William Duncan Strong
American archaeologist
William Duncan Strong (1899–1962) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist noted for his application of the direct historical approach to the study of indigenous peoples of North and South America.
Early life and education
Strong was born in Portland, Oregon.
He initially studied zoology, but he changed his focus to anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, under the influence of Alfred L. Kroeber, who became his "principal teacher, mentor, and friend". Strong completed his doctorate in 1926.
Career
Strong's doctoral dissertation, "An Analysis of Southwestern Society", was published in American Anthropologist. A related study of his, Aboriginal Society in Southern California, presenting his detailed fieldwork among the Serrano, Luiseño, Cupeño, and Cahuilla peoples, has been characterized as "one of the earliest and one of the best efforts by a United States anthropologist to combine structural-functional analysis with historical data and interpretation". Strong also conducted ethnographic field research among the Naskapi of Labrador.
Most of Strong's anthropological contributions were specifically in archaeology. His 1935 study, "An Introduction to Nebraska Archaeology", is credited with providing a major impetus for the direct historical approach in archaeology.
In the 1930s, Strong, Waldo Rudolph Wedel and A. T. Hill found archaeological evidence in Nebraska different from the prehistoric Central Plains and Woodland traditions.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Duncan Strong” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.