Biography[edit]

Beyer was born in Edgewood, Iowa to a pioneer family of Bavarian origin and developed an interest
in the Philippines when he visited the Philippine exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Centennial
Exhibition in St Louis, Missouri in 1904.
After graduating from Iowa State University then earning a master's degree in chemistry from
the University of Denver the following year, he volunteered to teach in the Philippines. His first years
in the Philippines were spent as a teacher in the Cordillera Mountains on Luzon island, home of
the Ifugao people. He later married Lingayu Gambuk, the daughter of an Ifugao village chief of
Amganad, Banaue. Their son William born in 1918 was their only child. Although in a Catholic
country, Beyer remained a Protestant throughout his life.
He pursued postgraduate anthropological studies at Harvard University. He was
appointed ethnologist in the Philippine Bureau of Science and part-time head of the Philippine
Museum. He became sole instructor in anthropology at the University of the Philippines in 1914. In
1925, he became the head of the university's department of anthropology and its first professor. By
that time, the anthropology department and its museum that Beyer himself built already occupied the
entire second floor of Rizal Hall which housed the university's College of Liberal Arts until 1949.
Beyer remained head of the department until his official retirement from the University of the
Philippines in 1954 after forty years of full-time teaching.
During the Second World War, Beyer was initially allowed to continue his work at Rizal Hall, but he
was later interned along with other Americans in the Philippines.
Before his death, the University of the Philippines, Silliman University and Ateneo de
Manila awarded him with honorary doctorates.[1] He also received a number of awards for his 60
years of scholarship in the Philippines. In 1965, the University of the Philippines held an H. Otley
Beyer Symposium in his honor. The proceedings of the symposium were published two years later.
He died in 1966.[2]

Legacy[edit]
The National Library of Australia acquired his papers and extensive library in 1972. [3]

Quotes[edit]

Archaeological work is like a fascinating mystery story, with the specimens and site data serving as
vital clues - and everything is of most importance while both the specimens and your memory of how
and where they were found is still quite fresh, and unconfused by later activities elsewhere.In a
letter to a colleague in March 1955.
Beyer described his work as trying to serve the University [of the Philippines] and