Home > Alfred L. Kroeber

Kroeber was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. He received his doctorate under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, basing his dissertation on his field work among the Arapaho. He spent most of his career in California, primarily at the University of California, Berkeley. The anthropology department's headquarters building at the University of California is known as Kroeber Hall.

Although he is known primarily as a cultural anthropologist, he did significant work in archaeology, and he contributed to anthropology by making connections between archaeology and culture. He conducted excavations in New MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the southwestern United States and its U. postal abbreviation is NM . The state's two official languages are English and Spanish. Nuevo Mexico was the Spanish name for the territory north and west of the Rio Grande. USS New Mexico, MexicoThis article is about the country Mexico. For other meanings, see Mexico (disambiguation The United Mexican States or Mexico ( Spanish: Estados Unidos Mexicanos or Mexico regarding the use of the variant spelling Mejico see section The name below) is a co, and PeruFor other uses, see Peru (disambiguation The Republic of Per ( Spanish: Per Quechua, Aymara: Piruw is a country in western South America, bordering with Ecuador and Colombia to the north, Brazil to the east, Bolivia to the east, south-east and south, Chil.

Kroeber and his students did important work collecting cultural data on western tribes of Native Americans. The work done in preserving California tribes appeared in Handbook of Indians of California (1925). These efforts to preserve remaining data on these tribes has been termed "Salvage Ethnography." He is credited with developing the concepts of Culture Area and Cultural Configuration (Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America, 1939).

His influence was so strong that many contemporaries adopted his style of beard and mustache as well as his views as a social scientist.

He is noted for working with IshiIshi ( 1860? March 25, 1916) was the name given to the last member of the Yahi tribe of California, and means man in the Yahi language. Ishi is believed to be the last Native American in Northern California to have lived completely outside the European-Am, who was claimed (though not uncontroversially) to be the last California YahiThe Yahi were a group of Native Americans who lived in Northern California in the Northern Sierra Nevada, on the western side of the range. The Yahi are closely related to the Yana, or may have been a subgroup of the Yana. They were hunter-gatherers who l Indian. His second wife, Theodora KroeberTheodora Kracaw Kroeber ( 1897- 1979) was a writer and anthropologist best known for her interpretations of the oral traditions of several native Californian cultures. Kroeber was born in Colorado and later moved to California, where she studied at the Un, wrote a well-known biography of Ishi, Ishi in Two Worlds.

His textbook, Anthropology (1923, 1948), was widely used for years.

Kroeber was the father of the academic Clifton Kroeber by his first wife and the fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin and academic Karl Kroeber by his second. He also adopted the two children of his second wife's first marriage. Clifton and Karl recently (2003) edited a book together on the Ishi case, Ishi in Three Centuries.