Doris Stone (1909–1994)

Doris Zemurray Stone was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Her father Samuel Zemurray founded the Cuyamel Fruit Company the following year and built it into a successful venture.

As a child, Doris traveled regularly to Honduras,
Costa Rica, and Guatemala because of her father's business. She attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she majored in anthropology, graduating in 1930, and pursued graduate studies in archaeology despite the discouragement women faced in higher learning during this era. In Cambridge, she met Roger Thayer Stone, a physics student at Harvard from Schenectady, New York; the couple married in 1930 and moved to New Orleans.
Doris joined the Department of Middle American Research at Tulane University, which later became the Middle American Research Institute (MARI). Over the next eight years, she worked as a research associate in ethnography, and then as an associate in archaeology.

In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Doris and her husband moved to Costa Rica, settling on a coffee plantation in Curridabat, outside San José. Doris remained based there and in Central America for the next 20 years, returning to New Orleans after her father's death and her husband's retirement from the plantation business in 1962.
She is best known for her pioneering studies in the archaeology of Honduras and Costa Rica
and for her comprehensive writings on Pre-Hispanic
Central America, but she also published extensively on the ethnography and ethno-history of indigenous Central American
peoples. Doris devoted much effort to the welfare of the indigenous peoples and to the development of local archaeology and
museum facilities in Costa Rica. She served as the director of the National Museum of Costa Rica. Later, she endowed numerous professorial chairs at universities in the USA.