Henry Field (anthropologist) - Early Career

Early Career

After being awarded his B.A., Field moved back to Chicago in 1926 to begin working for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as assistant curator of physical anthropology. Field's first participation in an expedition was in the University of Oxford/Field Museum excavation of Kish. His work included 5000 photographs of the excavations and portraits of the modern villagers. Beginning in the late 1920s the Field Museum began planning for the upcoming Chicago World's Fair. Field supervised the creation of two permanent exhibitions. The "Hall of Prehistoric Man" had nine full-size dioramas of early life augmented by artifacts collected by Field. The "Hall of the Races of Mankind" had over 100 full sized sculptures of different races by the renowned sculptor Malvina Hoffman. The exhibitions were ready on time for the opening of the fair, the Century of Progress, on 30 May 1933. In 1934 Field was promoted to Head Curator of physical anthropology. One important acquisition Field made for the Museum was "Magdalenian Girl" which is still on display today and remains the most complete Upper Paleolithic skeleton available for study in North America. Field went back to Iraq in 1934 and made anthropometic surveys of Marsh Arabs, Shammar bedouins, and Kurds.

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