Daniel F. McCall

Daniel F. McCall, a voracious reader with broad scholarly interests and a steel-trap memory, helped create the anthropology department and build the African Studies Center into a cutting-edge interdisciplinary program in three decades at Boston University (BU). McCall (CAS’49), was a College of Arts & Sciences Professor Emeritus of Anthro­pology.

After a tough Depression-era child­hood and a stint in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, McCall earned his degree from BU on the G.I. Bill. He later enrolled in a doctoral program at Columbia University, taking time off for fieldwork in Ghana and Liberia. He returned to BU in 1954, while still completing his Ph.D., as the first faculty member hired for the newly created African Studies Center, then called the African Research and Studies Program. At a time when few Africa scholars performed fieldwork, McCall’s reputa­tion as an intrepid traveler spread beyond BU. Robert Levine, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology in the 1950s, came to work with McCall after discovering no one in his home department had been to the then-mysterious continent.

McCall’s most renowned work, Africa in Time-Perspective: A Dis­cussion of Historical Reconstruction from Unwritten Sources (1964), was a path-breaking amalgam of history and anthropology, according to Robert Weller, a CAS professor and chair of anthropology. “The book transformed the way we looked at Africa by drawing on his polymath strengths as an anthropolo­gist who was equally comfortable in archaeology, ethnology, and historical linguistics,” Weller said in a recent tribute to McCall.

McCall retired in 1983, but re­mained active in his research and in the community. He cofounded the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory with Hal Fleming, a CAS Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. He spent much of his last years writing a memoir, One Thing Leads to Another … : The Turbulent Youth of Dan McCall, which was published just after his death.

Source: Boston University