Obituary: Froelich Rainey

Froelich Gladstone Rainey, archaeologist and anthropologist, born Black River Falls Wisconsin 18 June 1907, Director Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia 1947-77, married Penelope Lewis (one daughter and one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved 1973), 1976 Marina Cippico, died St Austell Cornwall 11 October 1992.

FROELICH RAINEY was America's Sir Mortimer Wheeler and on one famous occasion they both fought together on the same television programme. Both archaeologists had equally active wartime experiences; Wheeler charging about the North African deserts and Rainey hijacking vital supplies of quinine in Ecuador and later helping rebuild a defeated Germany's power industry.

His name 'Froelich' was not from a German ancestor. His Scottish/Irish father gave him the name, remembering a jolly little waitress who looked after the students when he was at medical school. Rainey senior did not become a doctor. He became a homesteader and land-dealer in the state of Montana. He married Alma Holzhausen, who had two brothers who were also homesteaders. They joined him and his brother Rob in the Rainey Land and Cattle Company. It was a successful ranching operation and his son 'Fro', as he has always been known, at the age of 10 could throw a lariat over the head of a calf and bring the animal to the ground. When the time came for father to give his son that serious lecture about life, his advice was 'Never eat sweet cakes with your wine and have nothing to do with red-headed women.'

These colourful details and many more are in Rainey's autobiography Reflections of a Digger, published earlier this year by the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, just as Rainey was beginning his final battle with a fatal illness.

Froelich Rainey joined the Philadelphia Museum after the Second World War and was its Director for 30 years. His archaeological credentials were earned before the war after several years as a would-be writer wandering about the Far East signed on as a deck-hand on tramp steamers or picking up odd jobs ashore. His father had insisted that he first went to college. The chance choice of an anthropology course brought him in contact with Ralph Linton of Yale. Linton took him on a long car journey to see an Indian mound excavation. Neither Linton nor the other passenger, an archaeologist from Chicago, could drive, so they kept Rainey awake at the wheel by telling endless stories of their work. Rainey writes, 'Sometime during the long night, half hypnotised by the steady speed across the plains, Space and Time were opening out for me in the glow of the headlights.'

Thus Fro Rainey became a reflective digger. From the Caribbean to the Arctic he turned his hand to the excavator's trowel and, if things got boring, he would co-opt a local bulldozer. Not for him the obsessive cataloguing of minutiae for its own sake. Archaeology had to be an insight into former humanity. Without that aim it was a waste of time. In the Arctic he lived with the Eskimos.

He nearly died with them too when a lost axe on a long sledge trip meant that the frozen seal- meat could not be cut up for the huskies. There followed a desperate 50-mile run, first at night under the stars and then through a day which he never forgot. The earliest Eskimos came there 10,000 years ago. Their technology to overcome travel in that environment at that time, writes Rainey, deserves our respect. His list of publications includes 26 papers and reports on Arctic cultures.

As Museum Director Rainey oversaw the world-wide activities of his excavation staff in Middle and South America, in the Near and Far East. His museum was kept in the public eye and in the imagination of potential funders by the first television programme to present professional archaeologists guessing the origin and purpose of excavated objects. Called What in the World, it was first broadcast in 1949 and confounded the media sceptics by becoming a prime-time CBS network presentation, and ran for 15 years. The show became the model for the BBC's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral produced by the late Paul Johnstone.

Retirement brought Rainey to Cornwall where he and his second wife Marina renovated a beautiful old farmhouse for an assortment of dogs, cats, peacocks, chickens and donkeys and a large number of visiting relations and friends, all of whom were wonderfully fed and looked after. The conversation was always fascinating. His door always was open to the Cornish locals who took to their hearts this wise old wanderer. If things got too noisy, Fro might retreat to his study to chip away at his woodcarving. Or he might amble down the drive to feed the dozen fat trout which lived in the pool beneath the hillside spring. We will all remember that lone figure in a black fisherman's cap standing by the pool puffing on a small cheroot and looking out over the wooded river valley below.