Frederica de Laguna and Aleš Hrdlička: A Missed Collaboration

In the early 1930s, when Frederica de Laguna first conducted archaeological and ethnographic research in southcentral Alaska, Aleš Hrdlička was already working in the region. He had been coming to the territory since 1926 to collect human remains and study human populations. De Laguna was just beginning her long career; Hrdlička was already a well-known physical anthropologist, and they had little contact with one another. Later in her career, de Laguna was openly critical of Hrdlička. She particularly deplored his methodology at the Uyak site on Kodiak Island. For his part, Hrdlička never had much praise for de Laguna. This paper looks at the two scholars' differing fieldwork styles, and their responses to each other's work.