Thomas Athol Joyce

Thomas Athol Joyce OBE FRAI (4 August 1878 – 3 January 1942) was a British anthropologist. He became an acknowledged expert on American and African Anthropology at the British Museum. He led expeditions to excavate Maya sites in British Honduras. He wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica including "Negro" which was derided in 1915 for its assumption of racial inferiority. He was the President of both the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Anthropological section of the British Association.

Life

Joyce was born in Camden Town in London in 1878. His father was a newspaper editor and he went on to Hertford College, Oxford where he obtained an M.A. in 1902 and joined the British Museum. He served as an assistant to Charles Hercules Read for whom he gathered ethnographic artefacts by collaborating with others who travelled abroad, like Emil Torday who went to the Belgian Congo. Joyce took an increasing interest in American anthropology including a description of what is now the Totem Pole in the British Museum's Great Court and the stories that it tells.

At the end of the first World War he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his service on the General Staff where he had risen to the rank of captain despite not joining the staff until 1916. Before this he had written three textbooks South American Archaeology in 1912, Mexican Archaeology in 1914 and Central American Archaeology (1916). These successes are contrasted with an earlier entry written for "Negro" in the Encyclopædia Britannica where he stated that "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white". Joyce's description was described as ridiculous by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois derided Joyce's ethnographic description of Negros as culturally and intellectually inferior. Despite this Joyce was still employed as an expert to lecture to British colonial administrators on "native races".