Leslie Freeman, scholar of Paleolithic period in Spain, 1935 -- 2012

Leslie Freeman, a leading scholar of Paleolithic Spain, died on Dec. 14 in Portland, Ore. Freeman, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, was 77. Lawrence Guy Straus, PhD '75, a former student of Freeman's said, "Les had a virtually unparalleled record of commitment by an American scholar to doing Stone Age archaeology in a European country. Freeman worked extensively with Joaquin Gonzalez Echegaray of the Instituto para Investigaciones Prehistoricas in Spain, in what Straus described as one of the longest-lived, most productive international collaborations in the field of prehistory. Through that work, Freeman "produced an impressive empirical record," said Straus, the Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Echegaray, a Roman Catholic priest, is known as the "Dean" of Paleolithic pre-historians in Spain and was the founding director of both the Altamira and Cantabrian Ethnographic Museums.