Harvey Miller Bricker died at the age of 76 on January 18, 2017, in Gainesville, Florida, after a short illness. He was born on June 29, 1940, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the older of two children of the Reverend George H. Bricker and Florence Miller Bricker. He received his early education in the public schools of Waynesboro and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, graduating summa cum laude with a major in Russian history in 1962. From there, he went to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he enrolled in the graduate program in anthropology, with a focus on archaeology. His area of interest was in the manufacture of stone tools by the earliest humans in southern France. He later was named “Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques” for his research in this field. He married a fellow graduate student in anthropology, Victoria Evelyne Reifler, in December 1964. He received his PhD in June 1973.
The couple’s teaching careers at Tulane University began in 1969. In 1981, his research interests shifted to the astronomy of the ancient Maya as recorded in their hieroglyphic books. In collaboration with his wife, they wrote Astronomy in the Maya Codices, which was published by the American Philosophical Society in 2011, for which they received the Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical Astronomy in 2013.
After retiring from teaching at Tulane at the end of 2005 (and in response to their experiences during Hurricane Katrina), they began spending the months from mid-June to the end of October in Gainesville, Florida, where they had appointments as courtesy professors in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida and as research professors in the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Harvey Bricker is survived by his wife of 52 years, Victoria Reifler Bricker, his sister, Helen Bricker Smith, of Falls Church, Virginia, and her children: Matthew Bricker Smith of Uncasville, Connecticut, and Elizabeth Smith Hall of Eastleigh, England.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Latin American Library at Tulane University or the Latin American Collection of the Smathers Library at the University of Florida.
