In a sandstone hill outside the Brazilian town of Monte Alegre, the Cave of the Painted Rock overlooks the Amazon River some six miles to the south.
On its wide ceiling and tall walls are the art of an early people: handprints, geometric patterns, stick figures, odd runic designs, in red, yellow and brown paint.
More than a century ago, archeologists came across the cave and the many others with painted decorations in this section of the Amazon River basin. But the scientists were on the search for clues about the earliest humans to live in the Americas and discounted the cave paintings as the work of some later group.
Then, along came Anna Curtenius Roosevelt.
Dissatisfied with the doctrinaire thinking that explained away the importance of such sites without adequately studying them, Roosevelt sought to understand the painted ceilings and walls of the Cave of the Painted Rock by examining its floor–the accumulation of thousands of years of dirt and debris.
Starting in 1991, she and her associates laboriously worked their way through 20 layers of soil–a depth of some 7 feet–on the cave floor. They used trowels, tweezers and small brushes, and they sifted the dirt through fine-mesh screens. And what that searching and sifting found at the deepest layer of human occupation were the tiny bones of rodents, fish and birds; charred seeds and fruit pits; pieces of charcoal, the remains of fires; broken spear points; and, splattered by sloppy artists, small drops of paint.
This was the trash of the first people to have used the cave, and it revealed much about them and their society. And one thing more: Radiocarbon testing of the bones, paint, seeds and other garbage determined that those earliest Amazonian people used the cave as many as 11,200 years ago.
This finding, first published in 1996, was astonishing news in the world of archeology and sparked instant controversy. It flew in the face of the traditional belief that the first humans in the Americas had been the Clovis people, named by scientists for Clovis, N.M., near where their artifacts, believed to date back 11,000 years, were found.
At its most basic, Roosevelt’s research indicated that, even from the beginning, the Clovis people weren’t alone but only one of conceivably many distinct human cultures that were living in the Americas more than 100 centuries ago.
But there were deeper implications as well. The Clovis people were hunters of big game, and scientists have long thought that the earliest humans, across the ocean in Africa, were big-game hunters. Indeed, the theory has been that humans became humans by leaving the jungles and moving out onto the savannas where the demands of hunting large animals, such as the mammoth, led to the development of qualities that we, today, think of as human.
Yet, could that be true if, early on, complex human societies based on foraging, such as the one in Amazonia, had existed simultaneously with those based on hunting large beasts?
The people of Amazonia ate fish, fruit, nuts and other materials that could be — and most likely were — gathered by women and children. Unlike the male-dominated Clovis culture (at least as it has been envisioned by researchers), the Amazonian culture would have been one in which a greater balance of responsibility and power would have been possible between women and men.
That points directly at the deepest implication of Roosevelt’s work in Brazil, elsewhere in South America and now in the Congo River basin in Central Africa.
From the beginning of archeology, scientists have viewed human evolution in the context of the big-game-hunting societies. Key aspects of human behavior — pair-bond families, for example, and a tendency of men toward violence — have been seen as rooted in the human psyche because they improved the survival capabilities of those cultures. (For example: If, in the beginning, the role of men was to hunt big game, then the men most likely to survive would have been those who were most violent. Or so the thinking has gone.)
But, in arguing that early human societies, and perhaps some of the earliest in the world, were foragers, Roosevelt and others in a new generation of archeologists have forced a rethinking of such core questions as: What does it mean to be human? What is the “natural” role of a woman? Of a man?
No wonder many of Roosevelt’s more old-line colleagues are uncomfortable with and even irate at her research. But, for Roosevelt, that’s the point of archeology and, indeed, of all study of the past: to look at life anew, to shake things up.
“It never turns out as you expected. That’s half the fun. Depending on what you find, you’ve changed everything.”
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Anna Roosevelt has been described as “temperamental, outspoken and tough.” She’s been characterized as having a “rather uncooperative, assertive personality.” And she’s been called “relentless.”
The source of those descriptions? Roosevelt herself.
Now 53, Roosevelt has been working as an archeologist for a quarter-century, but, as she sits for an interview in her office, cluttered with boxes of files and specimens, at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, she still exhibits a youthful mix of certainty and vulnerability.
There’s an awkwardness in her conversation: Her words come in rapid rushes. There are unexpected pauses. Yet, there’s no clumsiness to her thinking. There is, indeed, a steely confidence. That, and a laser-like intensity about her research and findings.
“From the beginning, I was passionate,” Roosevelt says.
A trim woman with short gray hair, Roosevelt is the curator of archeology at the Field Museum. She is also a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In 1988, she won a $265,000 “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. In January 1997, her work in the Amazon basin was included in a special issue of Discover magazine on the 100 top science stories of the previous year.
Last May, Roosevelt, who is single and lives in Evanston, received the Gold Medal of the Society of Women Geographers, a worldwide organization, founded in 1925, for women engaged in anthropology, exploration, natural history and other geography-related work. The society was and remains a counterpart to the Explorers’ Club in New York which, for most of its existence, did not admit women.
The Society has been far from profligate in bestowing its award, honoring only 15 other women over the past seven decades, including Amelia Earhart, Margaret Mead and Jane Goodall.
