Honorary Chair
Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008
President
Daniel A. Bennett
Honorary President
James Fowler
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Honorary Chair Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008 |
President Daniel A. Bennett |
Honorary President James Fowler |
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Dr. Larry Agenbroad FN'65
Dr. Larry Agenbroad was born and raised in Idaho. After military service, he attended universities, earning four degrees, in Engineering; Geology; and Anthropology. He was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
He worked as a mining geologist, as an oil exploration geophysicist, and as a geoscientist on a nuclear test site. He initiated an earth sciences department in a state college, and later accepted a position at Northern Arizona University. He initiated a graduate program in Quaternary Studies, serving as the Director until 1996.
Agenbroad has been an active researcher since 1966, conducting field work in western North America. He has also conducted field research in Mexico and Siberia. He served as assistant director of several mammoth kill-sites, in southeast Arizona. He was the principal investigator of a series of Bison-jumps in Idaho, and was the principal investigator of a 9,820-year-old Bison-kill in northwest Nebraska. From 1974 to the present, he has served as the principal investigator of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota.
Since 1974, Agenbroad has studied alluvial, cave, and alcove deposits of the Colorado Plateau. In 1983, he helped research a large deposit of megafauna dung in a remote alcove, containing the first, intact, mammoth boli in this hemisphere. Since 1994, he has been the principal investigator of the pygmy mammoth (Mammuthus exilis) remains of the California Channel Islands. In 1999, he was invited to be the only American scientist on an international team to excavate and airlift a twenty-three-ton block of permafrost containing the remains of a woolly mammoth, from the tundra of northern Siberia, later made popular by the Discovery Channel television special "Raising the Mammoth".
Agenbroad has produced numerous professional publications in geology, hydrology, archaeology, and paleontology. He authored one book, co-authored another, and was editor or co-editor of several others. Several manuscripts are in press.
Barry Clifford MN'99
Barry Clifford is one of the world’s best-known underwater archaeological explorers. Born in 1945 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he has been involved in underwater surveys and recovery missions for virtually all of his life.
Clifford worked as a lifeguard, teacher, football coach and district executive of the Boy Scouts of America before starting his own salvage-diving business in the mid-1970s. Between 1974 and 1984, he utilized historical research, remote-sensing techniques, and underwater surveys to locate numerous shipwrecks around Cape Cod, including the Benedict Arnold, the first Revolutionary War-era privateer ever discovered.
In 1984, Clifford made world headlines with his discovery of the legendary shipwreck Whydah, which was wrecked in a storm off Cape Cod in 1717. The Whydah was the first pirate shipwreck ever discovered and authenticated and her treasures are still being recovered today. With his background as a teacher, Clifford has always sought to emphasize the educational aspects of his work—the Whydah collection has been kept intact at Expedition Whydah Sea Lab & Learning Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Clifford has been involved with the discovery, survey, and recovery of numerous other shipwrecks since then. In 1989, his team located an undredged site in Boston’s Inner Harbor with several shipwrecks that were associated with the Boston Tea Party and the evacuation of the city during the Revolutionary War. Between 1991 and 1994, he mounted expeditions to Panama and Belize that led to the discovery of several shipwrecks of historical and archaeological significance, including the possible resting place of the Satisfaction, a ship associated with the notorious pirate Henry Morgan.
In an ongoing project, Clifford is currently working to identify suspected remains of the Santa Maria, the flagship of Christopher Columbus, off the coast of Haiti. His work at this site was the subject of a 2004 documentary on the Discovery Channel. He is also the author of four books which document his expeditions and discoveries.
Dr. Michael Novacek FR'91
Michael Novacek has served since 1982 as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he is currently Senior Vice President and Provost of Science and Curator of Paleontology. Awarded a doctoral degree, with honors for outstanding graduate research, at the University of California, Berkeley (1978), his studies concern patterns of evolution and relationships among extinct and extant organisms. He has led paleontological expeditions to Baja California, the Andes Mountains of Chile, the Yemen Arab Republic, and Gobi Desert of Mongolia in search of fossil dinosaurs and mammals. The Mongolian expeditions mark the first return of a western scientific team to the country in over 60 years and have received worldwide scientific and public attention for their spectacular findings.
