Anna H. Gayton

Personal life and education

Anna H. Gayton was born in Santa Cruz, California, on September 20, 1899. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. in 1923 and an M.A. the following year. In 1928, she became the first woman to receive a PhD in anthropology from Berkeley, completing her dissertation on the narcotic plant Datura in Native American cultures. Her doctoral work was supervised by Alfred Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie, with a psychology minor under Edward C. Tolman.

While a student, Gayton worked as an editorial assistant for the journal American Anthropologist, a position she later held again from 1932 to 1934. She also served in a similar capacity for Yale University Publications in Anthropology from 1934 to 1939. In 1931, she married fellow anthropologist Leslie Spier. Gayton passed away on September 18, 1977, at age 77.

Folklore

Anna H. Gayton joined the American Folklore Society in the 1930s, later serving as the Journal of American Folklore’s reviews editor from 1935 to 1940 and as an associate editor until 1943. She chaired the Society’s Committee on Research in Folklore between 1945 and 1948, was Vice President in 1947, and became President in 1950. Around this time, with a 1947 Guggenheim Fellowship, she started researching the Feast of the Holy Spirit among California’s Azorean Portuguese. Gayton is recognized as a pioneer in comparative folklore studies.

Academia and curating

In 1948, Gayton began working in UC Berkeley's Department of Decorative Art. Her primary research area became the university's Peruvian textiles, a project started by the previous department head, Lila M. O'Neale.

She expanded this work to include ancient Peruvian costume while serving as the unpaid textile curator at Berkeley's Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Her work there focused on items gathered by the archaeologists Max and Charlotte Uhle. Gayton retired from teaching in 1965, the same year she served as Vice President of the Institute of Andean Studies.

Selected publications

Anna Hadwick Gayton contributed to several academic fields, including anthropology, folklore, and archaeology. Her early work focused on Peruvian artifacts, co-authoring with A. L. Kroeber and Max Uhle on the Uhle pottery collections from Nazca and publishing a separate volume on the Uhle Collections from Nievería in 1927. In the mid-1930s, she examined the distribution of folktales across California and analyzed the Orpheus myth in North America.

During the 1940s, Gayton turned her attention to the Yokuts and Western Mono peoples, publishing studies on their social organization, the relationship between their culture and environment, and a comprehensive ethnography in 1948. That same year, she wrote about a Portuguese festival called the Festa da Serreta in Gustine, California, and discussed the connection between folklore and anthropology. She also collaborated with Barbara Thrall Rogers on a collection of twenty-seven Chukchansi Yokuts myths in 1944, and in 1942 she compared English ballads with Indian myths.

In the 1950s, Gayton explored broader perspectives in folklore and, with Saul H. Riesenberg, documented Caroline Island belt weaving. Her archaeological interests continued with analyses of ancient Peruvian textiles and clothing, including a new type of ancient Peruvian shirt in 1955, early Paracas style textiles from Yauca, Peru in 1961, and a horizontal-necked shirt from Marques, Peru co-authored with Louis M. Stumer in 1958. Her final listed publication, from 1967, examined textiles from Hacha, Peru.