Personal Comments of Dr. Reinhard for K-12

How I Became an Anthropologist:

Many people are surprised when I tell them that I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. I have lived most of my life outside the USA and even my name is foreign. But actually lived the first 18 years of my life New Lenox, which in 1943 (when I was born) was a village of 800 people in Illinois farm country. My early adventures were of hunting, fishing, and camping along Hickory Creek, which flowed through our town. Like many of my friends, I collected fossils and arrowheads, read the Hardy Boys, and experimented with rockets…most of which exploded on the launch pad. I began to read more about explorers and was soon dreaming of visiting faraway lands.

The first opportunity to be on my own came when I was 16 years old. I worked with Southerners on a railroad line gang traveling throughout the Midwest. We dug holes by hand and put up telegraph poles. The men were all much older than me and came from much different backgrounds. To me they were like people from another world—and in a way they were. As a Northerner I had to act and talk like they did in order to become accepted. Without knowing it, I had begun to behave like an anthropologist, constantly learning more about how these strange men thought. Perhaps even more importantly, I discovered that I could do hard labor and earn my own keep--and thus independence.

When I graduated from high school, I traveled alone to South America with money I had saved from working on the line gang. It was during that trip that I knew that my fascination with other cultures was not just a passing fad. I decided that I wanted to learn more about both civilizations of the past and people living totally different lives from mine in other parts of the world. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found out that there was an actual profession for doing this…anthropology.

The more I read about anthropology, the more I thought that I should learn tools that I could use in different situations I might find myself. Some of these tools were academic ones, such as linguistics (which taught me how to learn unwritten languages) and archaeological excavation techniques. Others were rather less academic, and included sky diving, scuba diving, mountain climbing, cave exploring, and sailing. I thought that these would enable me to undertake exploration in places that few, if any, anthropologists had worked before.

After studying anthropology for a couple of years in the USA, it seemed to me only logical that, if I was going to be an anthropologist and live in other cultures and speak other languages, I might as well study anthropology in a foreign country and kill two birds with one stone. So I went to Europe and studied German and then continued my studies at the University of Vienna in Austria.

My first cultural anthropological field experience was with sponge divers in Greece and soon afterwards my first archaeological experience was underwater in the Mediterranean Sea. Ironically, the first job I had in archaeology was also one of the most interesting that I have ever had. I was 21 years old and still studying archaeology at the University of Vienna, when I was able to work with one of the fathers of underwater archaeology, Peter Throckmorton. We spent the summer of 1965 conducting underwater archaeological surveys in the Mediterranean Sea and in a lake in Italy. First we recovered Roman artifacts off the coast of southern Italy. Then we surveyed a village site of the 3,000 year old Villanovan culture. We uncovered artifacts that had never been seen before. I not only was able to learn how to do archaeology in the field (even if underwater!), I also was able to participate in some of the most exciting research being done at the time.

But my main desire was to gain experience in a culture as different from my own as possible, and so I focused on studying nomadic hunter-gatherers. Only a few such societies existed in the world, and one I found was in the foothills of the Himalayas. I was interested in how they kept their way of life and what happened when some groups of their tribe had settled and taken up agriculture. But above all, I was fascinated by shamanism and how it related to the natural environment. Later my research focused on the importance of the sacred Himalayan mountains in Buddhism and Hinduism and on the "hidden lands" of Tibetan Buddhism.

I choose a project after I have weighed several factors: Has it the potential to provide new knowledge or otherwise be beneficial to people? Will I learn from it, both in a scientific sense and in terms of my own personal growth? Can I do the job as well, or better than, other people who might do it? Is it something that I will not regret having done, even if it is unsuccessful otherwise? If I can answer yes to those questions, then the rest is easy.

Over time my interests in mountains, religion, and archaeology grew together until I found that they combined in a unique way in the Andes. I was able to develop new theories based on original research to help explain some of the greatest enigmas of South American archaeology: the Nazca Lines (giant figures drawn in the desert of Peru over a millennium ago), Machu Picchu (the famous Inca site), Chavin de Huantar (which originated high in the Andes at nearly 1000 B.C. and is considered to be the first center of a shared Andean culture), and Tiahuanaco (the center for one of the most important Andean cultures which arose at about 300 A.D., affected much of the central Andes, and lasted beyond the end of the first millennium). My training in underwater archaeology led him to an investigation of one of the most sacred geographical features of the Andes: Lake Titicaca. Our work at an underwater site worshipped by both the Incas and people of Tiahuancaco marks the first true underwater archeological study that has been undertaken in the Andes and resulted in finds unique to the archaeological record. The study of mountain worship also led to my investigating the world’s highest archaeological sites. I was at first interested in trying to explain why the Incas had climbed to altitudes not even reached by man until 400 years later. I began surveying and excavating the sites, and my research over a 16 year period eventually led to the discovery of the Ice Maiden.