THEODORE DONEY McCOWN

June 18, 1908- August 17, 1969

THEODORE DONEY McCOWN

June 18, 1908 -- August 17, 1969

This sketch of Ted McCown's life and interests is in three parts.
In the first I will describe briefly his fundamental contributions to

anthropology, drawing on my own appreciation of his work and even more on
the comments of my colleagues whose expertise is greater than my own. In
the second I will give verbatim the eulogy delivered at the memorial ser-
vice to him in Berkeley on August 20 last. Finally, I will attempt to
express what seems to me to be the particular emerging sentiment of
appreciation for him among all his friends and colleagues.

I.

The most important thing to understand about McCown the anthro-
pologist is that he was not in a hurry. Perhaps because his primary
interests lay in bones and artifacts that had lain in the earth for

millennia, eons, he saw no reason for unseeming haste, for casual dis-

regard of stubborn fact, for any of the signs of frantic lack of scholar-
ship that are so common. He enjoyed thoroughness, he was precise in his

speech and manner and in his thoughts. In all, he was a moral aristocrat.

In considering his more particular contributions, one must

realize that he was not an archaeologist or a physical anthropologist but
both. (I can recall that in carrying out some statistical analyses of
departmental activities, according to the three major divisions of the

discipline, I had to make a fourth category for Ted.) It is instructive
to look at his activities in connection with the Mt. Carmel finds. He

worked in that excavation as an archaeologist, primarily associated with
Dorothy Garrod. His father had opened to him the world of classical and
Near Eastern archaeology, with its perspectives and methods so different
from those of the New World until a few years ago. Having worked in the

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excavations themselves, he occupied himself for several years with the

incredibly tedious task of removing the fossils from the breccia in which
they were embedded, that breccia itself often having been removed from the
deposit with dynamite. Then, with patience and skill, he worked with

Arthur Keith in the description and analysis of the human fossils. The
resulting book, The Fossil Human Remains from the Levalloiso-Mousterian
(Vol. II of The Stone Age of Mt. Carmel, with Sir Arthur Keith, 1939),
is a classic. In its archaeological approach to human fossils, its

emphasis on association, it put physical anthropology into the twentieth
century, after it had languished so long in the bone-collecting phase of

earlier years. Similarly, the analysis regarded each fossil as a remnant
of a member of a group of people, an attitude not particularly common

among those physical anthropologists who had spent their lives looking at
plaster casts. Having adopted this approach, the report suggested that

all the individuals in a fossil population did not have to be morphologic-
ally identical, any more than all the people in a living population did.
The range of variation between the es-Skuhl and et-Tabun finds did not

have to be interpreted as one of vast temporal difference or of admixture
of two distinct populations; it could be interpreted as a normal range

of variation in a single, roughly contemporaneous population. It took a
while for this lesson to sink in in physical anthropology; twenty years

later some people were still lecturing out of the 1946 edition of Hooton's
Up from the Ape and insisting with him that "pure races" interbred, when
McCown had shown that in fact it is people that breed, populations that
show diversity, and that "races" are classificatory abstractions.

McCown's archaeological approach, his emphasis on association
and ecology, appeared again in a paper entitled "Animals, Climate, and

Paleolithic Man" (Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, No. 25, 1961).
Dorothy Garrod and later Frederick Zeuner had interpreted the varying
numbers of fallow deer and gazelle as a straightforward indication of

periodic variation in precipitation. McCown gently debunked some of the

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basic assumptions, returned to the evidence with painstaking statistical
care, and concentrated on what kinds of lives palaeolithic hunter. were

likely to have led, on the terrain and varied climate of Palestine within

a day's walk of the site, on the variety of species that must have existed,
and on matters such as hunting skill and dietary preference. Again, for

him, people had lived in those caves. I can remember talking to him about
that paper as he wrote it; he spoke of the topography of the Mt. Carmel
ridge and of the adjoining lowlands as though they were in his own back-
yard. Indeed they were.

Sherry Washburn has noted, in addition to some of the points
above, that Ted McCown was always convinced that the secrets of human

evolution in the Pleistocene lay to the east of Palestine. He felt that
primate populations were inherently variable, so that Neanderthal man's
concentration in Western Europe could just as easily be a function of
the collecting habits of anthropologists as one of isolation or odd

adaptation to the cold of the fourth glaciation. But this was more than
another case of the "ex oriente lux" virus, and Ralph Solecki and others
have since proved McCown right with more spadework. McCown was convinced
that variability was the answer and that it lay in India; he used to

speak with animation of probable Pliocene and Villefranchian populations
of Dryopithecinae, stretching from Africa to the Himalayas. It was to

the Narmada Valley that he later went and where he had planned to return,
to seek other evidence of the antecedents of man. Characteristically,
with no haste, be began with the geology.

In all of this work he exhibited the patience and respect for
solid fact but flexible interpretation that characterizes the natural

science in anthropology. Whether in the chimneys at et-Tabun or sketching
the architecture at Huamachuco (Pre-Incaic Huamachuco, UCPAAE Vol. 39,

No. 4, 1945) he remained cognizant of the cultural and natural environment
in which his particular problem was embedded, and he brought to all his
investigations the unhurried, literate, and urbane scholarship that is
the mark of the generalist and the whole man.

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II.

