[1] He was associated with the University of Chicago for his entire career: all of his higher education took place there, and he joined the faculty in 1927 and remained there until his death in 1958, serving as Dean of Social Sciences from 1934 to 1946.
[3] In 1923 he and his wife Margaret Park Redfield traveled to Mexico, where he met Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist who had studied with Franz Boas.
[7] Vonnegut was influenced by Redfield's work on the "folk society" and references him in his novel Slapstick, as well as throughout his non-fiction speeches and commencement addresses.
"[9] Redfield intermittently served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology along with Sol Tax after the retirement of Fay-Cooper Cole in the late 1940s.
The collection of human remains of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, bone fragments, and artifacts were compiled, studied, stored, and possibly exhibited on the campus.
The skeletal collection contained human remains and archaeological objects taken and collected by faculty, students, curators, and donors through excavations of Illinois burial mounds such as the Fisher Mounds, Starved Rock, Kincaid, Algeria, Globe, Arizona, among materials from private donors.
Skeletal remains of 400 Indigenous people, as well as 10,000 bone fragments, stone, pottery and shell implements and artifacts largely excavated from Fisher and Adler Mounds, were donated in 1930 by George Langford, an engineer from Joliet who as also an amateur anthropologist, an honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and later Curator of Plant Fossils at Field Museum.
Under NAGPRA guidelines, these institutions are now responsible for deaccessioning and repatriating Native American human remains and funerary objects.
[12] The remaining skeletal materials do not account for extent of the historical collection; the department's report recommended that the majority be "dumped.
[13] In addition to his field anthropology work, Redfield made public and published contributions to the philosophy of social science.
Redfield explored this topic at length in an article entitled Social Science Among the Humanities, originally published in 1951 in Measure: A Critical Journal and later collected in his posthumous papers.
[19] The papers of Robert and Margaret Redfield are located at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.