Frederica de Laguna

Frederica ("Freddy") Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna (October 3, 1906 – October 6, 2004) was an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist influential for her work on Paleoindian and Alaska Native art and archaeology in the American northwest and Alaska.

She founded and chaired the anthropology department at Bryn Mawr College from 1938 to 1972 and served as vice-president of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) from 1949 to 1950 and as president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 1966 to 1967. De Laguna's honors include Bryn Mawr College's Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1972; her election into the National Academy of Sciences as the first woman, with former classmate Margaret Mead, in 1975; the Distinguished Service Award from the AAA in 1986; a potlatch from the people of Yakutat in 1996; and the Lucy Wharton Drexel Medal from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

Early life and education De Laguna was born to Theodore Lopez de Leo de Laguna and Grace Mead (Andrus) de Laguna, philosophy professors at Bryn Mawr College, on October 3, 1906, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was home-schooled by her parents until age nine due to frequent illness.

De Laguna's first funded expedition was to Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet, Alaska, in 1930 after Kaj Birket-Smith fell ill and was unable to continue with de Laguna as his research assistant. De Laguna instead secured funding from the University of Pennsylvania Museum and brought her brother Wallace, who was a geologist, as an assistant. The following year, the museum hired de Laguna to catalog their Eskimo collections and again financed two excavations to Cook Inlet in 1931 and 1932. She co-led an archaeological and ethnological expedition of Prince William Sound in 1933 with Birket-Smith; the trip became the basis for "The Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta, Alaska" (1938). De Laguna next explored the lower Yukon Valley and Tanana River in 1935 and published two works because of it: Travels Among the Dena (1994) and Tales from the Dena (1997).

Selected works 1930, The thousand march: Adventures of an American boy with the Garibaldi. Boston: Little, Brown. OCLC 3940490 1937, The arrow points to murder. Garden City, NJ: Crime Club, Inc. OCLC 1720968 1938, Fog on the mountain. Homer, AK: Kachemak Country Publications. OCLC 32748448 1972, Under Mount Saint Elias: The history and culture of the Yakutat Tlingit: Part one, pdf. Smithsonian contributions to anthropology, v. 7. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. OCLC 603795 1977, Voyage to Greenland: A personal initiation in anthropology. New York: Norton. OCLC 2646088 1991, with George Thornton Emmons, The Tlingit Indians. New York: American Museum of Natural History. OCLC 23463915 1994, with Norman Reynolds and Dale DeArmond, Tales from the Dena: Indian stories from the Tanana, Koyukuk, and Yukon rivers. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. OCLC 31518221 1997, Travels among the Dena: Exploring Alaska's Yukon valley. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. OCLC 42772476