David Rindos was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947. He earned a Bachelors Degree in Sociology from Cornell University in 1969. Afterwards, he held many jobs. He worked at Volunteers in Service to America, and the New York Public Interest Research Group. In 1976, he was a paleoethnobotanist for the Alambra Project in Cyprus, and in 1977 he worked for the Sula Valley Archeological Project in Honduras. After these projects he earned a Masters Degree in Botany from Cornell University in 1980 and a Ph.D. from Cornell in Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in 1981.
Rindos has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the University of Illinois, the University of Missouri and Michigan State University. He held a Fellowship at the Australian National University before being recruited to the University of Western Australia. At the University of Western Australia he was involved in a battle over tenure; he was denied tenure under questionable circumstances. Prior reviews were positive, he was successfully teaching a heavy load, dropout rates were low in his classes. As Department Head, he began many projects and grants and the department increased by more than 500%. He was also involved in nationally published research. When news of his tenure battle reached the scientific community, he received large amounts of support from colleagues. After being denied tenure, other departments at the University offered to tenure him in their department.
One of Rindos' contributions to anthropology was his 1984 book Origins of Agriculture. In this work, he applied "neo-Darwinian theory to problems of cultural change, including the great mystery of agriculture" (Anthropology News). Other works by Rindos were published in Current Anthropology, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Illustrated History of Humankind. David Rindos died of a heart attack in 1996.
http://www.aaanet.org/an/ob9702.htm Anthropology News Death Notices
Written by Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007