gic Services (OSS), then returned to research. The 

 American Museum of Natural History provided 

 him with a desk, and in 1945 mounted a major ex- 

 hibition of his photographs. Then, for the rest of 

 his life, he journeyed, again and again, around the 

 world. A tiny cabin and vegetable garden near 

 Woodstock, New York, served as home base. "I live 

 like a hermit," he noted, "and know only two 

 people, besides shopkeepers, in my small commu- 

 nity." Yet he remained connected to the rest of the 

 world through travel and correspondence. He prob- 

 ably spent more on stamps than on food. 



Schuster's correspondence file, which with the rest 

 of his archive is now housed in the Museum of Eth- 

 nology in Basel, Switzerland, includes more than 

 18,000 information-packed pages, which he typed 

 single-spaced with narrow margins. Most of his cor- 

 respondents were leading scholars, but others were 

 self-trained, living in remote 

 areas, who had never shared 

 their work until Schuster ar- 

 rived. Long after his death, let- 

 ters from isolated places con- 

 tinued to arrive, filled with da- 

 ta, drawings, and photographs. 



Schuster may sound like a 

 classic amateur, a dilettante, 

 but he never wandered aim- 

 lessly. He deduced where ev- 

 idence was likely to be, wrote 

 endless letters, then went di- 

 rectly to the museum, village, 

 or person he had identified. 

 For example, he knew every 

 ethnographic specimen, in- 

 cluding two painted robes of 

 immense historical value, that 

 was stored — along with dried 

 food, trade goods, and used 

 nails — in a shed on an isolat- 

 ed ranch in Patagonia. Little 

 escaped him. On one occa- 

 sion, he tracked down a re- 

 tired physician in France 

 who, as a medical officer with 

 the Foreign Legion in North 

 Africa, had recorded tattoos 

 on prostitutes and prisoners 

 there and carefully annotated each sketch. 



One of the last specimens he photographed was 

 a stone bead discovered by an amateur archaeologist 

 in the Nevada desert. That a collector had spotted 

 such a small, crude object exposed by the wind on 

 a dune in the Humboldt Sink — and recognized it as 

 a human artifact — is astonishing. That Schuster al- 



Female figurines from an early nineteenth-century 

 Eskimo grave in the central Canadian Arctic (left) 

 and from the 22,000-year-old Siberian archaeologi- 

 cal site of Malta (right) were both pierced for hang- 

 ing upside down. Such inversion may have symbol- 

 ized death, indicating that the person portrayed 

 was an ancestor. 



most immediately found the collector is equally as- 

 tonishing, but typical. 



Behind this lifelong search was pure will, betrayed 

 at the end only by health. "1 came to the brink of a 

 very steep downgrade," he recorded when traveling 

 in the Southwest, shortly before his death, "and 

 knowing my physical disability at the time (I was 

 having heart trouble and unable to walk even a few 

 steps without getting out of breath), I felt unwilling 

 to risk that slope in a desert where I could not have 

 expected help from any passers-by." 



In ancient iconography similar forms appear again 

 and again across wide regions. Presumably, they 

 once had meanings. Yet the scholarly consensus is that 

 those meanings cannot be recovered. Schuster doubt- 

 ed this. He believed answers survived among living 

 tribal peoples. Nevertheless, he shunned controversy: 



I avoid discussions of principles 

 and devote my energy to build- 

 ing up a picture of the world as 

 it is, by looking at it, instead of 

 arguing about it, and drawing in- 

 ferences from what I see. 



Of the many "puzzling 

 parallels" Schuster docu- 

 mented, one of the simplest 

 was the inverted figure [see 

 photographs at left]. Many Pa- 

 leolithic "Venus" figurines, 

 some made as early as 30,000 

 years ago, were perforated at 

 their ankles so that they could 

 be suspended upside down. 

 From that ancient beginning 

 the practice continued for 

 millennia in several parts of 

 the world, particularly in the 

 Arctic, where it survived into 

 the nineteenth century, and in 

 Oceania, until well into the 

 twentieth. The significance in 

 Paleolithic times of inverting 

 a figure is surely lost to us, who 

 live so much later in time. Or 

 is it? Until recently, certain 

 tribes in the interior of Bor- 

 neo made entire necklaces of inverted female figures. 

 Their carvers identified the figures as ancestors. And 

 why were they inverted? Inversion, explained the 

 carvers, symbolized death. 



Examples of such symbolic reversal delight the so- 

 called structural anthropologists, who seek to tease 

 out the logic behind symbols. Preeminent among 



44 NATURAL HISTORY May 2006 