It was more than twenty years ago, in 1947, that I met Ted

McCown, when I came as a freshman to Anthropology. In him I found, al-
though I scarcely knew it at first, an anomaly in the modern world, a
paradox, and a guide. He was a modern man: an explorer, a scientist,

a statistician, a man probing the future of our knowledge of ourselves.
But at the same time he was a man of the past: a student of it, with

roots, part of the fabric of his ancestry, of his community, and of his
university.

He came to Berkeley from Illinois in 1914 at the age of six, the
son of a former missionary to India--a place to which Ted later returned
to seek the antecedents of man. His father was a Biblical archaeologist
and Director of the Palestine Exploration Fund; the son lived in Pales-

tine in the 1920's and later returned there to advance the cause of science
with his discovery and analysis of the Mt. Carmel remains. The elder

McCown was Dean of the Pacific School of Religion; his son rose to pro-

minence in an institution only a stone's throw away. But Ted McCown came
to more than prominence in the University; he came to be a part of it,

of the university community, and of the town. From his entrance in 1925,

his Bachelor's in 1929, his doctorate in 1939, he grew with the Department
and the Museum, with the campus. Frank Lloyd Wright once said of

buildings that they should not be on a hill but of it, and there is so

much of the University that is Ted McCown and so much of him that is the

University, that no line can be drawn between them. Thus he was a boy in
the town, a citizen, a student, a professor, a Chairman, a Dean, a leader
and counselor in the Senate. So also one could discuss with him at one

moment when the last bear and mountain lion had been seen west of Grizzly
Peak and in the next the implications of Federal funding for the future
of the University. When he was a student, he held the same factotum job
that Henry Nixon has now, that George Shkurkin had, that I had. He grew

with the Department in its classic days--of Kroeber and Lowie and Gifford,

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when the Museum was at the Affiliated Colleges in San Francisco, and later
where Campbell Hall now stands, and when the Department was housed in a
tin shack. He was the historian of the Department, and with the passing
of its chronicler, a chapter of that history has ended.,

Most of all I remember Ted from the days when I was a student,
and in a way from the standpoint of all those who ever were, and are,
students. It was to him that we always went when we were confused or
troubled, and from him that we had that invaluable gift of a listener.

His advice, coming by indirection, hint, and allegory was spare, austere,
so that in the end we profited but thought the solution of our own in-

vention. This gift as an adviser was the more remarkable for its frequent
demonstration; we all came to him, and often, and no one was ever turned
away. It was Ted who quietly saw to it that seniors were nominated to

Sigma Xi and to Phi Beta Kappa, it was he who concerned himself with the
departmental citation for scholarship. His talents were not limited to
students in physical anthropology; everybody was Ted's student in the

old days, and I learned as much from him about the people and religions
and social organization of the Near East as I did about statistics, and
osteology, and evolution.

The younger faculty in the Department found in Ted McCown a man
who troubled himself to guide them in the ordinary administrative tasks,

to tell them how the Senate worked, and to suggest the subtle compromises
that permit a department to exist. He was by instinct, by practice, and
by accomplishment a statesman. Much has been and will be said, and

rightly so, about his expertise in the science of man, but for many of us

his major accomplishment was in the art of man, in the expertise in people
in the singular rather than in the plural. It is always the small things
that create a person. It was when I needed a specimen from the Museum
as a prop in a sophomore play that Ted McCown quietly provided it. It

was when I attended seminars at his home and one night had a flat, that

the professor helped the student change a tire. It was when I joined the

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staff and became his neighbor around the corner that he would come on
Christmas with a sprig of holly from his tree to wish us well.

All of this would make a nice man, but there was more than this
to the paradox of Ted McCown. For all his kindness, his thought for
people, he was hardly bland. He was a man of conviction, of strong

opinion sometimes vehemently expressed, contemptuous of sham, deeply

offended by much of the world around him. The hottest fires are those
that are well banked, and many are those who mistook control for dis-

interest, courtesy for neutrality. There was nothing disinterested or
neutral about him.

In a world that disenchants and fills with dropouts, he was
committed. In a world that changes with alarming rapidity, he had a

sense of history. In a world in which institutions crumble, he was stable.
Where the inner self is now so public, he was a private man; his was a

world of kin and long-time friends. His life was shaped by a stock that
is altogether rare now, that stubbornly creates its own place and its
own time. We can all take our mark from him.

III.

In the days that have passed since Ted's death, many have spoken
of him, reminisced, talked of his contributions to knowledge and to the
lives of those who knew him, and particularly of his devotion to the

University. In the week that followed August 17, some of us who had felt
him a permanent part of our existence could not shake the feeling that he
was still here. In the memorial meeting at the Faculty Club on October
27, one could sense his presence in the rooms he had walked so often,
where his quiet voice had counselled. It seemed he had not gone, and

indeed he has not. He would smile his wry smile to know that he is in
Durkheim's words, a social fact--a man whose permanence in the world of
our minds cannot be affected in the slightest by his physical absence.

It is strange to reflect that in the discussions about him, all who speak
seem to feel that they knew Ted better than others did, all seem to feel

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that they knew him longer. All are convinced that he was very much a
part of their own lives in a special way. There are not many men who
have ever lived who can have given that feeling to so many.

As Sherry Washburn said, "'There is a time and a place for

everything.  A time to be born and a time to die.'    This is a time to

honor."  It was no shame for men to weep when Ted left, and we did.    I
am saddened that he is gone, but I am glad he was here, and privileged
that I knew him.

E. A. Hammel

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