Henry Field was born on December 15, 1902. He started his archaeology education in England at Oxford University, graduating in 1925. After graduating from college he worked as an assistant curator of Physical Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History. He held the position of assistant curator for a few years and he later became the head Curator from 1934 until 1941. During the period when he was Curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, he participated in many of the Near East expeditions that the museum made.
In 1941, his position of Curator ended. Henry Field accepted an invitation to work for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as an anthropologist and as his personal assistant. In accepting this position, Field became a member of the Special Intelligence Unit of the White House. He was also the director of the “M” project, a study of world population, migration and settlement. The data provided was used for shaping post-war re-location strategies.
Throughout Henry Field’s career, he participated in archaeological expeditions in Africa, Europe, Mongolia, and southwestern Asia. He led expeditions into Europe, the North Arabian Desert, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. He was a member of the University of California African Expedition which took place from 1947-1948, and also a member of the Peabody Museum Harvard Expedition to the Near East and Pakistan.
Henry Field received many honors and awards during his career as an Anthropologist. He was a research fellow in the physical anthropology department at Harvard from 1950-1969 and was also an honorary member of the Glasgow Archaeological Society. He also joined several foreign scientific societies and organizations in the Untied States and many other countries.
In 1966, Field joined the University of Miami faculty where he wrote and published a number of anthropological studies through his “Field Research Reports”. The collection of Henry Field Papers included the page proofs of the “M” project for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. That included six hundred and sixty-sixty studies from the “M” project as well as the history behind the project.
In his lifetime, Field published many papers and wrote for many journals. Some of his publications include: The Anthropology of Iraq and Bibliographies on South West Asia I-VIII, Contributions to the Anthropology of the Caucasus, The Track of Man, Mongolia Today and many more. Henry Field contributed much to the study of anthropology during his lifetime through many articles, books and journals. Henry Field died in 1986 in Miami, Florida.
References:
http://www.library.miami.edu/archives/papers/field.html
Man, Volume 62 June 1962 #88
Written by: Kari Gates