Anne Chapman

Who was Anne Chapman?

Anne MacKaye Chapman was a Franco-American ethnologist. She studied the Mesoamerican civilizations and especially the Tolupan people of Honduras. She had visited Magallanes and Tierra del Fuego many times since 1965 to study the Fuegian peoples in depth, especially the Selk’nam and Yahgan.

Concerning the Fuegian, she first became interested in the matter through Joseph and Annette Emperaire. Her research was essential to understand the cultures of these peoples and she met the last members of the Selk’nam people: Lola Kiepja and Ángela Loij.

Chapman wrote on many important anthropologic issues; possibly her most important work concerning the Fuegian was Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego. She also wrote La Isla de los Estados en la prehistoria: Primeros datos arqueológicos, El Fin de Un Mundo: Los Selk'nam de Tierra del Fuego', and three chapters listed in Cap Horn 1882-1883: Rencontre avec les Indiens Yahgan, which contains many photographs taken by members of the French expedition to Cape Horn 1882-83 that are among the best of the Yahgans, ten of the Alakaluf in 1881 of the eleven who were kidnapped and taken to Paris and other European cities, and six of the last Yahgans she took in 1964 and 1987.