Wilhelm G. Solheim, II

BA 1947, Mathematics		Wilhelm Solheim had "no firm idea of what I wanted to major in" as a UW undergraduate. By the time he finished his WWII Army Air Force service, he knew: he wanted to be an archaeologist. With no UW anthropology department then, be completed a mathematics degree. He credits his A&S background with getting accepted for graduate study by Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley. He chose the last, receiving his MA in 1949. He earned the PhD at the University of Arizona in 1959. In 1950, he went to the University of the Philippines as a faculty member and research associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He was also librarian and curator of the U.S. Embassy American Historical Collection and a public information officer for the U.S. Information Service. Following his return to the U.S. in 1954, he was designated a Fellow of the Arizona State Museum of the University of Arizona, and taught at Florida State. He joined the University of Hawaii-Manoa faculty in 1961, and retired there as professor emeritus in 1992. He was acting chair of the UH Anthropology Department for seven years, and archaeologist with the UH Social Science Research Institute. For 12 years he edited Asian Perspectives, part of the Institute's Asian and Pacific Archaeology Series, and directed the UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies. He is a Founding Fellow of the Philippine Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has held the Far Eastern Prehistory Association's highest offices. A fond UW memory: "...playing freshman basketball in fall 1942 under Ev Shelton with Kenny Sailors and other basketball greats. There was no possibility of my making the team, but in scrimmages alter practice, it was great to be on the floor with them, if only for a few minutes."