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Vaughn Bryant: Reader of the Invisible Dust
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18202 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
3,218 Words |
| Author
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David Lampe
David Lampe is a free-lance nonfiction writer and the author
of five books. |
Vaughn M. Brant, Jr. head of the Anthropology Department at Texas A&M University, recalls his first field trip in 1960 as a college freshman:
"The site, overlooking a dry tributary of the Rio Grande in arid southwest Texas, was a large rock shelter inhabited continuously for 9,000 years.
"At lunch, in the Cliffside cave's mouth, the head archaeologist talked about what could be learned from the things found on the site. He also talked about what he'd like to learn, but couldn't about the diet of those early cultures. Had it been healthy? What kinds of seeds had they harvested? What animals had they prepared their food?
"And all the while he talked to us he was idly playing with cowpatty-shaped, fossilized, prehistoric human feces, known as coprolites, that lay all around us, skipping them out into the thermals that swirled up from the canyon bottom. It never occurred to him that all material deserved a second glance. To the archaeologist those coprolites, so plentiful that they nearly clogged the screen used to sift the dirt, were a nuisance.
Although coprolites would one day play a major role in Bryant's career, in 1960 they meant no more to him than they did to that archeologist. Bryant was, after all, a geography major, and the field trip was merely an interesting break in his routine.
Born in 1940 in Dallas, Vaughn Bryant spent most of his childhood in South America, where his father was an Associated Press correspondent. Upon returning to the United States, Bryant enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin as a journalism major, but soon decided that this was the wrong field. "I didn't want to write about the things they wanted me to write about, so I switched my major to cartography in the geography department," he recalls.
Upon receiving his B.A., Bryant prepared to study for is master's, but when a hoped-for assistantship position in the geography department didn't materialize, he switched to anthropology, where he was offered a job as a mapmaker.
While Bryant was working on a graduate degree in anthropology, the department applied for and received a major grant to do a paleoenvironmental study of southwest Texas. Although the grant proposal included fossil pollen studies, the department had no paleontologist to conduct
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