Karl Sapper
Karl Theodor Sapper ( Carl Sapper, born February 6, 1866 in Wittislingen, † March 29, 1945 in Garmisch -Partenkirchen ) was an itinerant collector, antiquarian, geographer, anthropologist and linguist in Mesoamerica around 1900.
Life
His parents were raisin cutter and August Sapper, owner of a forge. His brother was Richard August Sapper, who emigrated to Guatemala and there was owners of large coffee plantations.
Karl Sapper studied after attending high school in Ravensburg 1884-1888 Natural Sciences and Geology. In Munich, he completed his studies with a thesis about the geology of the Juifen and its surroundings with special emphasis on the Liasablagerung.
From 1889 to 1893 he held on with his brother Richard in Guatemala, where he worked as a manager of a coffee plantation of his brother. Together with Erwin Paul Dieseldorff (1868-1940) he made numerous archaeological excavations. 1893, Sapper briefly as state geologist in Mexico, from 1894 to 1900 again in Guatemala and in other places in the Central American region. In 1900 he qualified as a professor at Friedrich Ratzel in Leipzig with a thesis on Over the geological importance of tropical vegetation types in Central America and southern Mexico. In 1902 he was offered a professorship at the University of Tübingen and was initially ao Professor and in 1907 full professor of geography. The following year he undertook on behalf of the Imperial Colonial Office, together with the ethnologist Georg Friederici a research trip to the Bismarck Archipelago. In 1910 he became professor of geography and anthropology at the University of Strasbourg and 1919 followed erschließlich a chair at the University of Würzburg.
Sapper operation in the years of his stay in Mesoamerica next to the geology and volcanology and Linguistics operation. To Sappers contribution to the science of Mesoamerican languages heard his theory of the origin of the Mesoamerican languages , he situate 1912 in the border region between Chiapas and Guatemala. The cradle of the Proto - Maya was therefore probably in the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes. There are at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin a collection Sapper [Note 1].