Geology

Faculty

Charlie Love
Professor of Geology/Anthropology
307-382-1743
clove@wwcc.wy.edu

Charlie, pictured at left teaches both Geology and Anthropology at WWCC, having set up both departments in 1972.  His expertise is in both the field research of geology and archaeology of Wyoming but also the cultural anthropology of other peoples in the world.  For his MS in geology, he mapped the geology of the Gros Ventre Range near Jackson Hole.  For his MA in Anthropology, he accomplished an archaeological reconnaissance of the Jackson Hole region.  He has lived briefly with the Citak cannibals of Irian Jaya in New Guinea, the Shipibo and Yahgua Indians along the Ucayali and Amazon Rivers, visited the Guitchen Indians of the Canadian North Arctic, spent two years with the Rapanui of Easter Island, a total of another year with Fijians, Tongans, Tahitians, Marquesas Islanders, Mircronesians and Samoans, and wildest of all, time with the mysterious and secretive Pleistocene glacial geologists of the Wind River Range in Wyoming.

His hardest life assignment?  Surviving 35 years with the complicated machinations of the WWCC faculty, various administrations, professionals, staff, and the ever-changing and unpredictable landscape of the educational fads overwhelming Wyoming. So he’s kind of an ‘old and skeptical’ dude….  He brought the boulders, the dinosaurs, fossil displays, and two multi-ton Easter Island moai replicas to the campus, the larger of which was moved upright for a NOVA program.  He takes various academic student trips to the Yucatan, Mexican Highlands, Guatemala, Ecuador-Peru-Bolivia, Easter Island, Hawaii, and even around Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. 

            Oh, he teaches full-time just for fun.

He is also irritatingly modest, arrogant, philosophical, and skeptical at the same time and does not buy into the seriousness he sees controlling other people’s lives.

His View on Life?  This should do it
Philosophically he renamed mankind about 12 years ago for his students.  Linnaeus called us Homo sapiens back in the 1700s, meaning in Latin, “Man, the wise”, and sadly, the name remains the same to this day.  Charlie thought that “wise” was just a little bit premature, so he renamed him what he felt was more accurate:  Homo creemythicus ritualensis hypocriticus – “Man, who believes in myths through rituals, and is a hypocrite about them”.  These, he feels, are the only notions common to all mankind.  Note “wise” is not one of them.