BIOGRAPHY:
• Froelich Rainey (1907-1992)
grew up in eastern Montana, working as a cowhand at a family owned ranch. In 1929 he went to Shanghai, but following the U.S. Stock market crash, Rainey found himself stranded in China. He traveled through much of southeast Asia, including the Philippines, where he taught English for awhile in Luzon. Upon returning to the U.S. Rainey began graduate school at Yale University at the encouragement of Cornelius Osgood of the Peabody Museum. Rainey did pioneering fieldwork in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico before accepting an offer from Clark Wissler of the American Museum to collaborate with Otto Geist in excavations in Alaska. In 1938 at the International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnology in Copenhagan, Rainey met Helge Larsen and in the following year the two men began research in Point Hope, Alaska. At Point Hope, Rainey and Larsen discovered one of the largest and oldest archaeological sites in the Artic, the Ipiutak site. With the American entry into World War II, Rainey found work as the director of the U.S. Quinine Mission in Ecuador and by 1944 had joined the Foreign Service. At the war's end, Rainey was appointed U.S. Commissioner for the Rhine and later helped in the create what would later become the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1947 Rainey was appointed the director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and establish it as one of the leading archaeological research institutions in the world. Rainey helped introduce the fields of anthropology and archaeology to the world with his television series "What in the World" in the early 1950s. Rainey Froelich made important discoveries on four continents during his career and was a central figure in the development of Arctic archaeology. He died on October 11, 1992.

• Helge Larsen (1905-?)
studied at the University of Copenhagen and in 1935 became a curator at the Danish National Museum in the Department of Ethnography. Prior to his work in Alaska, Larsen had been engaged in archaeological research in Greenland. After excavations at Point Hope, Larsen became the Associate Curator of Prehistoric Archaeology at the American Museum (1942-45). Larsen continued working in Alaska, excavating an Ipiutak ceremonial center at Deering in 1950, but died before he could complete his research.

• Harry Shapiro (see Shapiro's field notes for a biography)

SUMMARY:
The Rainey-Larsen Point Hope Expedition (1939-41) was an archaeological investigation of what became known as the Ipiutak site in Alaska, jointly sponsored by the American Museum and the Danish National Museum. The work was carried out by Froelich Rainey of the University of Alaska and Helge Larsen of the Danish National Museum. James Louis Giddings Jr. joined the two to conduct tree ring dating on the site. In the final field season, Harry Shapiro of the American Museum arrived in Alaska to supervise the excavation of the numerous burials found there and made anthropomorphic measurements of Eskimo living in the Point Hope area. This site, the largest and oldest site yet found in the Arctic, led to a reconsideration of all known theories regarding the origins of the Eskimo or Inuit peoples. Some 10,000 artifacts were found at Point Hope, many bearing strong resemblances to traditions of northeastern and central Asia. The papers found here include correspondence, field notes, newspaper clippings and photographs from the Ipiutak site.

NOTES:
For more information, see:

"Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture" by Helge Larsen and Froelich Rainey. Anthropological Papers, Volume 41. 1948.

"Alaskan Eskimos," a video recording of the expedition, can be found in the Museum's Library