ASU Research E-Magazine: Telling the Human Story

Why become an anthropologist or archaeologist? Genetics can play a role. Gwyneira Isaac says that having a passion for learning about and telling the human story is another driving force.

As a young girl, Gwyneira Isaac and her family spent many long, hot summers in the wilds of East Africa. Big game was not the object of their trips to Kenya. Rather, their annual summer visits were family reunions and a continuing search for more and better information about the origins of humanity on this planet.

Isaac’s father was the late Glynn Isaac, one of the world’s foremost experts on the archaeology of human origins. Professor Isaac enjoyed having his family with him while he and his colleagues worked at Kenya’s famed Koobi Fora archaeological site.

“The study of human origins was my father’s passion,” remembers Isaac, now an assistant professor of anthropology at Arizona State University. “He wanted others to share in his excitement about human history. His philosophy brought together Kenyans and visiting researchers from many countries. The staff at Koobi Fora spoke of his sense of humor and how, even in Swahili, he always encouraged everyone to laugh together. This is how I remember him best.”

Surrounded by science and scientists while growing up the daughter of world-famous researcher, it might come as no surprise that Isaac herself became a scientist. But her personal passion is not focused as much on the actual act of discovery at a dig site. Instead, she revels in telling the story behind the dig and explaining what those discoveries mean to members of an interested general public. Today, Isaac works as the director of the Museum of Anthropology on the ASU main campus.

Isaac was raised in Berkeley, Calif., during the 1960s. She has fond memories of growing up in such an exciting community at such a precarious time in history. At age 11, her parents sent her to boarding school in England. “My parents wanted a more rigorous academic setting for my sister and me,” she explains. But Africa was always where the family met during the summer. “Once you’ve experienced Africa and archaeological fieldwork, you’re hooked,” Isaac says. “Although, becoming an anthropologist was not really my first choice.”

As an undergraduate, Isaac had no intention of following in her father’s footsteps. Instead, she earned a degree in photography from the University of Michigan. “I’ve always loved art, photography in particular. Before graduate school I worked as a research assistant with the African Research Institute at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia,” she says. “My role was to photograph various African collections for a catalog of the artifacts. I really enjoyed the work. But I was actually more fascinated with the content within the photos. That’s what captured my attention.”

The content in those photographs really examined the material culture of various African tribes—they presented items you could touch and see. Scientists like to categorize things to simplify their programs of study. Anthropologists consider structures built for shelter and personal belongings such as tools and clothing as representations of material culture. Language, music, stories, customs, and religious beliefs are examples of non-material culture.

“The study of material culture is really just learning how to understand the relationship between people and things,” Isaac says.

It was the idea of combining the two disciplines, her two loves—photography and anthropology—that directed Isaac to her graduate studies. By 1995, she had completed a pair of graduate degrees at Oxford University in ethnology and museum ethnology. She earned a doctorate in social and cultural anthropology from Oxford in 2002. That work brought her to Arizona.

Isaac’s dissertation research revolved around the photo archives of the Zuni tribe in northern Arizona. She spent two consecutive summers studying and documenting the archives. Her goal was to understand how the Zuni Heritage Museum could best be used as a multi-purpose location for both Zuni residents and outside visitors.

Isaac seemed destined to spend more time in Arizona. Today, the ASU Museum of Anthropology is providing plenty of opportunities for her to put her education and talent to work.

“In 2004, we plan to launch an exhibition that is focused on the ancient city of Teotihuacan,” she says.

ASU archaeologists George Cowgill, Saburo Sugiyama, and teams of graduate students have spent decades studying the ruins of the ancient city, including years of sweaty, back-bending excavation at the Pyramid of the Moon.

Teotihuacan (pronounced tay-oh-TEE-wa-kahn) grew into a major population center 30 miles northeast of what is now Mexico City around the first century. The massive, stepped pyramids of the sun and the moon were built sometime during the next few hundred years. At its peak in the sixth century, the city was larger than Imperial Rome, covering eight square miles. And its 150,000 people made the city more populous than Washington, D.C. during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, more than 1,300 years later.

In its day, Teotihuacan was a Mesoamerican superpower. Its dominance over the region was so complete that its cultural influence can still be found in prehistoric sites as far as 1,100 miles away in Guatemala.

This was an amazing culture,” Isaac explains. “The challenge for us is how to best tell their story. My vision is to bring this exhibition to life. I want to immerse visitors in the sounds and the visuals, really give them a feeling of what life was like so many years ago in the streets of Teotihuacan.”—Lenora Johanson