Benjamin Irving Rouse

ROUSE, Benjamin Irving Benjamin Irving Rouse, 92, died at home in North Haven, Connecticut, of congestive heart failure on February 4, 2006. He was professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale University and curator emeritus at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He continued his work on Caribbean archaeology until shortly before his death. Rouse was born in Rochester, NY, on August 29, 1913. He came to Yale University in 1930 as an undergraduate in order to study plant science so that he could go on to graduate studies in forestry. The stock market crash and the closure of the bank with his savings led Rouse to seek employment at Yale's Peabody Museum, where he was assigned the task of cataloguing archaeological artifacts under the tutelage of Cornelius Osgood. This new activity led him to begin taking graduate courses in anthropology and eventually to complete his undergraduate degree at Yale in 1934 and his PhD in 1938. Rouse's fascination with taxonomy and his exposure to linguistic anthropology led him to focus on issues of pottery classification and prehistoric systematics. His 1938 dissertation and the resulting 1939 book Prehistory in Haiti: A Study in Method was hailed as a pioneering work both for its substantive contributions to Caribbean archaeology and its innovative theoretical contributions to artifact analysis. Rouse stayed at Yale throughout his career, rising in the ranks of the anthropology department from instructor (1939–43) to associate professor (1948–54) and finally to professor (1954–79); in 1979 he was appointed as the C J MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, a position which he held until his retirement in 1984. During this time he carried out pioneering archaeological investigations throughout the Caribbean, most notably in Puerto Rico (1936–38, 1962), Cuba (1941), Florida (1944, 1949), Trinidad (1946, 1953), Venezuela (1946, 1950, 1955–57, 1961–62), Antigua (1958, 1970, 1973–74), Martinique (1950, 1962, 1974), St Lucia (1953), Guadeloupe (1962), the Bahamas (1966) and the Dominican Republic (1967, 1971, 1973). His systematic approach to research and his meticulous work habits enabled him to publish virtually all of his abundant fieldwork, a claim that few archaeologists can match. He was a major figure in the central theoretical debates concerning archaeological approaches to culture history prior to the emergence of "New Archaeology" and his concept of modes and his analysis of migrations continue to be influential, as do his chronological and cultural insights for Caribbean prehistory. Rouse was actively involved in the profession, serving as the president of the American Anthropological Association from 1967–68, vice president of the American Ethnological Society from 1957–58, and president of the Society for American Archaeology from 1952–53. He was also the editor of American Antiquity from 1946–50 and associate editor of American Anthropologist from 1960–62. During his career he was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1960 he received the Viking Fund Medal and Award in Anthropology. Despite all of these eminent positions and prestigious awards, Ben Rouse remained an exceptionally kind and modest man who was always willing to help students and colleagues. Up to his death he remained active and open to new ideas, always emphasizing that his writings were the product of his background and times. Ben Rouse shared most of his adult life with the late Mary Uta Mikami Rouse, who had been a graduate school classmate of his at Yale. They are survived by their two sons, Peter and David, and a granddaughter Hana. There will a conference held in his honor on April 20-21, 2007 at Yale University. For more information, please contact Rachel Lease at (203) 432-8403 or archaeology@yale.edu.