Authors 
While working on the design of a 
solar building, Lisa Heschong became 
intrigued with how thermal qualities — 
warm, cool, humid, airy, radiant, cozy 
— could be used, like light, as an effec- 
tive element of design. In her book 
Thermal Delight in Architecture , an 
excerpt from which introduces this 
special issue of Natural History , she 
has explored how people perceive 
hearths, gardens, and other places 
whose strong thermal qualities have 
special cultural associations. Hesch- 
ong, who has a master’s degree in 
architecture from the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, is a solar de- 
signer and a technical editor for Solar 
Age magazine. 
On the subject of being cold, Fred 
Bruemmer can be considered an ex- 
pert. He writes that he has “lived with 
the Eskimos in Alaska, the Canadian 
north, and in Greenland during more 
than twenty years of fieldwork, often 
for as much as seven months of the 
year. Naturally, when one is cold and 
miserable, the subject of how to keep 
warm tends to be uppermost in one’s 
mind.” He has, consequently, studied 
the various means that the Eskimos 
have evolved to enable them to live in 
reasonable comfort in a land with an 
extremely uncomfortable climate. 
Bruemmer has recently returned from 
the High Arctic, where he spent the 
summer investigating the behavior of 
beluga whales. 
Fascinated by the symbolism of fire 
in Siberian tribes, Catherine Perles be- 
gan to do research on the discovery 
and use of fire in prehistoric times. In 
1977 she wrote a book on the subject, 
Prehistoire du feu. An associate pro- 
fessor in the Department of Ethnology 
at the University of Paris at Nanterre, 
Perles has done archeological field- 
work in both France and Greece. Her 
interests include stone-tool technology, 
prehistoric food processing, and the 
importance of diet changes in human 
evolutionary development. 
Amanda Mayer Stinchecum’s ac- 
quaintance with traditional Japanese 
attitudes and customs concerning how 
to keep warm stems from her experi- 
ences while living and traveling in Ja- 
pan, as well as from her studies of 
Japanese art and literature. In particu- 
lar, she has a longstanding interest in 
clothing and hand-produced textiles 
and in the relation between dress and 
forms of society. Holder of a Ph.D. in 
Japanese and comparative literature 
from Columbia University, Stinche- 
cum is a free-lance journalist and mu- 
seum consultant. She is now in Japan 
on a grant from New York’s Metro- 
politan Museum of Art to research a 
book on Japanese “ikat” textiles — tex- 
tiles in which the yarns are partly dyed 
according to a planned pattern before 
being woven. 
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