Clara Lee Tanner
| Clara Lee Tanner | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1905 |
| Died | 1997 |
| Alma mater | University of Arizona |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
Clara Lee Tanner (May 28, 1905 – December 22, 1997) was an anthropologist known for studies of the arts and crafts of American Indians of the Southwest.
Born Clara Lee Fraps in Biscoe, North Carolina, the daughter of Joseph Conrad Fraps, a railroad machinist, and his wife, Clara Dargon Lee Fraps, she moved with her family to Tucson, Arizona, at the age of two.
She graduated from the University of Arizona with a double major in English and archaeology, in 1927, the first year that an archaeology major was offered. Her teacher in the latter field was Byron Cummings, who had steadily developed the department of archaeology at the university since his arrival in 1915. With Cummings's encouragement, she went on to graduate study, and, in 1928, became one of the university's first three recipients of master's degrees in archaeology, along with fellow students Florence May Hawley and Emil Walter Haury. In her master's thesis, initially entitled "Hopiland" and ultimately submitted under the title "Archaeological Survey of Arizona," Tanner undertook a survey of all known prehistoric habitations in the state.
Fraps (Tanner) received an appointment as a lecturer in the archaeology department at the University of Arizona for the fall semester 1928, and continued to teach there over the course of her career, becoming an assistant professor in 1935, associate professor in 1957, and full professor in 1968; she retired with the title of professor emerita in 1978.
She pursued further graduate work at the National University in Mexico City, in 1929, and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, in 1934.
In 1936 she married John Frederick Tanner, the proprietor of an Indian craft store in Tucson. Her involvement in her husband's work was one influence that shifted her research interests in the direction of regional cultural anthropology.
In 1937, when Cummings retired and his former student, Emil Haury, took over as chair of the department, Haury initiated a change in its name to the Department of Anthropology, to reflect the breadth of scholarly activities it had come to encompass; he also aimed to expand it to include social anthropology, applied anthropology, and ethnology. Haury asked Tanner to develop a course on Southwest ethnology and archaeology. From around this time she began to focus her research on Southwest Indian arts, crafts, and ethnology.
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