Carroll Riley and Charles H. Lange. 1996. The Life and Adventures of Adolph Bandelier. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Born in 1840 in Bern, Switzerland, Bandelier emigrated with his family in 1848 to a farm and vineyard in Highland, Illinois, a small mainly Swiss settlement on the Looking Glass Prairie near St. Louis, Missouri. The mix of languages in frontier Illinois gave Adolph a grounding in French, German, and English; he was later to add Latin and Spanish. He spent his childhood working on the family farm, and his young adulthood working in a bank. In 1860, he began recording local meteorological data, and through his work became familiar with the scientific community in St. Louis. And so it was that the small town boy from the midwest became infected with the love of science. In 1873, while on a business trip to Rochester, New York, Bandelier met Lewis Henry Morgan, and his fate was sealed. It turned out they had a mutual interest: in poking around the libraries of the midwest, Bandelier stumbled across a copy of the Crónica Mexicana, written in 1598, and Morgan was trying to understand the governmental systems of the Native Americans but didn't read Spanish.
Bandelier: the Life and Adventures of Adolph Bandelier is a biography of Bandelier, written in 1996 by Charles H. Lange and Carroll L. Riley. Lange and Riley also edited Bandelier's personal journals, and their familiarity with their subject is well reflected in the pages of this book. They trace Bandelier's life through his first lay interest in ethnography and archaeology, through his abrupt career change at the age of 40, into his disastrous first attempts at ethnography at Santo Domingo and more successful work at Cochiti pueblos, in the American southwest.
From his travels in the American southwest, into Mexico and South America, Bandelier published work on mythology in the islands of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia; site plan maps and archaeological studies of Gran Quivira and Casa Grande, New Mexico; a history of the Zuni Indians; and diverse studies of politics, environment, government, history, mineralogy, culture, and religion of North and South Americas; and a raft of others in English, Spanish, German, French.
Bandelier's life was rich, fraught with disaster and success. Curiously, but perhaps inevitably, the book whets your appetite for a glimpse into his journals. Oh, the wonders he saw!
From his travels in the American southwest, into Mexico and South America, Bandelier published work on mythology in the islands of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia; site plan maps and archaeological studies of Gran Quivira and Casa Grande, New Mexico; a history of the Zuni Indians; and diverse studies of politics, environment, government, history, mineralogy, culture, and religion of North and South Americas; and a raft of others in English, Spanish, German, French.
Bandelier's life was rich, fraught with disaster and success. Curiously, but perhaps inevitably, the book whets your appetite for a glimpse into his journals. Oh, the wonders he saw!
