Person

Speck, Frank G. (Frank Gouldsmith), 1881-1950

1881-1950

Frank Gouldsmith Speck, an anthropologist and ethnographer at the University of Pennsylvania, specialized in the study of Algonquian and Iroquois peoples in both the Eastern woodlands of the U.S. and the boreal areas of Eastern Canada. His interest in these peoples had been sparked on a camping trip around 1900 when he became friends with young members of the Mohegan tribe in Connecticut. A graduate of Columbia University, having earned a BA and MA by 1905, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Yuchi people of Oklahoma among whom he had worked in 1904, 1905 and 1908, under noted anthropologist Franz Boas for a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1908. The University then hired him in a dual capacity as an assistant in ethnology at the university’s museum and instructor in anthropology. In 1912 he was appointed a full-time faculty member in the newly created Department of Anthropology; in 1913 he became chairman of the department, a role he filled until 1949.