Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island - Softcover

Van Tilburg, Jo Anne Jo Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743244818 ISBN 13: 9780743244817

Publisher: Scribner, 2014

Synopsis

A portrait of the first woman archaeologist to work in Polynesia documents Routledge's experiences on Easter Island, beginning with the launch of the 1913 Mana Expedition and continuing with her emersion into local customs and beliefs and battle with schizophrenia.

About this title

About the Author:

Jo Anne Van Tilburg, PhD, is an archaeologist with two decades of experience on Easter Island, where she directs the comprehensive and definitive Easter Island Statue Project. Currently a research associate of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, she is also director of the UCLA Rock Art Archive. She is a national lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America and a lecturer for the British Museum Traveller. She lives in Malibu, California.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Englishwoman Katherine Pease Routledge, born in 1866, wanted a life of discovery, not domesticity. Extremely intelligent, curious, diligent, and fearless, she attended Oxford, where women students were barely tolerated, and majored in anthropology. Already hearing voices, the first intimation of the paranoid schizophrenia that would eventually hijack her life, Katherine was at her best while doing fieldwork, first in Africa and then on Easter Island, which became her much loved spiritual home. The story of how Katherine-- forthright, independently wealthy, intrepid, and ambitious--married the scientifically inclined, nomadic, and irascible William Scoresby Routledge and then organized a complicated, contentious, dangerous, and unprecedented expedition to splendidly isolated and enigmatic Easter Island is extraordinary on all fronts. And Van Tilburg, herself an Easter Island expert who has worked with the great-grandson of Juan Tepano, the islander who helped Katherine discern aspects of his culture no outsider ever considered before, tells the extraordinary story of an extraordinary woman extraordinarily well. Animated in her descriptions, sensitive in her insights, and agile in her scientific and cultural knowledge, she brings to life a brilliant and courageous "natural-born ethnographer" whose arduous and groundbreaking fieldwork ascertained the origins of Easter Island's astonishing giant stone statues as well as their surprisingly relevant social and ecological significance. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0743244818
• ISBN 13: 9780743244817
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384