ABSTRACT
From 1920 through 1940, the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, headed by Franz Boas until 1936, awarded forty doctoral degrees, twenty to women, twenty to men (Goldfrank 1978:18). Many of these young scholars, especially in the early period, wrote ‘library dissertations,’ drawing on the artifacts and books to be found in the museums and libraries of New York City (Babcock 1993:127n. 5). Fieldwork usually came later, after the Ph.D. It was largely to remedy this lack of field training, common to many anthropology departments in the 1920s, that the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was established in 1927, with a field training school first operating on a small scale in the summer of 1929 (Stocking 1982). One consequence of this pattern was that, until the 1930s, anthropologists seldom encountered Native American languages until their formal academic coursework was over and their areas of specialization already determined. From the holdings of museums, it was possible to study weaving and pottery.
