Roland Burrage Dixon was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on November 6, 1875. Dixon began his study of anthropology at Harvard University. Upon his graduation from Harvard in 1897, Dixon was appointed an Assistant at Harvard’s famous Peabody Museum. While at the Peabody Museum he participated in a great deal of research including the excavation of burial mounds in Madisonville, Ohio. Dixon joined the Jesup North Pacific Expedition and the Huntington Expedition in California after earning his Masters Degree in 1898 (Murray, 1999, p. 650). Dixon earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1900 with a thesis on the language of the Maidu Indians of California. This thesis was included in the first volume of the Handbook of American Indian Languagesby his supervisor, Franz Boas, who was also a member of the Jesup Expedition.
Roland B. Dixon worked several seasons in the field doing research in California and various other places around the world. However, “his primary interest came to be on mastering the ethnography of Asia, Oceania, and the New World, and in presenting it to his students” (Eggan, 1968, p. 132). While ascending the ranks of the Harvard faculty and the Peabody Museum where he became a Professor for the university and a Curator of Ethnology at the museum, Dixon traveled, continuing his research on ethnography, and wrote many important works on his studies. His first major publication was Oceanic Mythology (1916), which was the first important study of Oceania (Eggan, 1968, p. 132). This work had a great influence on the later study of Polynesia. Dixon’s most important book, however, was The Building of Cultures, in which he surveyed the problems of diffusion, independent invention, and environmental influence (Eggan, 1968, p. 132). Within The Building of Cultures, “Dixon refined the age and area method by distinguishing components of culture traits more finely than was usual in such work” (Murray, 1999, p. 650).
While his publications and ideas seemed to be of great importance at the time they were rarely used or refined by later anthropologists. The models that Dixon developed were disregarded and the topics of those models were deemed unimportant and of virtually no interest to anthropologists. Even though Dixon was looked upon by fellow anthropologists as a very knowledgeable man, he was looked up to by very few because of his impersonal nature. Alfred Tozzer, one of his Harvard colleagues, spoke of Dixon: “he was rigid and unbending in his ideas and he shrank from personal contacts” (Murray, 1999, p. 651).
Dixon died at his home in Harvard, Massachusetts in December of 1934, after lecturing earlier that day.
Eggan, F. (1968). "One Hundred Years of Ethnology and Social Anthropology." In O.J. Brew (Ed.), One Hundred Years of Anthropology (pp. 132-133). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Murray, S.O. (1999). "Dixon, Roland Burrage." In J.A. Garraty and M.C. Carnos (Eds.), American National Biography (pp. 650-651). New York: Oxford University Press.
Written by: Kyle Melville, 2001