George Amos Dorsey

Early life and education

George Amos Dorsey was born in Hebron, Ohio, to Edwin Jackson and Mary Emma Dorsey. After local schooling, he earned a BA from Denison University in 1888 and a second BA in anthropology from Harvard in 1890. His 1894 PhD dissertation, based on excavating over one hundred graves at Peru’s Ancon necropolis, was Harvard’s first anthropology doctorate and only the second awarded in the United States.

Career

Based on his work in Peru in 1892, Dorsey became head of the archaeological branch of the department of anthropology at Harvard, serving until 1896. In 1897 he joined the staff of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as assistant curator, was promoted to curator in 1898, and served until 1915. From 1907 to 1915 he also was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. In the 1890s he traveled with Anglo-Canadian botanist and ethnographer Charles Frederick Newcombe and Scottish guide James Deans in Northwest Canada to gather Haida artifacts.

Their methods drew criticism from missionary John Henry Keen, who published a letter in the Daily Colonist complaining that they had raided graves and left hair and coffins strewn about. Dorsey argued that Keen's anger should be ignored. In the early 1900s he acquired objects from curio dealers J. F. G. Umlauff of Hamburg and W. D. Webster, then made his own trip to New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, and Australia, which led to his sending Albert Buell Lewis on a major expedition to the South Pacific.

During World War I, Dorsey was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve, later serving as assistant naval attache at Madrid and naval attache at Lisbon, and as an adviser on Spanish problems to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at Paris. He studied emigration from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria, and political conditions in India, China, Japan, Australia and South Africa. He was a delegate to international congresses of anthropology and a member of the Jury of Awards for the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.

In 1897 and 1898 he was called as an expert forensic witness in the murder trial of Adolph Luetgert, identifying four tiny fragments of bone as human and helping gain the arrest and conviction of Luetgert for the murder of his wife.

Marriage and family

Dorsey married Ida Chadsey on December 8, 1892, while completing his PhD. They had two children: Dorothy Ann and George Chadsey Dorsey. They separated in April 1914 and were subsequently divorced. Their daughter married and their son became a manager at Marshall Field & Company in Chicago.

Ida Chadsey Dorsey died in 1937. Dorsey married Sue McLellan after his divorce. He died suddenly in 1931 of an embolism at his home in New York City, shortly before he was to give a radio talk and his book On Civilization was published.