SPIER, LESLIE

SPIER, LESLIE (1893–1961), U.S. anthropologist. Born in New York City, he became a student of franz boas , later serving as assistant anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. From 1939 he taught at the University of New Mexico where he established a department of anthropology. Influenced also by R.H. Lowie and C. Wissler, he did his field work on various North American Indian tribes, principally among the Zuñi and Yumans. In North American ethnology Spier studied cultural traits over a continuous geographical area to achieve a historical reconstruction of human history. Such a paper as "Sun Dance of the Plains Indians" represents a significant contribution to cultural historical analysis by mapping the distribution of different elements in a cultural complex. He also studied the ghost dance and nativistic movement in the Northern Plains in 1890. Spier worked among the Indians of the Northern plains to salvage the vestiges of dying cultures. All of Spier's work is characterized by methodological restraint and sobriety. He founded and edited anthropological journals and helped to establish American anthropology as an academic discipline. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: H.W. Basehart and W.W. Hill, in: American Anthropologist, 67 (1965), 1258–77, incl. bibl.; IESS, 15 (1968), 130–1, incl. bibl. (Ephraim Fischoff)