alpha Helix.
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From page 216... ...
His premier research accomplishment was to provide a comprehensive populationbased description of human cranial variation. This meant an appropriate application of multivariate statistics to a large battery of measurements that he and his wife, Muriel, recorded, beginning in the late 1960s, on a well-defined and adequately sampled series of male and female crania.
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From page 217... ...
Coon relied heavily on the earlier work of Franz Weidenreich, but he also used a large amount of descriptive data, and both metric and nonmetric cranial observations. Howells showed that notions of distinct races had no basis in craniometrics, contrary to the long tradition in biological anthropology before his time.
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From page 218... ...
In addition to the Distinguished Service Award given by the American Anthropological Association in 1978, he received the Charles Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists at its inception in 1992. In 1993 the William W
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From page 219... ...
Barely two years ago Dan Lieberman and one of us (D.P.) visited him in Kittery Point to show him the unpublished reconstruction of the Sahelanthropus cranium, and Bill's comments showed that he was even then at the top of his game; he kept up with an eclectic literature practically until his death.
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From page 220... ...
1976. The measure of a man: William White Howells.
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From page 221... ...
1973 [1] Cranial Variation in Man: A Study by Multivariate Analysis of Patterns of Difference among Recent Human Populations.
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From page 222... ...
1995 Who's Who in Skulls: Ethnic Identification of Crania from Measure ments. Peabody Museum Papers, vol.
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