Sauer Lecture History

The Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture was established in 1976 by colleagues, friends, and students as a memorial to the late University of California Professor of Geography.

Born in 1889 in Missouri, Carl Sauer was raised in a family of German Methodists. His grandfather was a minister, and his father taught French and music at the German Methodist College, Central Wesleyan, where Sauer earned his A.B. degree.

Later, as a student at the University of Chicago, Sauer focused his thesis on the geography of his homeland in the Ozark highlands. After earning his Ph.D. in 1915, he taught at the University of Michigan. At Michigan, Sauer learned that the stripping of the state’s pineland had made it unsuitable for agriculture. This discovery would help shift Sauer’s focus from geography to a concern for the health of the land. In 1922, he helped form the Michigan Land Economic Survey to study these issues.

Sauer’s move to Berkeley in 1923 marked the beginning of his fascination with the distant past and foreign cultures. He focused his research on Mexico and expanded his concentration to cultural aspects of the land. He organized his courses around the term "culture," which encompassed both the great and small differences among the world’s people. He published various studies on Latin American cultures, most notably the distinguished series "Ibero-Americana." His involvement in off-campus activities included serving on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation selection committee for 30 years.

Sauer's concern with the destructive effects of man's occupation of the earth dominated his early articles, while later articles centered on primitive cultivation. His book "Agricultural Origins and Dispersals" grew out of his interest in primitive economies. The last phase of his scholarship concerned the cultural and geographical state of America when Europeans first arrived. Sauer delved into contemporary writings of Spaniards to uncover the devastation of Caribbean lands after the discovery of America, producing "The Early Spanish Main."

Carl Sauer was one of the most influential geographers of the 20th century. He believed history is as important to geography as physical terrain and that there is such a thing as a "humane" use of the land. He contemplated the earth in all its vast physical and cultural variety and its changes through both geological and historical time. He saw technological culture as an ephemeral and perhaps lethal disturbance. After a long and full life, Sauer died in 1975 at the age of 86.

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