Marshall Howard Saville

Marshall Howard Saville (* 1867 in Rockport, Massachusetts, † 1935) was an American archaeologist for America.

Life

1889-1894 he studied anthropology at Harvard University and first operational field research under the direction of Frederic Ward Putnam. In southern Ohio, he took important discoveries concerning the Moundbuilder cultures. From 1903, he taught American Archaeology at Columbia University. He also was director of the Museum of the American Indian ( Heye Foundation), whose collection has gone from thousands of artifacts now in the care of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Saville led important archaeological sites in Yucatan, Honduras, Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia. He baptized the Olmec culture after a tribe that inhabited at the time of the Aztecs that region of the Gulf of Mexico, where the main sites of the Olmec culture was discovered.

He affirmed that discussed around 1900 issue of whether there had been in Central America before the arrival of Europeans stringed instruments. The reason he interpreted in an Aztec manuscript an unusual depiction of musicians as " pre-Columbian music group" and saw a figure in a musical bow player. After several investigations in the subsequent period, this view is now considered refuted.