Olga F. Linares facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Olga Francesca Linares
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| Born | November 10, 1936 David, Panama
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| Died | December 2, 2014 (aged 78) |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anthropology, archaeology |
| Institutions | Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute |
| Thesis | (1964) |
Olga Francesca Linares (born November 10, 1936 – died December 2, 2014) was a super smart scientist from Panama and America. She was an anthropologist and an archaeologist. This means she studied human societies and cultures, and also dug up old things to learn about people from the past.
Olga Linares worked for a long time at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. She was famous for her studies on how people in Panama lived with their environment. Later, she also did important work in a place called Casamance in Southern Senegal. She was very interested in how people organized their farms and how things like the environment, money, and people moving around affected how they grew food in warm, tropical places.
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About Olga Linares's Life
Olga Linares was born on November 10, 1936, in David, Panama. Her parents were Francisco Esteban Linares and Olga Tribaldos de Linares.
In 1973, she married Martin Moynihan. He was also a scientist who studied animal behavior and helped start the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Martin Moynihan passed away in 1996. Many years later, in 2006, Olga married Fenwick “Fen” C. Riley. They both lived in Panama and sadly passed away a few months apart in 2014.
Olga's Education and Career Path
Starting Her Journey in Anthropology
Olga Linares went to Vassar College and earned her first degree in Anthropology in 1958. She then continued her studies at Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1964. A Ph.D. is the highest degree you can get in a subject!
Teaching and Research Roles
After finishing her studies, Olga Linares taught anthropology at Harvard University in 1964. From 1966 to 1971, she was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. She also visited other universities to teach, like the University of Texas in 1974 and Stanford University in 1982. She even spent time as a fellow at Cambridge University in England from 1986 to 1987.
In 2002, she was a trustee for the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome. This shows her interest in plants and how they are used around the world.
Olga Linares retired in 2008 from the STRI. She had worked there for about 35 years! Even after retiring, she kept her title as a scientist emerita, meaning she was still highly respected for her scientific work.
Olga's Main Archaeology Discoveries
Exploring Ancient Panama
Olga Linares started her career by focusing on lower Central America, especially Panama. Many people thought this area was just a pathway between Mesoamerica (like Mexico) and South America. But Olga wanted to prove that people actually lived, hunted, and farmed there for a very long time. It wasn't just a road!
One of her first big projects was studying how people lived in the Gulf of Chiriqui in central Panama, from around 300 AD. She was the first to create a timeline for the ancient Chiriqui culture. She did this by looking at old pottery found in different layers of the ground. This helped her understand how people's lives and art changed over time in Panama and even in Costa Rica.
Olga also studied how ancient people in Western Panama adapted to different environments. She looked at places that were wet and places that had dry seasons. She found that people developed different ways of farming, like growing root vegetables or seeds, depending on where they lived. By studying these ancient patterns, she helped us understand how people first moved and settled across the Americas.
She also explored "Ecology and the arts in ancient Panama." She studied the art of ancient groups in central Panama, especially at a place called Sitio Conte. She collected artifacts to understand what the art meant and how it was used. This included looking at how people traded goods and how power was organized in the 16th century among the Cocle and Cuna cultures.
Researching in Senegal
From the 1980s, Olga Linares started a lot of research in the Casamance region of Southern Senegal, which is a country in West Africa. Her work there focused on the Jola people and how they organized their communities and grew food. She looked at different ways they grew rice in wet fields and how their social groups affected these farming methods.
For example, she studied how the roles of men and women changed when people started growing crops to sell (called cash crops) instead of just growing food for themselves (called subsistence crops). She also looked at how colonial rule changed the Jola people's traditional farming ways.
Olga also explored a new type of farming she called "urban farming" in cities. As more people moved to cities, they started growing food in their backyards. This not only provided food but also helped people stay friends and work together, and even made the city environment better.
She also discussed how the government's actions sometimes made farming problems worse during droughts in the Basse Casamance region. She believed that droughts were not the only problem; the government's slow or ineffective response also played a big part in farming failures.
Awards and Memberships
Olga Linares received grants from the National Science Foundation in 1965 and from 1970 to 1973.
She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Anthropology Institute, and the American Anthropology Association.
See also
In Spanish: Olga Francesca Linares para niños
