J.B. Birdsell was born in South Bend, Indiana on March 20, 1908. When he was 23 years old, he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a science degree in 1931. He then spent four years in New York City as a financial analyst. In 1935, under the direction of Earnest A. Hooten, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Birdsell returned to college to complete his education. Birdsell then went with Australian ethnologist Norman B. Tindale on the first of several Australian Expeditions financed by Carnegie Corporation. In 1941 he returned to complete work on his Ph.D. at Harvard University.
Birdsell began his career at College of Washington, Pullman where he taught anthropology until the start of World War II. During the war he was at Wright Field where he served as an Air Force officer. His special skills in anthropometry earned him a position in the Personal Equipment Laboratory. He moved to Los Angeles in 1947 and started his long careet in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (later the Department of Anthropology) at UCLA from 1947 to 1975 and during this time there he met his wife, Roselin Auf der Heide, with whom he would have one son, John. In 1949 he turned down an offer of a position at Harvard to remain at UCLA. He, along with Tindale, spent another two-year field season collection follow up data in the Australian outback. The data they collected on that trip doubled the size of their data sets.
Birdsell mainly dealt with the Aborigine culture in Australia. He was very well known for his work with the Aboriginal peoples. He led expeditions to Australia with Harvard and UCLA. Birdsell's database, which he collected over many years, was considered state of the art and is acknowledged to be one of the last collected among hunting and gathering populations. His analysis of the data resulted in the clarification of several phenomenon. One was "gene flow", which is the the close dependency between annual rainfall and foraging band size. Another important theoretical statement known as the "trihybrid" hypothesis which related to the early peopling of Australia. His studies dealt mostly with the evolution of man.
Grants from Carnegie, Guggenheim, Fulbright, N.S.F., and Viking Fund were given to Birdsell to continue his work. He was a member of the American Anthropological Society, Society for American Archaeology, American Society for Human Genetics, Society for the Study of Evolution, and the American Association of Physical Anthropology. Dr. Birdsell published many professional journal articles and wrote a popular textbook, Human Evolution: An Introduction to the New Physical Anthropology, (1972-1981, three editions). Some of his other publications are:
Races, a Study of Race Formation in Man (1950)
Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australians: A Gradient Analysis of Clines (1993)
Birdsell was known by his friends and colleagues as being as rather as 'affectionately crusty' sort of man who always wore the same trademark "uniform"- baggy corduroy pants, flannel shirt, and a smashed hat, looking like he was always in the field. At the time of his death, he was still working on several manuscripts. Professor Emeritus Joseph Birdsell died of cancer on March 5, 1994, at the age of 85, at his home in Santa Barbara, California.
References
Former link, http://clolek.com/wwwvlpages/aborigpages/history.html, (May, 2000)
May, Hal. Contemporary American Authors, Gale Research Company, Detroit, MI, 1987
http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/deadbook.htm, American Anthropology Obituary Index
Anthropology Newsletter. 1994 35(6): 70. Obituary by Larry L. Mai
Written By: Adam Williamson
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008