Anna Roosevelt

at 11:55AM, 1:55PM, and 3:55PM

Many people would assume that Anna Roosevelt’s love of exploration and discovery stemmed directly from her great-grandfather, President Theodore Roosevelt. Known mainly for his love of adventure and American leadership, he also led a 1914 expedition that mapped a river in the Amazon that had never previously been charted by white men. While she can’t deny that the urge to explore is in her blood, Anna credits her mother for her love of archeology.

Anna explains that her mother was always highly interested in archeology and gave Anna books to read on the topic at a very young age. At the age of nine, Anna decided she wanted to be an archeologist and her mother thought that was a fine choice, despite the fact that there weren’t many women entering the field at the time.

Anna’s interest has primarily been with the Paledonian pre-history era and learning how the cave dwellers of this time interacted with each other and adapted to their surroundings. In the mid-nineties, she led an international team to South America in search of new evidence of human settlements that once existed in that area.

In 1996, Anna completed a report on an excavation of Caverna da Pedra that she conducted over a two-year span. The cave is located in Brazil, near the town of Monte Alegre. In her exploration, she found multiple stone artifacts shaped as pointed projectiles. Gauging the age of her findings by using a combination of carbon and thermoluminescence dating, she estimated that the stone and other ancient remains she found were between 10,900-11,200 years old. The common theory among archeologists has always been that the earliest settlers in North America at that time were big-game hunters. But the stone, spearheaded-like shapes that Anna discovered would have been more suitable for killing large fish, not animals such as mammoths and bison.

Anna was also involved in a study of pre-historic settlements in Orinoco, Venezuela. She discovered that approximately 1,000 years ago, there had been civilizations that grew corn for food. The common notion up until that point was that people from that era lived like Native Americans and were hunter-gatherers. Anna challenged that idea with her discoveries.

Anna’s findings created quite a stir in the field of archeologists, because her theories challenged earlier beliefs. To Anna, there is no “right or wrong” in her field, just exciting discoveries about the conditions of life, and how humans adjusted to that life, thousands of years ago.