Lynn Snyder

Researcher at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute

Berlin Prize Fellow - Class of Spring 1999

Lynn M. Snyder is an anthropologist/archeologist with a specialization in zooarchaeology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Snyder’s research has focused on zooarchaeological studies, including the place of dogs in the cultural and economic history of Native Americans. Snyder has published numerous articles, among them “Our Best, and Oldest, Friends: The Long and Often Forgotten History of Dogs,” Archeology (Jan/Feb 1998); “Bone Mineral Density and Survival of Elements and Element Portions in the Bones of the Crow Creek Massacre Victims,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1997); “Identification of Table Remains and Butchering Debris of the Frankish Period,” Hesperia (1997); and “The Cretan Badger as a Food Resource at the Early Iron Age Village of Kastro,” in The Pleistocene and Holocene Fauna of Crete and its First Settlers (1996).

Project Description

Study of the Plains Indians of North America in the collections of the Berlin Museum of Völkerkunde (together with JoAllyn Archambault)

While in Berlin, together with JoAllyn Archambault, Director of the American Indian Program at the National Museum of Natural History, she worked on a study of the material culture of the Plains Indians of North America. This project, developed in cooperation with the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde, involved analysis of several early ethnographic collections in Berlin and other German museums, including those of Duke Paul von Wurttemberg and Prince Maximilian zu Wied. It focused on the material choices made in the manufacture of these ethnographic objects, placed in the rapidly changing natural and cultural setting of North America in the early 19th century.

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