AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 70:289-291(1986)

Obituary: Glynn Llywelyn Isaac, 1937-1985 BERNARD WOOD Department ofdnatomy, The University of Liverpool, Liuerpool, England

Glynn Isaac died in Japan, after a short illness, on October 5th, 1985.

Glynn joined the Department of Anthropol- ogy of the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. He was on the staff for 17 years before moving to become Professor of Anthro- pology in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in 1983; he was to have been the first George Grant MacCurdy Professor in that Department. Glynn was an archaeolo- gist, but it was proper that he worked within Anthropology Departments, for he, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, saw the need to set the record of early hominid

behaviour within the broader contexts of the relevant comparative and palaeontolog.lca1 evidence.

Glynn, and his identical twin Rhys, were born on November 19, 1937 in Cape Town. They were the product of an academic fam- ily; Edwyn, their father, was a Professor of Botany at the University.

Glynn began his archaeological interest as a member of the local archaeological society. While acknowledging that prehistory was to be his eventual goal, he realized that to be a “scientific” archaeologist it was necessary to have a thorough grounding in the earth and

0 1986 ALAN R. LISS, INC.

290 B. WOOD

life sciences. Thus, as a student of Professor Goodwin and Monica Wilson, whose influ- ence he always acknowledged, he took zool- ogy and geology as his main subjects at the University of Cape Town.

Both Glynn and Rhys left South Africa in the late 1950’s. An Elsie Ballot Scholarship took Glynn to Cambridge where, after 2 years, he supplemented his Cape Town BSC. with a BA specialist degree in archaeology awarded by the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. This involved general train- ing in both the theories and methods of ar- chaeology and an intensive study of the Palaeolithic period. His guides were Gra- hame Clark and the late Charles McBurney, and his Cambridge undergraduate experi- ence proved to be an ideal complement to his Cape Town education. During this time he took part in excavations and fieldwork in Britain and North Africa and worked with Hal Movius in France.

Cambridge was also a turning point in Glynn’s personal life, for it was during that time that he met a young education officer from Sheffield City Museum, Barbara Miller, whom he later married and with whom he shared a continuing interest in archaeology. Their skills were complementary, with Bar- bara providing the visual images of ideas he generated, and which they often debated. He wrote, she amended, edited, indexed, and collated. He fought to give her credit she deserved as, for instance, in the acknowl- edgements at the beginning of the Olorge- sailie monograph, where he wrote ‘‘she ought to be joint author, but will not accept her dues.”

After finishing his BA degree course, Glynn used the remaining two years of Ballot Schol- arship support to undertake prehistoric re- search in Kenya with Louis Leaky. From 1961 to 1962, Glynn was Warden of Prehis- toric Sites, and from 1963 to 1965, he was the Deputy Director of the Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology attached to the National Museum of Kenya. Leakey offered him the chance to work at Olorgesailie where he ex- panded the excavations and undertook the analysis of that Middle Pleistocene site. This work formed the topic of his PhD from the University of Cambridge, awarded in 1969. His analysis of the site was both vigorous and imaginative, and because of its attention to the problems of geological context, it pro- vided valuable experience for later work un- dertaken elsewhere in the East African Rift Valley. During this time Glynn was also co-

leader, with Richard Leakey, of an expedi- tion to the Peninj site near Lake Natron, where they recovered a hominid mandible and evidence of a stone culture.

Glynn left East Africa to join the Depart- ment of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. There, he joined Sherwood Washburn, Desmond Clark, Richard Hay, and later, Clark Howell. Be- tween them they developed what was quite possibly the most outstanding undergradu- ate and graduate program in prehistory. Pop- ular, charismatic, and inspiring as an undergraduate teacher, he was even more in his element with graduate students.

In 1969 his career took another turn when he first visited the fossil sites at Lake Rudolf, and later when he received an invitation from his old Natron colleague, Richard Leakey, to undertake the archaeological re- search at the then newly discovered site of East Rudolf. Glynn was later invited to co- lead the East Rudolf Research Project. This provided him with an opportunity for which he was uniquely equipped. East Rudolf (now Koobi Fora) provided, then and now, a series of technical archaeological problems on an unprecedented scale. Sites had to be found and excavated, and their spatial and behav- ioural contexts and implications had to be analysed. Glynn, along with his graduate students, was given support from the Na- tional Science Foundation, and they set about tackling the challenge. A series of research projects was undertaken, with studies rang- ing from the effect of seasonal fluvial activity on artifact assemblages to carefully designed sampling studies of the distribution of sur- face artifacts.

The work at Koobi Fora led to the develop- ment of a series of hypotheses about the sig- nificance of the collections of stone tools and animal bones there and at other broadly syn- chronic sites. The concept of a “home base” with its secondary predictions about such places being loci for food sharing and/or its processing emerged from this work. What is now sometimes forgotten is that these were highly innovative analyses of the evidence. Their strength was that they were always presented as hypotheses and not as dogma. Glynn was an inveterate “model” builder, but his were models of ideas, not of objects. It is a credit to both his insistence on the use of the hypotheticodeductive method and to the quality of his data that more recent alter- native hypotheses can be put to the test. The mark of a true scientist is willingness to test

OBITUARY GLYNN LLYWELYN ISAAC 291

his or her own hypotheses. Glynn was will- ing and eager to do this. His graduate stu- dents, many already distinguished prehis- torians, have undertaken a series of such tests, some involving modern analogues of hunter-gatherer strategies, others concen- trating on the stone tools and the bone rem- nants themselves, and yet others on the processes affecting the distribution of such evidence. He was not afraid to modify his own interpretations, and while new analyses may result in a shift of emphasis from hunt- ing towards scavenging, the basis for these reinterpretations will always be the sound data he and his colleagues collected.

Glynn’s contribution to research at Koobi Fora was, however, much more profound than his strictly archaeological work. He en- couraged, pushed, and prodded all those concerned; palaeontologists, geologists, geo- physicists alike. He structured the annual meetings of the old East Rudolf Research Project (later the Koobi Fora Research Proj- ect) to ensure fruitful interaction between disciplines. He was knowledgeable about hominid paleontology and was a persistent advocate of integrating the results of func- tional morphological analysis with other more or less direct lines of evidence of homi- nid function, such as tool manufacture as an index of dexterity and conceptualization, and the location of archaeological sites in rela- tion to the source of raw material as an indi- cator of locomotor ability and ranging behaviour.

His scientific output was typical of the per-

son he was. In constant demand to produce symposium papers, he used these occasions to advance the level or direction of his criti- cal analyses. His own monographic contri- butions, as well as his coediting endeavours (e.g., with Karl Butzer--“After the Australo- pithecines”-and with Elizabeth McCown- “Human Origins”) were all of high quality. The Archaeology Volume for the Koobi Fora Research Project Series (published by Clar- endon Press) was in the later stages of prep- aration when he died, and it is typical of Barbara’s close involvement with his work that she, and his former students, are in the process of completing it. Recognition of his research eminence came in the form of a Miller Professorship at the University of Cal- ifornia in 1971-72 and the award of a J. S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in

The title of one of his papers was “Casting the Net Wide,” and Glynn did just that at both the scientific and personal levels. As well as being a much-valued scientific col- league, Glynn was a good friend to many of us: indeed, in some instances our most relia- ble ,and loyal friend. On both scientific and personal levels he could be relied upon through thick and thin, and, difficult as it is to believe now, we will come to miss him more, not less, as the months and years pass. To Barbara, Ceri, and Gwyneira, his col- leagues and friends can but offer solace that Glynn’s influence was, and will be, profound and lasting.

1975-76.