Voices of the Dead: James Neel's Amerindian Studies

During his 1967 fieldwork, James V. Neel, professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan, spent a good deal of time collecting chicken dung. He scraped up dirt and chicken waste from the ground around the Yanomamö villages. He sought out dirt from the floors of the Yanomamö houses, where parrots were kept as free-roaming pets. He crawled under chicken coops, filling seventy-five labeled plastic bags with samples, using a fresh plastic spoon for each sample, and he worried about getting this soil and bird waste safely back to Atlanta, Georgia, for testing at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).1