Yet, even as Roosevelt has garnered such honors, she has had to fend off highly charged criticism from some of her elders in archeology — criticism that seems to have been stoked to an even higher fury by the confidence and passion with which Roosevelt has reported her research.
She’s been accused of overemphasizing the importance of her data and misunderstanding its implications. She’s been called a sensationalist.
And then, of course, there is her name.
Roosevelt is one of the Roosevelts. Her great-grandfather was President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). Her grandfather was Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the assistant secretary of the Navy under President Warren G. Harding as well as governor of Puerto Rico and later the Philippines. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) was a distant cousin.
Critics have contended that her name has brought Roosevelt more attention than her research warrants and has opened doors for her throughout her career.
But, Roosevelt says, it’s not that simple.
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Anna is a popular name in the Roosevelt family.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s full name was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. Her mother was named Anna, and so was Eleanor’s eldest daughter and one of Eleanor’s granddaughters. Anna was also the name of Teddy Roosevelt’s older sister.
But the future archeologist was not named for a Roosevelt.
Anna also happened to be the name of Frances Webb Roosevelt’s mother, and so when Frances, the wife of Quentin Roosevelt II, gave birth to her second daughter on May 24, 1946, the name was passed down to the girl from the Webb side of her family tree.
It was in 1944 during the Second World War that Frances and Quentin had met and married in England. Frances, a Smith College graduate and an artist of some skill, having studied under Thomas Hart Benton, was there as a Red Cross worker.
Quentin, who had graduated cum laude from Harvard, had been seriously wounded in combat a year earlier. But that didn’t stop him from rising to the rank of major by the end of the war, serving in the final months in China for the Office of Strategic Services, the spying arm of the American government that later became the Central Intelligence Agency.
After the war, Quentin was hired by Pan American Airways, and, in the spring of 1948, shortly before Anna’s second birthday, he went to China with his family to serve in Shanghai as a vice president of the Chinese National Aviation Corp.
It was several months later, just a few days before Christmas, that Quentin was on a Chinese National plane that crashed near Hong Kong. He and all of the other 34 people aboard died.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Frances Roosevelt and her three young daughters, Anna, Alexandra and Susan, moved in with Quentin’s widowed mother, Eleanor, at her large but empty home called Old Orchard at Oyster Bay on Long Island.
“I think it was hard on my mother; I know it was. But we had an idyllic childhood anyway,” Anna Roosevelt recalls.
It was also, except for occasional visits by uncles, a childhood without men.
“I was raised in a most wonderful world peopled by women — my grandmother, my mother and my sisters. Everyone else had died.
“We could do no wrong. Oh, I got quite a few spankings from my mother. But she used to tell us that each one was prettier than the others. I learned I was pretty. I had buck teeth and was fat, but I had many boyfriends from the age of 12 because I projected prettiness — confidence.
“I was kind of bouncy — optimistic, bold, took risks. I had been raised in a world where the women were rulers. It never occurred to me that the world was any different.”
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Roosevelt finds it odd how people react to her name. They come to her with preconceived notions. “They want me to be a certain way.”
It’s true, she says, that, in her search for funding for her fieldwork — over the past two decades, she’s had to raise $760,000 — the Roosevelt name has opened some doors. But that hasn’t always been to her benefit.
“Sometimes, they ask me for money. They think Roosevelt is Rockefeller,” she says.
And her name hasn’t cushioned her from what she describes as an anti-female bias exhibited by many institutions of science and education. Indeed, her career as an archeologist almost died aborning when, in 1968, she began her graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania on a Ford Foundation fellowship.
“I was a cute co-ed from Stanford, and they were very cold to me and kept trying to hedge me out,” Roosevelt recalls. The first summer there, she landed a position with an archeological dig, but university officials blocked her from taking it, contending that she needed more book work before she could go into the field.
“It was all about trying to have authority over me,” Roosevelt says.
She soon gave up on Pennsylvania and shifted to Columbia University in New York. In addition to her graduate work, Roosevelt began working at the Museum of the American Indian where she eventually became curator, ultimately an important boost to her career.
There is much about Teddy Roosevelt’s life that his great-granddaughter doesn’t like — his big-game hunting, for example, and his social snobbiness. But she says, “He did have a precept I follow: You’ll never get anywhere unless you put yourself in the center of the arena. You’ve got to be in the struggle. And it’s not always going to be wonderful.”
It’s been Roosevelt’s willingness to engage in that struggle and her reluctance to temper her opinions that seem to have heightened much of the antagonism against her within the archeology community.
“When women get caught in conflict, they feel guilty at having people angry at them. They feel afraid of conflict,” Roosevelt says. “But I don’t feel I have to be a good little girl. There are certain things in our family that we all have, and one is a very strong conscience. Anything you do is going to cause some problems — this is life.”
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During recent fieldwork in the Congo River basin in the Central African Republic, Roosevelt chewed out her crew for failing to follow her directions.
That night, as the crew returned to the camp, a native geographer acknowledged that Roosevelt had been right, and told her that she was “sage, brave and hard.”
Months later, during the interview in her Field Museum office, Roosevelt repeats the description.
It’s a characterization she relishes.
