Sauer, Carl (1889–1975)

Background and Reputation

Sauer was born in Warrenton, Missouri, on December 24, 1889. He took his first degree at the Central Wesleyan College, Warrenton (now defunct), moved to Northwestern University in 1908, and then completed his PhD in the first full-fledged department of geography at Chicago University in 1915, under the varied and different influences of Ellen Churchill Semple, Harlan Barrows, and the geologist and charismatic head of department, Rollin Salisbury—all of whom had a lasting influence on him. During those years, he was commissioned by the state geological department to write a geography of the Upper Illinois Valley, and he also completed the fieldwork for his PhD on the Ozarks. He then taught at the University of Michigan until 1923, when he moved to Berkeley, where he taught for 34 yrs. (years), 32 yrs. as chair of the geography department) and established one of the most distinctive graduate schools of American geography, one that would always be associated with cultural geography. He was also one of the chief advisors to the Guggenheim Foundation from 1935 to 1955 and to the social sciences division of the Rockefeller Foundation for nearly as long. After he retired in 1955, he enjoyed 20 remarkably productive years that saw the publication of four books and a score of influential papers.

The Cultural Landscape

Sauer rejected the prevailing ethos of human geography as environmental determinism, and in his work on the Ozarks, Illinois, and the Economic Land Survey of the Michigan Cutovers, he promoted a more humane and culturally nuanced human geography that took full account of the natural sciences, ecology, and the historical record and exhibited an empathetic understanding for both the people and the landscape. Much evidence was gathered through fieldwork, on which he put special emphasis.

On arriving in Berkeley, he found the social anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie agreeable intellectual companions, which reinforced the cultural bias. In a famous essay, “The Morphology of Landscape” (1925), he established the primacy of human agency in the formation of cultural landscapes fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group and the importance of a time-based approach. “Morphology” became one of the most influential and debated papers in American geography during the ensuing decades. During the 1930s, he started substantive fieldwork on early settlement and society in Southern California, Arizona, and Mexico. These investigations drew him into the controversy about New World plant domestication and origins and into collaboration with botanists, archaeologists, and ethnologists, whom he considered as more congenial intellectual company than most geographers, whom he found to be shallow, intellectually ignorant, and consequently ignored.

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