Novacek is the author of more than 150 titles, including articles in the international scientific journals Science and Nature. Since 1982 he has published a series of monographs and papers on the broader evolution of mammals, culminating in a major review of molecular and morphological evidence, featured as a cover article in Nature (March 1992), where he is also a frequent invited-contributor to the "News and Views" section. He has co-edited books on Extinction and Phylogeny (1992), Mammal Phylogeny (1993) and edited The Biodiversity Crisis, Losing What Counts (2001). He is the author of a popular book on the Gobi expeditions, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs (1996) and on his experiences as a fledgling paleontologist and eventually an expedition leader, Time Traveler (2002).
He is also a contributor to the magazines Natural History, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and Time. His research has been supported by many agencies, including the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, Sloan Foundation, Eppley Foundation, and the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX). In recognition of his worldwide explorations, he received the "Roy Chapman Andrews Society Distinguished Explorer’s Award for 2003".
Dr. Rick Potts FN'95
Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts is the director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program and curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. He received his BA in anthropology from Temple University in 1975 and his PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1982, after which he taught anthropology at Yale University and served as curator of physical anthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum.
A renowned specialist in human origins research, Potts joined the Smithsonian staff in 1985. He has spent much of his career piecing together a record of Earth’s environmental change and human adaptation to those shifts. His ideas about how human evolution was a response to environmental uncertainty and disruption have stimulated wide attention and new research in several scientific fields. During Potts’s tenure at the Smithsonian, he has developed a program of international collaboration among scientists interested in the ecological aspects of human evolution. He leads excavations at early human sites in the East African Rift Valley, including the famous handaxe site of Olorgesailie, Kenya, and Kanam near Lake Victoria, Kenya. He also co-directs ongoing projects in southern and northern China that compare evidence of early human behavior and environments from eastern Africa to eastern Asia.
The author of numerous research articles and books, such as Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai (Aldine de Gruyter, 1988) and Humanity’s Descent: The Consequences of Ecological Instability (William Morrow and Co., 1996), Potts has also been interviewed numerous times on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Talk of the Nation and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He has been the recipient of a number of honors, including a Certificate of Honor by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the Emmy Award-winning Tales of the Human Dawn on PBS in 1990 and election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2004.
Dr. Patricia Sutherland
For over thirty years, Dr. Patricia Sutherland has undertaken pioneering research into the human history of remote regions of northern North America. She was among the first archaeologists to work on the Queen Charlotte Islands in northern British Columbia, where her excavations defined a unique early cultural tradition. She was one of the first women to undertake archaeological research in Arctic Canada and since 1975 has worked from the Mackenzie Delta in the western Arctic to Labrador, Baffin Island, and northwards to the High Arctic regions of Canada and Greenland.
Much of her field research has been carried out with the involvement of local communities, and she has been at the forefront among Arctic researchers in her commitment to the mentoring of Inuit students. Over the past three decades, her contributions to knowledge of Arctic history have been significant and diverse. Her research has addressed the entire range of human history in Arctic Canada, from the earliest occupations of the High Arctic approximately 5000 years ago to the nineteenth-century search for the lost Franklin expedition. This work has been reported in numerous publications, and she has lectured widely to audiences in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Her interpretations of Palaeo-Eskimo art resulted in the exhibition "Lost Visions, Forgotten Dreams: The Life and Art of an Ancient Arctic People", which was shown in Europe and North America and for which she received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Research from the Canadian Museums Association.
Her most recent endeavor, the Helluland Archaeology Project, is focused on the investigation of cultural contact between early Europeans and the aboriginal occupants of the eastern Arctic in the centuries around AD 1000. Sutherland currently holds the position of Curator of Eastern Arctic Archaeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
RETURN TO LOWELL THOMAS 2005 PAGE
Stephanie Chambers
Tel: 212-628-8383, ext. 18
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