Sherburne Friend Cook was a physiologist by training, and served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

. He was also a noted pioneer in population studies of the native peoples of North America

Native Americans in the United States

Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...

 and Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is a region and culture area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and...

 and in field methods and quantitative analysis

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 in archaeology

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

.

Cook studied at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and served in France during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. He completed his Ph.D. thesis, The Toxicity of the Heavy Metals in Relation to Respiration, in 1925. He taught physiology at Berkeley from 1928 until his retirement in 1966.

Cook repeatedly returned to the problems of estimating the pre-Columbian

Pre-Columbian

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...

 populations of California

Population of Native California

Estimates of the Native Californian population have varied substantially, both with respect to California's pre-contact count and for changes during subsequent periods. Pre-contact estimates range from 133,000 to 705,000 with some recent scholars concluding that these estimates are low...

, Mexico, and other regions, and of tracing the rate and reasons for their subsequent decline. He often arrived at higher figures for pre-contact populations than had previous scholars, and his work has not escaped criticism within this controversial field (e.g., Mathes 2005).

Selected publications

• The Extent and Significance of Disease among the Indians of Baja California. 1935. Ibero-Americana No. 12. University of California, Berkeley.
• The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century. 1948. Ibero-Americana No. 31. University of California, Berkeley.
• (with Woodrow Borah) Essays in Population History. 1971-1979. 3 vols. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• The Conflict between the California Indians and White Civilization. 1976. University of California Press, Berkeley. (Reprinting six studies originally published in Ibero-Americana, 1940-1943)
• The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970. 1976. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Honors

• Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1938

External links

• "Tribute to Sherburne Friend , 1896-1974"; includes "Anthropological Bibliography of Sherburne Friend Cook" excerpted from a more extensive bibliography in the original publication.